Unvergessen

Forgive yes, forget no. Committed to this principle, Franz Thaler, born in 1925, recounts the worst years of his life: During the option in 1939, his father decides to stay in Italy rather than emigrate to the German Reich. Young Franz suddenly finds himself subjected to the harassment of local National Socialists and their supporters. Although he is a stay-behind and thus an Italian citizen, he receives a call to join the Hitler Army in 1944 but escapes into the mountains. Only when his family faces the threat of collective punishment does he surrender. His path of suffering takes him through several prisons to the Dachau concentration camp and temporarily to the Hersbruck subcamp. At the age of twenty, he returns home in August 1945, both mentally and physically broken. Franz Thaler describes his memories in simple yet poignant words. His book, which has been reissued several times, is a classic of the new South Tyrolean historiography.