European Resistance Archive/European Resistance Archive (ERA)

Maybe we weren’t prepared for this,

but it was the reaction of a young girl who by then had already suffered from bombings,

from seeing soldiers being captured.

The older men, who had fought in the First World War, were talking about concentration camps.

My father used to tell us that we had to feed my brother otherwise these beasts would let him die of hunger.

We had to help them.

You suffer terribly from these things you’re facing.

In the end they are just like you.

You don’t know what their future will be, you risk your own life to help them.

We went on the street as we saw a soldier and we escorted him out of danger,

since there were road blocks everywhere.

Our old men even carried them on the crossbar of their bicycles for a while,

so that they could rest a little and stay out of trouble.

You realize immediately that it’s something terrible.

That the antifascists were right in what they were saying.

Still, until then, we hadn’t been helping people for political reasons.

We were rather doing it for humanitarian principles: as a woman, you saved another woman’s son,

that’s what got us to face danger, too.

From that moment, however, I realized that it had to be something conscious.

I never pulled myself out anymore in regards to all the things I was asked to do.