Salesian Students Remember Salesians Killed by Nazis

On Holocaust Remembrance Day,
Salesian Students Remember Salesians Killed by Nazis

by SDB Southern Italy Press Office

(ANS – Caserta, Italy – February 3, 2023) – On the occasion of Holocaust Victims Remembrance Day, secondary school students of the Salesian institute Sacred Heart of Mary in Caserta engaged in research activities on the Shoah. In addition, the final year students carried out specific work on the historical reconstruction of the events that led three Salesian priests and a Salesian coadjutor from Caserta, along with three other civilians, to lose their lives at the hands of Nazi soldiers on Sept. 28, 1943, at the Villa Santoro, located on Garzano Hill.

The province of Caserta at that time was prey to bombing following the armistice that led Italy to abandon its baleful alliance with the Third Reich. The Caserta work was also badly hit by bombing, and the senior priests were displaced to the hills. There, following the killing of a German soldier by a partisan, the Nazis decided to retaliate with a reprisal in which Fr. Tommaso Chiapello, Fr. Francesco Coratella, Fr. Domenico Borgiattino, Salesian coadjutor Bro. Giuseppe Di Gennaro, civilians Agostino Brandi, Donato Rucci, and young soldier Antonio Caricato lost their lives.

This massacre was commemorated in 1944 first with a plaque, later replaced in 1966 by a funerary stele. On March 15, 1997, the Salesian Rector Major Fr. Juan Edmundo Vecchi also went to the hill in prayer to remember his Salesian brethren. Thus, on Saturday, January 28, the students of the Salesian institute went with the teachers to Garzano and were able to see with their own eyes the site of the incident, experiencing a moment of meaningful remembrance.