Welcome to the website dedicated to Little Martyrs of the School of Gorla, where we tell the sad story of 200 children who lost their lives on the morning of October 20^th, 1944 while they were following the lessons in their school, together with their teachers, due to an aerial bombardment carried out by American aviation.

Usually episodes like this, which unfortunately also happens today, are called "secondary effects", we prefer to call it the worst crime against civil population of the second world war.

To introduce you to the atmosphere of those years, we propose you a poem written after a similar event, the heavy attack suffered by Milan in August of the previous year, 1943.

Invano cerchi tra la polvere,

povera mano, la città è morta.

E' morta: s'è udito l'ultimo rombo

sul cuore del Naviglio. E l'usignolo

è caduto dall'antenna, alta sul convento,

dove cantava prima del tramonto.

Non scavate pozzi nei cortili:

i vivi non hanno più sete.

Non toccate i morti, così rossi, così gonfi:

lasciateli nella terra delle loro case:

la città è morta, è morta.

Uselessly you search among the dust,

poor hand, the city is dead.

Is dead: the last rumble has been heard

in the heart of the canal. And the nightingale

is fell by the antenna, high on the convent,

where he sang before sunset.

Do not dig wells in the courtyards:

the living are no longer thirsty.

Do not touch the dead, so red, so swollen:

leave them in the land of their homes:

the city is dead, is dead.

This website does not use profiling cookies and does not track the visitors habits' and history to send them personalized advertising messages.

It is not comparable to a newspaper, as it is updated without any regular periodicity.

It can't therefore be considered an editorial product under italian Law n. 62 of March 7^th, 2001.

The song in the background of the home page is taken from the movie "El Alamein - The fire line" (in italian "El Alamein - La linea del fuoco"); Authors: Pivio & Aldo De Scalzi.

Text and images are not protected, in case of use on other sites we invite you to ask us for authorization to withdraw, to cite the source and to create a link to our pages.

We inform you that all the images on our site, if not specified each time, comes from photographs taken by ourselves or from the scanning of old paper originals such as photographs or postcards collected between the year 1999 and the year 2002 in historical families of Gorla for the creation of the book "October 20^th, 1944 ... they said the war was over ..." (in italian: "20 OTTOBRE 1944 ...dicevano che la guerra era finita..."), to whose legitimate owners have been returned.

Possible similarities of some images with others that you could find in other sites, are due to the uniqueness of the reproduced subjects.

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