October 21, 2026

The American and German Invasions

In Italy, we welcomed the Americans with joy as liberators because this meant the end of the war and of deprivation. American soldiers would toss us chocolate from their tanks, chocolate we had almost forgotten existed, along with cans of meat, which we, being hungry, had not eaten for a very long time. And although the Americans were different from us, they were, after all, fellow Westerners. Indeed, many of them were Italians who had emigrated to America, the promised land for so many of us.

In Russia, the Germans were the enemy: they wanted Lebensraum and sought to reduce the Slavs to slavery. They killed and massacred people; they were certainly not liberators. They did not toss cans of meat and chocolate, but fired cannon shells and machine-gun bursts.

What could the Russians do other than fight them to the very end?