European Resistance Archive/European Resistance Archive (ERA)

First partisan action; Cervi brothers

The first engagement I took part in, we disarmed two German soldiers.

They were by the railway tracks, on the Via Emilia railway bridge. They were really young.

Fiorello had a gun, since he was a Carabiniere when he had escaped from Yugoslavia.

I had a fake one he had made out of wood, which looked just the same.

We sneaked behind these two boys, pointed our guns at their neck and got them to raise their hands.

We took away their P38 guns. From then on we felt armed.

We had a meeting in the fields with the Cervi brothers.

They were worried and said that they wanted to go to the mountains.

Their house at the time was a hideaway.

They welcomed a lot of people, maybe too many. They also welcomed fleeing foreign soldiers they didn’t know.

Some of them might have been spies. So they went to the mountains for a while and then came back.

I guess they went on letting too many people in. We all know what happened afterwards.