Summer 1945

Hemingway called it his Country Club when he spent a few months in 1917, but by 1945, Schio was a city terrorized, a once-thriving provincial town where the Black Shirts had come in the ’20s to break communist and union heads; where enemies of Duce’s state were sent to die in the death chambers of Mauthausen; and where anyone could be seized, tortured, raped, and even buried alive once the Nazis came in 1943.  

But come April 1945, when the partisans flooded down the mountains, Schio became one of only two cities in Italy liberated by Italians. By partisan heroes. And that’s when men like “il Tartaro”, leader of the local Tagliamento militia who’d killed and tortured with impunity, were quickly rounded up and taken up to the fields for summary execution and burial in forgotten mass graves.

It was the time for the resa dei conti—the reckoning. A time for vengeance. Tens of thousands of fascist collaborators were killed in the Po Valley in the weeks after Nazi Germany’s defeat. Revenge for the sins of fascism. Revenge for 20 years of Mussolini’s reign of terror. It was a time for the bosses, who’d collaborated with the Nazis and the fascists, to pay the price for their disloyalty. And the partisans knew who’d been at their side through the years of struggle—and who’d sided with the fascists and the invaders.

In Schio, 99 men, women, and children are rounded up and imprisoned in the local jail in the weeks after liberation. They were waiting to be charged and prosecuted for their alleged war crimes when, on a hot night in July, a dozen men belonging to the partisan brigade forced their way into the jail.

The prisoners were lined up and summarily machine-gunned. Fifty-seven would die. It would make news around the world.

Outraged by the crime, the Allies decided to investigate. What they found remains a mystery to this day.