There is a little known story to tell and also with a certain urgency, perhaps only known to scholars.
A story that has to do with the memory that we must preserve for the past and which, as always, must help us not to forget and better understand the present.
Beyond the fact that it is released for Memorial Day 2021 (for now on the On Demand platforms on CG Digital, iTunes, Google Play, Chili), Promised Land is an incredible story: the epic of concentration camp survivors, estranged , without roots, without nowhere to go, smuggled by Aliyah Bet, progenitor of Mossad, in Israel, in the country that was being built.
This flow, for most of Eastern Europe, of human derelicts, of orphans who at night called mum and dad, of people who had lost everything and had experienced the hell of the fields, crossed our country, from the Alps reaching many places - from Merano to Fano, to Monopoli, La Spezia, Marina di Pescia Romana in the Grosseto area, to Santa Maria al Bagno near Nardò in Puglia - and then, among incredible difficulties, to be able to leave on fishing boats built by themselves or on ships arrived on purpose, in a clandestine crossing of the same Mediterranean which today sees the route traveled in reverse by migrants.
Daniele Tommaso's documentary film, produced by the Istituto Luce-Cinecittà, is a continuous discovery of places, faces, minimal stories and great characters such as Ada Sereni and the Polish Yehuda Arazi, the great leader of this odyssey, a man of Israeli secret service, considered today for its work among the founders of the modern state of Israel.
Ada Sereni, who was born in Rome in 1905 (died in Jerusalem in '97), was a leading exponent of the Zionist movement, with her high school mate at Mamiani husband, Enzo (who died in Dachau after being parachuted to Italy after the front line), in '28 she emigrated to Palestine to build the utopian Erez Israel, the Land of Israel, and in '45 she returned to Italy for this project that she herself recounted in the book 'I clandestini del mare: Jewish emigration to the land of Israel from 1945 to 1948 '(Mursia).
"It took me two years to make this documentary - Daniele Tommaso tells ANSA - which has many images from the archives of Luce and other archives that I was able to use, from the Steven Spielberg Jewish Film Archive to the film The Illegals by Meyer Levin which in the ' 47 had filmed the voyage of one of these ships. As I learned the stories, the routes of these hundreds of people who crossed the mountains on foot, were piled into trucks, suffered terrible situations with the aim of reaching the earth. promise, an incredible map of welcoming Italy appeared in front of me. In every sentence, in every testimony it came out how the Italian population gave these survivors, Poles, Romanians, Yugoslavs, Austrians, solidarity and incredible help by putting what little we had left in the immediate post-war period. I don't want to say compensation for the racial laws, of course, but a sort of no
small ransom ".
Of all those people - 35,000 left from Italy in those three years (similar stories also from France) - to date practically none have survived: this is how Daniele Tommaso spoke with the relatives of Ada Sereni and Yehuda Arazi and summoned to the kibbutz by Givaat Brenner all the families of those protagonists, collecting precious testimonies of stories with which they had grown up.
Like those of a woman born during a crossing and another born in Cinecittà theater 5.
Yes, the Fellini studio that Ada Sereni and the organization had transformed in the immediate post-war period into a shelter for families of extermination camp survivors, a truly incredible story.
"The story of La Spezia stands out above all - adds Tommaso - where hundreds of illegal immigrants about to leave were blocked by the British - in this whole affair they are the 'enemies', ed - but that they brought to the fore with a sensational hunger strike international by breaking out a diplomatic case ".