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Italy

When Pets Mourn: Italian Dog And Cat Can't Say Farewell To Departed Owners

CORRIERE FIORENTINO, LA STAMPA, LA REPUBBLICA (Italy)

Worldcrunch

ROME - Meet Tommy and Toldo, two Italian pets deeply attached to their owners. In fact, they're still searching for them, months after they died.

Tommy is a German Shepard who lives in the town of San Donaci in the southern region of Puglia. He goes to Mass every day in search of his owner, Maria, because that’s the place he last saw her, reports La Stampa.

Ever since sneaking in to her funeral in the parish last November, Tommy has come back to the church every day since -- perhaps hoping to see Maria again.

Affectionately known by the congregation as “Ciccio” (pudgy), he comes to the church each morning and lies at the alter beside the priest, also attending weekend weddings and baptisms. When he sees a hearse go by, he follows along as part of the procession.

The priest Donato Panna looks after him, but they are looking for someone to give him a permanent home because at the rectory they can’t keep him.

#Ciccio, the dog that always goes to church twitter.com/pukenken/statu…

— «cycle16_M☺LLY» (@pukenken) January 16, 2013

Maria loved her companion and they went everywhere together. He waited outside shops for her -- and outside the church, too. La Repubblica writes that the first time Ciccio went into the church was at her funeral and he crossed the threshold sadly and slowly. The priest did not have the heart to chase him away.

"I had just lost my dog -- he was hit by a car," said Mayor Dominico Serio "and a few days ago while I was walking with my wife, we came across Ciccio and we immediately thought of adopting him. When we called him, he came and gave us his paw- he is so friendly. On the way home we discovered that everyone in town had already adopted him, feeding him what they could! I didn’t have the heart to take him away from the community. He’s everyone’s dog.”

Me-ouch

Toldo, a cat from the Tuscan town of Pistoia, is another pet who also misses his dearly departed owner, Renzo -- and indeed, visits his grave every day, often leaving tokens of affection.

#Curiosidades#EnItalia El gato #Toldo vuelve cada día a la tumba d su amo. Le lleva ramitas, hojas, vasos.. @dpachecoctwitter.com/Yerbatero5781/…

— Eduardo Haro Párraga (@Yerbatero5781) January 10, 2013

Renzo’s widow, Ida, told Corriere Fiorentino that often she would go in the afternoon to see her husband’s grave with Toldo and people would tell her that Toldo had already been there that morning, carrying acacia branches in his mouth to the grave.

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Society

Where 'The Zone Of Interest' Won't Go On Auschwitz — A German Critique Of New Nazi Film

Rudolf Höss was the commandant of Auschwitz concentration camp who lived with his family close to the camp. Jonathan Glazer's The Zone of Interest, a favorite to win at the Cannes Festival, tells Höss' story, but fails to address the true inhumanity of Nazism, says Die Welt's film critic.

Where 'The Zone Of Interest' Won't Go On Auschwitz — A German Critique Of New Nazi Film

A still from The Zone of Interest by

Hanns-Georg Rodek

-Essay-

BERLIN — This garden is the pride and joy of Hedwig, the housewife. She has planned and laid out everything — the vegetable beds and fruit trees and the greenhouse and the bathtub.

Her kingdom is bordered on one long side by a high, barbed-wire wall. Gravel paths lead to the family home, a two-story building with clean lines, no architectural frills. Her husband praises her when he comes home after work, and their three children — ages two to five — play carefree in the little "paradise," as the mother calls her refuge.

The wall is the outer wall of the concentration camp Auschwitz; in the "paradise" lives the camp commander Rudolf Höss with his family.

The film is called The Zone of Interest — after the German term "Interessengebiet," which the Nazis used to euphemistically name the restricted zone around Auschwitz — and it is a favorite among critics at this week's Cannes Film Festival.

The audacity of director Jonathan Glazer's style takes your breath away, and it doesn't quickly come back.

It is a British-Polish production in which only German is spoken. The real house of the Höss family was not directly on the wall, but some distance away, but from the upper floor, Höss's daughter Brigitte later recalled, she could see the prisoners' quarters and the chimneys of the old crematorium.

Glazer moved the house right up against the wall for the sake of his experimental arrangement, a piece of artistic license that can certainly be justified.

And so one watches the Höss family go about their daily lives: guiding visitors through the little garden, splashing in the tub, eating dinner in the house, being served by the domestic help, who are all silent prisoners. What happens behind the wall, they could hear and smell. They must have heard and smelled it. You can see the red glow over the crematorium at night. You hear the screams of the tortured and the shots of the guards. The Höss family blocks all this out.

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