Remembrance Day took on a special significance for me this year, having just returned from Italy where I and two colleagues took part in the kick-off meeting for an exciting new European project, called SEME (which means 'seed' in Italian, and also stands for Sharing European MEmories). As well as the UK and Italy, the project involves partners in Norway, Spain and Poland, and will see young people involved in collecting WWII veteran memories, which will then be shared across Europe in an effort to increase understanding of what war means to different cultures.
It was an emotional couple of days, because as well as listening to some quite harrowing accounts of wartime events in the different countries, we were taken to the Monte Sole National Park and Peace School in the northern Apennines. This beautiful mountain region has a tragic history, being the site of horrific civilian massacres carried out by the German SS in September and October 1944, as retribution for the actions of a group of local partisans. Our guide, 82 yr old Carlo Venturi, regularly takes groups of school children around the site, and when they hear that he was a member of the partisans at that time, aged just 17, the question they always ask is 'How many people did you kill?' Carlo's answer is always the same: 'I don't want to talk about killing. Now it's time to change'.
The park is also a heritage centre collecting the memories of many local people, such as Lidia Pirini, a young girl of 16 in 1944, who miraculously survived a firing squad attack at a hilltop cemetery, in which scores of women, children and elderly members of the community were killed. I can't begin to understand how she and Carlo, and countless others, have managed to cope with their memories all these years, and can do nothing but admire their courage. 
And that's why, at 11.00am on 11 November this year, I will spend the two minutes silence thinking not only about our own servicemen and women, but also about all the people, like Carlo and Lidia, whose stories need to be told, and then shared across the nations. As the SEME project progresses we hope to include some of the stories collected in our region here on My Yorkshire. In the meantime, we have added a series of audio clips from the Two Minute Silence project, to commemorate the 90th anniversary of Armistice Day.
