European Resistance Archive/European Resistance Archive (ERA)

They can’t understand how anyone coming from a Catholic family

that goes to Mass, that has baptized its children, whose father sings in church,

whose family that has rebuilt the church of Santa Maria after the Germans had set it on fire,

can join the Communist Party. There was this message of liberation.

Otherwise who would have done it, nobody paid us for this…

I worked for the Communist Party for 13 years and 6 months without social insurance contributions and without health insurance.

And that’s fortunately because I was already rich, I had food on my table at home.

Other comrades who were living the same life I was living had their wives working as maids, or on the rice-field, with children at home.

That’s how we set up the Communist Party, not with the treasure of Dongo.

Some Germans do not flee and marry in the villages

I didn’t even manage to come to Reggio for the liberation

because some German soldiers had hidden and we didn’t know what they were going to do.

We found out the following day:

they had stayed there because they were tired of the war,

because they didn’t want to follow their troops, maybe they were afraid of drowning in the Po river…

Two of them had girlfriends they got married with over here, their kids are here now.

Battle defending the Ligonchio power plant

So the Germans decided to blow up the power plants in Ligonchio

and headed up the mountains.

The central headquarters, who were afraid we would not endure one last attack by the Germans,