Il ragazzo con il libro sotto il braccio (2022)

Nildo Menin was only 19 when he was taken from his home country and put on a train, destination unknown. October 7, 1943. Nildo had recently reported for duty with 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 forced on a train by the SS. After 14 days in extremely harsh conditions, the train stopped at a prison camp called Moosburg. Italian Military Internees, that is how the Nazis called them. Not simply war prisoners but slaves, exploited for forced labor in a dehumanizing environment. During his 2-year detention, Nildo never stopped writing in his diary. The other prisoners used to call him "the boy with the book under his arm". On those pages, he noted everything, every single bombing, every piece of bread he could recover. He wrote about prisoner life, the weird alternative society inside the camp, his everyday struggle to survive. Nildo is now 97, and he's still willing to share his story. In "The Boy With the Book Under His Arm," we retrace the events of Nildo's imprisonment, with contributions from experts and historians, to shed light on the misknown history of Italian Military Internees.