European Resistance Archive/European Resistance Archive (ERA)

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.

He had prepared a wonderful lunch for our whole “Gufo Nero” unit and also for the English who were with us.

We were a very large group of people.

Before we finished eating they asked me to go find out if we could move forward.

You could still hear many shots, the Germans and the fascists were still around armed and were trying to resist.

We were quite worried. We had lunch there, then I left.