European Resistance Archive/European Resistance Archive (ERA)

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.

That was great for us.

At that point we understood that we could change our future,

that we had to be more than partisans, acquire consciousness about our role.

But we were really so ignorant, it was sad.

I set up two women support groups, we did two or three meetings.

This worker came, I think he was a mechanic of the factory Bloch.

Decision to resist

Torelli was an old antifascist living in our house. He was persecuted and had been in jail.

One day he told me he wanted to talk to me.

“The things you’re doing are very important; we were quite surprised by you”.

He was referring to what I had been doing with Maria Montanari and my cousin.

We were in a strong and combative group of friends, who shared the same ideals, the same feelings towards life.

The Germans had already officially announced that those who helped soldiers

and dodgers to escape would be sentenced to confinement in concentration camps or executed.

What we were facing wasn’t a joke.

Torelli went on: “You must try to keep everything that a clandestine army might need,