Photo used with permission of authorIt wasn’t supposed to end this way. There were hopes and dreams and plans for a better life… and it came to this, five flimsy, body-sized cardboard boxes held together by sellotape, sitting on a sloping path in the partial shade of a line of Tuscan cypresses. Each box, surrounded by the contrastingly imposing mausoleums of local Sicilian families, is simply graced with a sparse handful of flowers scattered by kind local residents. At the first sight of these crude coffins, my eyes start to well up, then my wife and I stand silently among a solemn gathering of perhaps 50 or 60 townspeople, four or five carabinieri, the mayor and a priest, who slowly puts on his white surplus and collar, ready to officiate.
It is a sunny Saturday morning in the cemetery of the hilltop town of Polizzi Generosa, in the mountains of northern Sicily, where I live for much of the year – and the boxes contain the cadavers of five unknown refugees, whose bodies were plucked from the seas around Sicily by Italian coastguards. So many drowned, so many bodies in the last few months, that the state appealed to local municipalities to help bury them in a civilised manner – and my small town, 25 miles from the sea that ended their lives, has taken five. The sole inscriptions on the boxes, their only epitaph, is a printed label which reads ‘For the commune of Polizzi Generosa’.
The priest begins the short funeral service with the shocking admission that we know nothing at all about these people – their nationalities, their names, their ages, not even their genders… they are truly the ‘unknown’, more unknown even than the famous soldier who symbolises all the lost and forgotten of two world wars. Perhaps, in its way, this is a new world war. And then there is probably the most awful ‘unknown’ of all, the eternal unknowingness of their distant families and relatives, for ever ignorant of their deaths or how they died or where they are buried.
