Could you imagine finding yourself in a video recorded more than 50 years before?

This is a unique story of an Italian war veteran who discovered YouTube for the first time and he’s found himself in a recording from 1942!!

Francesco Brambilla was born in Bellinzago Lombardo, a small municipality in Milan, in which today, you can only find no more than 3500 people.

Seventy years later, in the middle of a normal life of a common man: Francesco Brambilla, known as Mario, Corporal of the 54th infantry regiment has a special life-story to tell.

This Italian veteran of 93 years-old, Francesco Brambilla, never forgets the first time he discovered YouTube, where in his first search on the web, he found in an anonymous video shot the day before the departure of his regiment to the Russian front in 1942 during World War II.

Francesco's son, Fausto Brambilla, was the one who taught his father how to search anything he would like to see; his son explained him: "just write a name of what you want to look and you'll find it".

Fausto says that "Since his father has abandoned his strength and lives in the confined space of his home, traveling to the depths of his memories, especially those years”.

"The years of war, at the front of the long imprisonment in Russia", Francesco added.

Therefore, given the sober Google screen with the promised chance of finding what you wanted, Fausto said how his father directed him by saying: "Try Sforzesca my regiment during the war".

The most striking result was a video from 1942, under the title Caserma Passalacqua, shot images anonymously taken; in that video you can see in black and white, hundreds of soldiers dressed for battle and saying goodbye to their families.

"Daddy, that's you, exactly like the picture you've shown me so many times!" said Fausto when watching the images.

There, he explained, his father appears sitting, waiting for the departure of his division to the Russian front, a  terrible point of no return for millions of Italians, and from where the only one who came back was Francesco, his father.

The Russian Campaign, one of the most important forms of World War II, received over 230,000 soldiers from Italy, of which 114,000 were killed in action.

"Look at us over there. It’s us, we were those who were sent to die; and I am the only one in my town that came home alive"

If you want to see the whole video, click here.

The soldier appears in YouTube's video between minutes 1:26 and 1:36.

This story was published yesterday in the Italian daily “Il Corriere della Sera”.

I couldn't finish watching the video because some tears showed up in my eyes... as it made me remember all the stories my grandparents have told me. My grandparents are Italians and they lived all of those terrible years of World War II... I just cannot imagine all the things they've been through.