"Cold Feet": Italy's Suppressed Past in Ukraine
A letter to the father, a historical account, a document of the present: Ukraine, fascist Italy and us. Francesca Melandri's latest book.
Today's post is also available as Italian and German podcasts. Both podcasts will hopefully develop their own following - also on the usual podcasting platforms-, with a focus on books, while Beyond Berlin remains an experimental blog featuring photos, short narratives, and long essays. Why am I doing this? The project is growing (well, like ađ˘), and I love working with multiple languages. But I need your helpâplease share your feedback, either privately or publicly. Let me know your thoughts!
When Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, 2022, I was in Italy caring for my sick father. These were the final months of life for an octogenarian who had spent more than half his life as a soldier and had witnessed the entire Cold War.
My father was a child of World War II and son of an officer who had served in Ukraineâas an invaderâbetween 1941 and 1943, with the Italian army Mussolini sent to support Hitler's Operation Barbarossa. He was one of many who went there, one of few who returned alive.
When my father watched the war footage and invasion maps on television, he once again shared his father's story: a brief tale filled with unspoken truthsâthe story of an officer who ran a prisoner camp for Soviet soldiers in Dnipropetrovsk, captured during the Axis powers' first, victorious, and criminal advance. Though my father's eyesight and hearing had deteriorated, he still recalled the names of places, even after they had changed. Of his father, he remembered just one thing: his bitter words about the Germans, for in Dnipropetrovsk, he had likely witnessed their atrocities against the local populationâboth Ukrainians and Jews, the latter almost entirely exterminated.
During these weeks, I wondered: In how many Italian families are the elderly now recalling tragic memories of their fathers, grandfathers, and great-grandfathers?
My father died in December 2022. He lived to witness the Ukrainian resistance, the recaptured territories, and the atrocities revealed to the world in the first months of occupation. What he didn't live to see was the gradual waning of attentionâthe near-indifferent attitude Italians developed toward Ukraine. Contrary to my hopes, instead of sparking difficult family conversations, silence descended almost everywhere. Italians neither felt connected to these events nor acknowledged their own families' pastâor they simply didn't care.
But then one of the finest voices in Italian literature broke this silence: with a long letter to her father, a biographical and historical narrative written to restore the truth of past and presentâand to remind Italians of their responsibility for both.
The author is Francesca Melandri, and the book, which was published simultaneously in Italy and Germany in 2024, is called "Kalte FĂźĂe" (in Italian "Piedi Freddi", Cold Feet). And I'm going to tell you about this book today.
"There they are, Dad, the women you talked about so often, more and more as you grew older. I saw them, your women, in the first week of the war. In a YouTube video, imagine that, you didn't even know YouTube when you were alive. They wore hooded sweatshirts and valenki boots, these mythical beings without whom you would be just a name in an ossuary - or a name and nothing more - without whom I wouldn't exist. It was the video with that Russian soldier, thin, pale, terribly young. His pale."
So begins the long letter that Melandri writes to her deceased father: She watches a video in which Ukrainian women care for a Russian soldier, giving him food and letting him call home on their cell phoneâwhile elsewhere Russian soldiers are raping and killing Ukrainian women, children, and elderly people. Ukrainian women had also helped her father during the devastating retreat, providing him with food and clothing. These were the same women against whom German soldiers and their allies had unleashed their fury less than two years earlier during their advance into Russia.
Except that, as Melandri repeats like a mantra throughout her letter-narrative, it wasn't Russia at allâwhat the Italians called the "Ritirata di Russia" was actually Ukraine.
How could we ignore this for so long? How could we overlook that this supposed military campaign against Russiaâwhich actually took place in Ukraineâwas a colonial war, Melandri wonders as she sifts through her deceased father's memories and tells him about today's events in those same places. And how can we deny today that Russia's war against Ukraine is also a colonial war? How can we still hesitate to call things by their proper name and take the right side in a war that not only persists but could soon arrive at our own doorstep?
This hesitation is known in English as "getting cold feet" and describes the fear of tackling something necessary. The frozen feet also serve as one of the narrative's key memories threading through its pages â an experience shared by many soldiers who, from December 1942 onwards, were forced to march without adequate equipment through steppes we mistakenly called Russian, when they were in fact Ukrainian.
The book title carries a dual meaning: it literally refers to the frozen feet of Italian soldiers during the 1941â42 war in Ukraine, while metaphorically representing Western Europe's hesitation toward Putin.
Francesca Melandri, born in 1964, spent many years as a screenwriter before dedicating herself to books. In her worksâwhether novels or, as in this case, a blend of biography and pamphletâthe text instantly comes alive as vivid images in the reader's mind.
Melandri's works don't seek refuge in an imaginary past: From colonial history to Italy's inter-ethnic tensions, the author methodically uncovers suppressed truths and buried history. This historical sensitivity likely explains her remarkable success in Germany, which surpasses her recognition at home. In "Cold Feet," through dialogue with her fatherâquestioning both him and herselfâMelandri prompts Western European readers to contemplate the true meaning of peace and the weight of principles we so readily espouse, without realizing their defense will eventually exact a price.
Âť"No more war!" we have shouted for eighty years. And we thought this was a clear, committed stance that meant: "Never again will we tolerate military operations, genocides, or troops invading foreign countries; we will fight against this with all means at our disposal and defend international law, which is based on the inviolability of national borders and without which there can be no democracy." In reality, we were merely saying: "If there must be war, please not at our doorstep. Anywhere else will do, thank you. War shouldn't affect us directly; we're content with the vague, comfortable shudder of immense sympathy that runs down our spine at the sight of distant suffering" â and immense only because it's far enough away.ÂŤ
But what now?
ÂťThe war is here. The war has reached our continent. And as much as we wish it would disappear as if by magic - no, it's not disappearing. Our omnipotence has been hollowed out. Now we have the bothersome duty of applying those principles we've been parading around for decades. Worse still: we're even expected to pay a price for defending these principles!ÂŤ
Melandri's letter-narrative eschews chronological order in favor of thematic organization around unresolved questions. Writing for readers unfamiliar with these events, she reconstructs the Italian colonial campaignâconducted in what they mistakenly called Russia but was in fact Ukraineâwithout becoming bogged down in excessive historical detail.
She reveals what was concealed and never acknowledged: Like the Russian soldiers in 2022-2023, the Italians systematically plundered Ukraine's fertile black earth in 1941-1942. Using trains and carts, they transported all usable goods back to Italyâa nation that, despite being exhausted, continued to follow Germany into hopeless wars.
ÂťFrom mid-1942, coinciding with your arrival, a commission operated in the territory occupied by ARMIR, consisting of executives from Pirelli, the Agricultural Industry Corporation, the Ministry of Agriculture, and various universities. The task of this commission was to organize industrial rubber production.ÂŤ
[...]
ÂťThen of course there were the foodstuffs, the seemingly endless wealth of Eurasia's breadbasket. Fascist legislation stipulated that at least one-third of the food produced in occupied territories should go to civilians; however, the command posts ordered that the population be left with 'only the minimum necessary for survival.'ÂŤ
[...]
ÂťThere was also flour, honey, butter, and above all wheat. Lots and lots of wheat. One non-commissioned officer managed to send several ten-kilo packages of wheat home to Italy every day for months, until his superiors suggested he was taking things a bit too far. And who knows if you too might have sent your mother Bianca the occasional package of that golden treasure from Ukraine.ÂŤ
This entire chapter of historyâthe occupation, exploitation, and summary executionsâhas vanished from Italian popular narratives and history books.
Italy remembers only the retreat: the tragic story of ARMIR (Italian Army in Russia), a military disaster whose scale of suffering remains unmatched in Italian history.
Of the 230,000 men, 95,000 never returned. The Red Army captured 70,000 soldiers and sent them to camps, with barely 10,000 making it back to Italy after the war. The story is told as an epic of sacrifice and friendshipâyet there may be darker, untold chapters we'll never uncover.
These truths remain hidden because the victim narrative has prevailed. Instead of acknowledging the occupation march into Russia (which was actually Ukraine), people speak only of the retreatâas if those 200,000 Italian soldiers had mysteriously materialized there, rather than arriving in tanks, armored vehicles, and military motorcycles.
The culmination of all this, as Melandri reveals in conversation with her dead father and us living readers, takes place during the large-scale Russian invasion of 2022. In May of that year, the Italian parliament passed a law establishing January 26th as the Day of Remembrance for the Withdrawal of Italian Soldiers from the Russian Frontâthat is, from Ukraine. The chosen date commemorates the Battle of Nikolayevka, and the text of the first article, which Melandri quotes in her book, reads as follows:
Article 1 The Republic recognizes January 26th of each year as the National Day of Remembrance and Sacrifice of the Alpine Troops, in order to preserve the memory of the heroism, valor, and selflessness of the Alpine Troops and to promote the values of defending national sovereignty and independence, solidarity, and volunteerism.
Too bad, Melandri points out, that this war wasn't fought for Italy's sovereignty and independenceâit was a war of occupation. Of what they called Russia at the time, but was actually Ukraine. And what about the chosen date?
ÂťJanuary 26th is precisely the day before the International Holocaust Remembrance Day. As if it were completely irrelevant that the machinery of extermination was perfected in the same war where Italian soldiers - including the Alpini, including you, Dad - were allies of the Nazis.ÂŤ
ÂťOn January 27th, 1945, when the Red Army liberated Auschwitz, you were in Turin, working at a newspaper that published Joseph Goebbels' official communications daily. And now, Dad, here comes the most unspeakable question, the one I could never ask you: when you saw the images of the death factories for the first time, what did you think?ÂŤ
As the narrative unfolds, weaving together present and past, Francesca Melandri confronts increasingly difficult questions about her father's life story.
How could he sign an editorial endorsing fascism as Italy's only path forwardâmere days before the partisans liberated Turin? For this piece, Franco Melandri, her father, might have faced lynching in the vengeful climate following 1945. Yet he was saved by partisan leader Massimo Rendina, his former companion from the Russian retreat. Rendina remembered both their mutual support and Melandri senior's loyalty in not betraying him after they returned to Italy.
Years later, Melandri met the partisan Rendina to better understand the shared history between him and her father. She asked him, "What is fascism?" "Fascism is not a political phenomenon," he replied, "Fascism is a state of mind." Rendina reaffirmed what he had told her before: Though her father had been a fascist, he had been a decent one.
This too is the truth: There were also "decent" fascists. But this does not absolve us from the necessity of confronting this past.
In truth, Melandri isn't content with Rendina's seal of approval. She fears discovering that her father might have participated in massacres and war crimes. Armed with her father Franco's old book about the retreat, she embarks on a search for facts and places. This quest isn't driven by malice but by a desire to dispel the shadows of the past. All her accumulated knowledge culminates in this meticulously documented book.
While the narrative weaves together personal emotions with historical factsâincluding the dates and locations of massacres perpetrated by both Italians and Russiansâit reveals how the same places witnessed torture and violence against civilians by different forces. Readers are left to explore these darker chapters as deeply as they choose.
Between post-war Italy's chronic amnesia and the present day, Melandri ponders a crucial question: why did Italy never properly confront not only this war, but more importantly, its relationship with totalitarianism?
In particular, how can so many Italians be so accommodating of Putin's Russia while remaining indifferent to Zelenskyy's Ukraine?
In search of answers, Melandri reflects on her own past: As a high school student, she lived through an era when many teachers were devout Marxists and a third of the country supported a communist partyâone that, while having little in common with socialist realism, nevertheless idealized the Soviet regime. Like many in the West, Melandri acknowledges, she didn't learn the word Holodomor until much later.
She recalls her communist history and philosophy teacher's clinical detachment when presenting the "liquidation of the kulaks" as a crucial step in Soviet agricultural reform. What went unsaid was the chilling reality: owning just a few cows and a small plot of land was enough to be branded a kulak, condemning one to liquidation, deportation, or death by starvation.
With remarkable skill, Melandri weaves her letter-narrative to guide us through both our own history and Ukraine'sârevealing the toxic legacy our communism has left in modern thought. This includes the persistent belief that imperialism exists only where the Stars & Stripes wave, but not within the domains of the Soviet Union and Putin.
A certain benevolence toward Russia has cultural roots: in the Melandri household, as in my own home, Russian literature filled the shelves and commanded the same prestige as great Western authors.
No one was aware of Ukraine's rich literary tradition. No one knew that Gogol was Ukrainian, though he was raised in the Russian empire and had no choice but to write in Russian. The masterworks of Ukrainian literature only gained recognition later, when Russia's invasions sparked an unexpected cultural diaspora and renaissanceâa flourishing that Putin, blind to Ukraine's culture and very existence, never saw coming:
ÂťI had never heard of Taras Shevchenko, Lesya Ukrainka, or Ivan Franko. I had never heard that the end of Tsarist censorship on Ukrainian-language publications after the October Revolution had led to a true flourishing of works by Ukrainian writers and intellectuals; and likewise, I didn't know that Stalin then declared Russian language as Soviet dogma in the 1930s and had almost the entire Ukrainian intelligentsia murdered: several hundred intellectuals, writers, poets, publishers, men and women. The extremely productive artistic creativity of these years and its total destruction went down in history under the name 'Executed Renaissance' - and I had never heard of it. I read about it for the first time on March 7, 2022.ÂŤ
In Italy, as Francesca Melandri observes, even the intellectual elite continues to overlook the crucial distinction between Russian and Ukrainian literature. In her imaginary dialogue with her father, Melandri reflects on Viktoria Amelina:
ÂťThat's why I need to tell you about Viktoria Amelina, Dad. I know I wouldn't need to explain to you that sometimes the death of someone distant seems more unbearable than that of a neighbor - because it affects us more deeply.ÂŤ
Viktoria Amelina was, like Melandri, a writer and cosmopolitan. Following the Russian occupation of Donetsk and Luhansk, she took on an additional role: documenting Russian war crimes. She undertook this task not from anger but from a profound sense of justiceâbelieving that any future peace must be built on justice.
This is something that, as Melandri points out, too many Italian pacifists overlook when they cite only the first part of the Italian Constitution's article: "Italy rejects war".
They omit the rest: that Italy recognizes the self-determination of peoples and the need for justice between nations as a prerequisite for peace. On July 1st, 2023, Victoria Amelina was killed by a Russian drone while dining at a pizzeria.
Six days later, at the ceremony for Italy's most prestigious literary award, the Premio Strega, the foundation president, at his press office's suggestion, decided to honor the writer. He stated how important it was, on this momentous evening for our country's literature, to remember the tragic death of Wiktorija Amelina... the renowned Russian writer (sic).
ÂťThe Russian writer. Russian, Dad. He actually said 'Russian.'ÂŤ
Yet no one, Melandri observes, rose from their seats in this distinguished Roman gardenâamid writers, journalists, publishers and media figuresâto say the one thing that needed to be said in response to such an egregious insult:
Âť"No, Viktoria Amelina was a Ukrainian writer, Russian was the rocket that killed her.ÂŤ
Melandri could be angry, but writes without anger: what she conveys, from the first page to the last, is a mixture of wonder and dismay. Even when confronted by those who, upon hearing she's working on a book about her father and Ukraine, say:
ÂťStop it, Francesca, enough with this damn Ukraine!ÂŤ
Only the imaginary dialogue with her father manages to overcome this dismayâwith the certainty that a decent man like him, who had visited Ukraine and written about its war, would have bowed before Viktoria Amelina:
ÂťAnd I know, Papa, that you too would have bowed before Viktoria Amelina's death, before the mother, poet, writer and witness to the war.ÂŤ
The final pages of "Cold Feet" transform dismay into a pamphlet: against the quintessentially Italian survival strategy of forgetting or turning tragedy into farceâthat strategy which, after World War II, enabled the rewriting of history as if Italy had never lost. And above all, it stands against the strategy of indifference and the "they're all the same anyway" mindset, even when confronted with the flood of horrific images from Ukraineâimages that Melandri describes, but without the most gruesome details, telling her father that if he were still alive, she would shield him from them:
ÂťIf you were here now, Dad, I wouldn't show you certain videos. For example, the videos where Russian soldiers film with their phones what they do to Ukrainian prisoners, and even less the ones of mass executions. I wouldn't read you the translation of the phone call - and I won't transcribe it here either - in which a Russian soldier tells his mother what he did to a prisoner, until the mother hangs up because she needs to go shopping. If you were still alive, I wouldn't tell you about the Ukrainian prisoners...ÂŤ
Despite these videos and reports, many brilliant Italian mindsâcommentators, intellectuals, and journalistsâfailed to express even a hint of empathy. And, as Melandri points out, private conversations too have fallen into silence.
This narrative weaves together multiple threadsâthe father's war memories, the daughter's personal recollections, images of today's war, and the urgent message that Ukraine affects us allâinto a plea for taking responsibility - not guilt - for one's own history: For Italians, this means acknowledging their role as a nation that chose the wrong side, a colonial power that massacred and gassed people while occupying territories. For Ukrainians, it means accepting responsibilityânot guiltâfor their own acts of violence and pogroms against minorities, Poles, and Jews.
ÂťPersonally, Dad, I would prefer if people, instead of feeling guilty about yesterday's fascism, would take responsibility for tomorrow's democracy.ÂŤ
Taking responsibility leads to justice, and only through justice can peace emerge. There is still time to achieve this, Melandri writes, using the metaphor of fireâthe fire her father desperately wanted to light during their forced march to safety to avoid succumbing to the freezing cold:
ÂťMy old friend, if we don't light a fire here quickly, we'll all freeze to death.ÂŤ
ÂťAnd us? Will we be able to light a fire in time? I don't know, Papa. But when the storm comes, we'll find out.ÂŤ
TWO IMPORTANT NOTES
The book was published in Spring 2024 under the title "Piedi Freddi" in Italy and in Fall 2024 in German-speaking countries as "Kalte FĂźĂe". The English edition is planned for 2025 but I did not yet receive a fixed date from the publisher.
Regarding the Italian campaign in Ukraine: I will provide more context soon in English. Online resourcesâwith the notable exception of Wikipediaâtend to be either fascist propaganda or overly technical military analyses. Such is the Internet, folks!
One of your best Posts Valentina. Informative as always but also a particularly moving Post. Thanks you for sharing your thoughts on Cold Feet. I look forward to the publication in English this year.