Seventy years after the Marcinelle tragedy, the San Marino Trade Union (Unione Sammarinese Lavoratori, USL) is drawing attention to the importance of remembrance and safety in the workplace. On 8 August 1956, 262 workers lost their lives in the Bois du Cazier coal mine in Belgium, among them people linked to the Sammarinese community that had emigrated abroad.
“The hell of those terrible days must not survive only in the minds of individuals but must become collective memory, serving as a warning, given that, unfortunately, people continue to die in the workplace,” reads the statement issued by USL.
The union specifically remembers Maria Semprini, who passed away recently after turning one hundred years old. Her testimony was collected by the USL Pensioners’ Federation in the volume Testimoni del Tempo (“Witnesses of Time”).
“I have a lung problem,” she recounted, “that I’ve carried with me since I was in Marcinelle, Belgium, with my husband. We were there from 1948 to 1956; we lived in a hut and he worked in the mine. When the disaster happened, in 1956, he lost a leg, and that wasn’t the only problem he carried with him afterwards. I took care of him, washing his clothes soaked in coal, and that coal stayed inside me, ruining my lungs,” Maria Semprini recalled.
The statement also recalls the woman’s life story, marked by further suffering, including the loss of a daughter during childbirth in the years she spent in Belgium.
USL Secretary General Francesca Busignani reaffirmed the value of remembrance. “Maria honoured the duty of memory until the end of her days, and now it is up to all of us to carry that torch forward,” she said.
Busignani went on to underline the union’s commitment to accident prevention: “USL feels a strong responsibility to keep attention high on the issue of safety, because no one should go to work risking never returning home. Memory is one of the most valuable safeguards when it comes to workplace safety, and as USL we are proud to have gathered the testimony of Maria, a person who unfortunately lived through the scorching hell of Marcinelle firsthand. And it should come as no surprise that, having emerged from the darkness of such a tragedy, she was able to bring so much light.”
