Synopsis

Nildo Menin was only 19 years old when he was taken from his homeland and put on a train, direction unknown.

It was October 7th, 1943. Nildo had just recently joined the Carabinieri force. That morning, he was summoned to the barracks for what turned out to be an ambush. He and his comrades were arrested and put on a train by the SS. They spent 14 days on that train, in extremely harsh conditions, until they reached the prison camp of Moosburg, Germany.

Italian Military Internees, that’s how the Nazis used to call them. Not just prisoners, but slaves, forced into hard labor in an inhumane environment.

During his two years of imprisonment, Nildo never stopped writing his diary. The other prisoners referred to him as “the boy with the book under his arm”. On those pages, Nildo noted down everything, every single bombing, every piece of bread he managed to find. He wrote about his life as a prisoner, the peculiar alternative society that had formed in the camp, his everyday struggle to survive.