European Resistance Archive/European Resistance Archive (ERA)

Pasquale Marconi was there, a teacher from Castelnovo Monti, who was a Christian Democrat,  a catholic anyway.

Then there were Eros, Miro, a Jewish doctor who was from Jugoslavia.

We spent a few days there.

It was a sort of recruitment, but we didn’t have enough weapons;

we were waiting for Allied air drops that didn’t take place,

so they sent four of us back to Ligonchio.

We went to Ligonchio and there really was a crowd of partisans there.

Unfortunately, not all of them were armed.

More partisans came, who wanted to fight, to enrol.

More than weapons dropped from the sky or taken during attacks to the German garrisons.

I was luckier than others, since I was given an English machine gun, a Sten gun, which was quite short.

You could disassemble it in three pieces and hide it, and put it together quickly.

And I also had a 9 mm Beretta and four hand grenades.

I stayed there with the First Battalion

and we used to go on road 63, where German garrisons were all over the place.

Not long after, around July, there was a great mop-up.

The Goering attacked, we fought back for a day and a half, two days.

Then there was a disbandment,

because it’s really hard to resist against an attack

from a German division with armoured vehicles, artillery, small airplanes, special forces.