European Resistance Archive/European Resistance Archive (ERA)

It was hard for her to mop all that and she cried hard, kneeling in the blood.

My cousin and I were totally shattered.

The farmer’s wife said: “You stay indoors and don’t go outside.

Don’t you tell anybody what happened.” We didn’t.

If somebody told us to keep something to ourselves, we did.

We protected the partisans so much when we were kids;

they were our friends

and the Germans were our enemies.

Back to Carinthia

We went back over the mountain to Carinthia, when the snow was gone.

We got to a farmer’s where the cousin’s grandmother was.

The aunt asked the grandmother whether she could leave the youngest daughter there,

because she was very ill.

This woman said she could. The girl would die otherwise.

I thought: ‘Oh, she can stay and I have to go again; and it is so nice and warm here.’

We were so full and it was wonderful.

So I lay down on the bench and thought: ‘what could I do to be allowed to stay?’

I played being unconscious.

Whenever they picked me up I fell down again until the woman said:

“This one is so exhausted, you cannot take her either. Just let her stay here.”