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I would like to tell a story from my land, the Canton Ticino, Switzerland. We are in the mid-nineteenth century, the Ticino valleys are suffering merciless winters and relentless summers. Poverty reigns in the mountains and countryside because at that time, except for a few small lakeside towns inhabited by fishermen or small bourgeois like Lugano or Locarno, a sovereign indigence pervades the entire Canton. Many Ticino families emigrate abroad, or struggle in their meager daily lives. A few goats, a cow for milk, the rare eggs from chickens, a small garden, or unpaid work in the fields except for some food from a wealthy landowner, often foreign, or the Church... All this if things go well. If they go very badly, if you live in an arid and inhospitable valley, sometimes extreme solutions are found to tide things over with a bit of money in the pocket. Like selling one's children.
In the mid-nineteenth century, Milan was already a bustling and industrious city, the mirage of fortune and opportunity for those who had never left their narrow surroundings. In this story, besides poverty, ignorance plays a major role. Recruiters of young souls roamed the Ticino valleys to take them to Milan and turn them into little chimney sweeps. They went from valley to valley, knocked on rustic doors, and offered families a meager compensation and false promises in exchange for a male child, a boy or young lad, ideally to be squeezed into a small chimney with the sweep broom. Emaciated boys, skin and bones, suitable for cleaning Milan's chimneys. The illusory idea of giving their children a chance in that great, unknown city with a reputation for being rich and prosperous, and the certainty of having one less mouth to feed convinced fathers to push their own flesh and blood out the door into the hands of these unsavory recruiters.
This is how the story of the little chimney sweeps of Milan begins, brought to the forefront thanks to the discovery of an actual nineteenth-century news event, namely a fatal shipwreck on Lake Maggiore, through which Milanese recruiters ferried the poor Ticino boys to Italy.
"– Did you count them? – asks the man with the scar, boarding the boat last.
– Including myself, we are twenty-one, – says the boatman.
– Then we are full. I am the twenty-second.
– Many, too many for this wreck, – mutters the boatman and takes to the oars…"
From this news event, a couple of Germans exiled in Switzerland to escape Nazism, Lina Tetzler and Kurt Knäbler, wrote a factual novel, entitled The Black Brothers, which tells the story of a hypothetical Giorgio from Sonogno in the Verzasca Valley, a "bocia" who survived the mentioned shipwreck and in Milan is hired as a chimney sweep by a malicious exploiter. Thus begins his struggling life, abuses and violence are part of the days he spends going up and down the chimneys of rich Milanese houses, scraping away the thick black soot with a brush, bare hands, and nails. He thus meets his colleagues, boys who reluctantly come from the Ticino valleys or nearby Italian ones, and who secretly form a gang that meets in the sewers of Milan, the gang of the Black Brothers, opposing, among various events, the gang of the Wolves.
"Giorgio repeats the phrases: …I promise to always be a brave member of the Black Brothers gang, not to reveal its secrets nor its hideouts, and to remain loyal to each brother. Woe to me should I break this oath!"
I conclude the plot here, to leave a bit of suspense. This novel has been adapted into a German TV series, a feature film, a Japanese manga animated cartoon, but this illustrated book I present to you stands out more. Based on the novel by the two German authors and published by Zoolibri, it is accompanied by dark and intense scraper technique images by the skilled hand of Hannes Binder, an illustrator from Hamburg. A work that well expresses the suffering of these poor, ignorant young boys sold by their parents and subjugated in a grueling and terrible child labor, who have endured so much hunger, cold, frustrations, violence, anger, illnesses, accidents... But despite all this, it is in solidarity, brotherhood, and rebellion that they find, perhaps, who knows, a hope for the future.
Intended for those over ten years old, but also recommended for the little rebellious boy that resides in us all. If he's still there.
(My maternal grandfather and several of my uncles were chimney sweeps. The black soot is therefore part of my DNA.)
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