Mattarella: “A long year of aggression by Russia, peace requires great work”
“In our Europe,” Mattarella recalled, “we have not seen a war in which one state attacked another state in order to conquer territories or even annex them entirely; we did not see such phenomena in the dramatic events that preceded and led to World War II. Even back then, many fought and fought these aggressive behaviors. Many young people bravely stood up to them, even in trouble.” “Two days ago – added the Head of State – it is eighty years since some boys were killed – because they were executed: about fifteen German boys in their early twenties who bravely opposed Nazism in Hitler’s Germany, against violence by rejecting the practice of violence. They opposed it with words, with messages, with pamphlets, with writings. They paid for it with their lives, but they testified, these boys in their early twenties, led by two of their peers. Hans and Sophie Scholl, in the movement of the White Rose, sown for the future”.