We experienced two Remembrance Day commemorations last Sunday.
First we watched the ceremony at the Cenotaph on TV.
We then went to attend the inauguration of the Ivan Houston (US army liberation of Lucca 1944) room at S Giusto di Brancoli’s WW2 memorial museum.
Re-enactment groups from as far as Ancona joined up and a parade was held so that we might never forget what this place had to experience between 1940 and 1945.
A platoon presented an olive tree, that perennial symbol of peace, to the site.
The ‘Museo della Memoria’ at San Giusto, Brancoli has now been enriched by further contributions from Ivan Houston’s family including photographs and, most preciously, his medals
We were privileged to meet this soldier of the ‘buffalo’ brigade in 2019 just one year before he died aged 95 in 2020. As a 19-year old Ivan fought in the liberation of Lucca in 1944. He told us he was amazed, as a black, to see a black Christ in the city’s cathedral: the ‘Volto Santo’ dating back centuries and an object of the greatest veneration.
Over fifty years later Ivan wanted to revisit those places which had so impressed him during his wartime experiences. In the holy peace which Italy so luckily still experiences, the ex-teenage soldier, now a much-loved head-of-family member and highly respected retired business consultant was glad to revisit the country which had so influenced his youth.
It was that chance holiday which has established a permanent bond between the soldiers not just from American and Italian regiments but from all those forces, whether they were on opposing sides or not, who fought and died in the largest war the world has experienced.
And yet…..yet so many men, women and, especially children, are continuing to suffer from the futility of war. Will it ever stop?
We shall never cease from remembering them in the day’s glowing sunset, in the perils of the night and in the iridescent promise of the rainbow.
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For more information on the Brancoli theatre of war and on Ivan Houston do see my posts at: