European Resistance Archive/European Resistance Archive (ERA)

I always say that we were born old, but we also grew day by day.

You might have forgot about the things of today, but then you’d start thinking about what the future held for you,

and at the same time you couldn’t forget the things you had to report. My head was spinning the whole time, thinking.

I would leave Reggio and I would start thinking, remembering all the things that I had not written down.

As I made it to Albinea I would be thinking again, then in Casina, in order not to forget, until I finally made it up there after a full day.

I think that women helped a lot during the war.

Otherwise, how could all these men know when things were happening?

Sometimes we would even use children, getting them to run somewhere and tell the partisans to run away because the Germans were coming.

We did whatever we had to do then. But women were really important.

I’m not saying this for myself: as soon as the war was over that was it, both for me and my sister.

Even my husband was a partisan, but he joined the Resistance in his village.

He was with Casoli, the one from Berzana.

When the war was over he went back home too,

actually he was already there, doing whatever they could as partisans, running away when they had to.

In order to carry important documents, however, you really needed people who were willing to run.

We didn’t even have bicycles,

so we would just walk along the road every time we had to bring people to the mountains, depending on where we picked them up.

The Day of Liberation in Reggio Emilia

On the 25th of April we came down from Baiso and stopped to eat at Grandi’s house.

Grandi, a lawyer, was our great accomplice in Viano.