"The story of Martin Adler, 96-year-old from the Bronx and a former soldier during the Second World War in Italy, had been around the web. The elderly gentleman, who now lives in Boca Raton, Florida, had launched an appeal on Facebook thanks to his daughter Rachelle and the Reggio-based writer and journalist Matteo Incerti: he wanted to find three children whose lives he had saved in the autumn of 1944, when he fought in the Santerno, Idice and Sillaro valleys against the Nazi-fascists, with the 85 Infantry Division Custermen, as heavy armament officer of the D company of the 339th Infantry Regiment. He did not know the name of them, nor the country they lived in, but in all these years he has jealously kept a photo of them, taken just the day these three children came out of a basket, hidden in the house with their mother. Yet he never forgot them. His appeal, thanks to technology and social media, has been shared thousands of times, bringing the long-awaited happy ending. Martin found those three children, on the day of Saint Lucia. As in the best of fairy tales.
To tell the story, excited, is Matteo Incerti, who immediately embraced Martin's appeal, trying to find the three mysterious children. «On Sunday evening a message arrives on my Facebook account:“ Mr. Matteo there is an 83 year old man who needs to talk to you. It is that of photography ”. Here we are, I tell myself, a new little miracle of life has happened », writes Incerti on Facebook. It is not the first time that the journalist helps people whose lives have crossed, only to get lost, but perhaps this story has affected him more than the others. "I take a deep breath and, moved, call the phone number of Mr. Bruno Naldi, born in 1938. Excited, he tells me that he recognized himself in the photo and that he remembers Americans in his house, in a hamlet of Monterenzio, in the Bolognese Apennines. ". And so Mr. Bruno says that the two girls in the photo with him are his sisters Mafalda and Giuliana, born respectively in 1938 and 1941. They are all three alive and keep, in some memory drawer, some snapshots of the days of the war. They don't remember taking a photograph that day, but they never forgot that big basket they hid in and the chocolate that the American soldiers had given them."
Translated from an article of Corriere della Sera.