From July 16 to September 16 the exhibition “Il campo della memoria – Feld der Erinnerung” (The field of memory), by the sculptor Günther Heilfurth, is open in front of the Church of Sant’Anna di Stazzema.
The sculptures are stone parallelepipeds on which are drawn suffering human faces. They are set on the place of the mass grave of the 140 people slaughtered by the nazis in the church of Sant’Anna on the 12th of August 1944.
On that day the SS of Walter Reder, with the collaboration of Italian fascists, killed 560 civilian in the villages of the district of Stazzema.
Since many years, several initiatives, as the Festival of the Peace Organ, link Stazzema to Germany, with the belief that memory of the past tragedies is necessary to build a peaceful future.
Günther Heilfurth, born in Leipzig in 1940, studied paintings and graphic arts at the Fine Art Acdemy of Kassel. Since 1972 he has been dealing with pedagogy and art therapy. In 1985 he started again with his artistic production. He died in Hamburg in 2009