European Resistance Archive/European Resistance Archive (ERA)

Hiding weapons; developing awareness

At home, my father took care of the problem of ammunition.

Since he bottled wine, we had crates full of bottles in the cellar ready to be delivered.

He had made holes in the crates where he would stuff the ammunition. Then he closed them.

Our kitchen was right over the cellar.

The cellar had a vaulted ceiling with an empty space between the vaults.

My father had taken off some tiles in the kitchen over one of these spaces.

We hid our weapons, guns and everything else there.

Then we’d put the tile back and cover it with a chest of drawers.

It was really hard to notice the hiding-place.

Torelli at a certain moment told me: “Laila, what you’re doing is not enough.

You do so much for the partisans and for us, but you need to think about what your future will be”.

I replied: “Well, let’s just hope it will be a little bit better than now”.

He said: “If you agree, organize a meeting with all the women you work with and I’ll get a communist leader to come”.

To us, communists and socialists were just the same, what did we know about politics?

We had never got involved in it.

With fascism, you could only read what they gave to you, and you didn’t even have the right to make comments.

So before we did this meeting I met Paolo Davoli,

who explained how important it was for women to discuss their future.

After the war, women would take part in elections and have the same rights as men.