An interview with a Brazilian WWII Veteran - Entrevista com Veterano

Nelson de Paula Reis is a retired Captain of the brazilian army and a WWII Veteran of the italian campaign. He and 24 000 brazilians fought through the european battlefields in defense of Brazil's honour and the struggle against fascism, along with millions more who fought in the homefront, in the navy and in the airforce around the world as the war progressed.

The text in the poem to the fallen is as follows, translated by His Imperial Majesty Emperor Garmadon

"Inside the land, soaked in art.
Of the old Italian Motherland
Four hundred and a few Brazilians
Who fell in the rough war
Are sleeping, some with eyes half-open.

Drops of generous blood
In the hands, in the pure front
A show of extraordinary bravery
In the brown sunburnt faces
By the great tropical sun.

Crossing unknown waves, each one took
The marvelous intrepid certainty
Of fighting and winning
So that we don’t have
Our wrists cuffed in chains
Despite their greatest suffering
To destroy intolerance and fanaticism
Of those who dared claim the world for themselves.

In the graveyard of Pistóia
In the roaming spring of may
Shinning like a jewel
Covered in flowers and aromas
The birds sing loudly of hope.

Butterflies land in the humble graves
While our great many dead
After the fight and struggle
Dream of the fatherland and future springs
And the warm familiar embrace.

Many aren’t even twenty
Naïve thoughts in calm faces
In the hour of the attack, of the deafening fire
The hand, upon which they fell, paralyzed
Which still had the moves
Of writing the letters to their mother and girlfriend
With a calm and beautiful belief
Writing of the tumultuous, delicious things
That bury the heart.

And it’s possible that the letters, full of life
Will be taken by trebling fingers
Which filled with emotion read only
The final light, which is now lost
And while the beloved’s eyes glow
The face, which wrote such burning lines
Has in it an immovable shadow.

To the Graveyard of Pistóia
The livid, radiant spring
Opens over the vineyards
Shinning over the birds
And the blue sky of such pure light
Reminds them of the skies of Brazil, which sends them a smile
To the ones that affirmed our destiny and duty
And they sleep more awake than ever
More alive than us because they knew
To heroically right and defend us."

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