An apparition in the mountains

In the year 1943, Jan Wiener managed to escape an Italian internment camp called Ferramonti near the town of Tarsia along with another prisoner, a Polish soldier. The two men, exhausted and weak, managed to reach the La Sila Mountains, about forty kilometers south of the camp. They decided to attack a local house and try to get some food that way. “We knocked on the door, it opened and a biblical character appeared, a handsome older man, who still had black hair and a beard. I raised my axe, drew the guy close to me and started to shout: ‘Give us, sir, uove, vino, managare!’ He calmly put my hand down, stood away from the door and said: ‘Please enter, you are all the sons of Jesus Christ,’” he recalled. There were several women and children in the house and as soon as they saw the two ragged men, they started to shout and lament. “They weren’t afraid of us, they were shouting like that out of sympathy. We were wearing a military blanket instead of a shirt and we had terrifyingly protruding ribs,” he continued. Jan Wiener and his Polish friend could eat to the full for several months. The owner of the house gave them matches and a double-barrelled shotgun, so that they would be able to hunt for food and cook it, and then they set out on their journey: “I’ve always dreamt of returning to that place, because the people there were so kind, although very poor. For the first time, I visited them with my wife in 1968. The old man hugged me the way the Italians hug, started to cry and said: “He’s alive!”