European Resistance Archive/European Resistance Archive (ERA)

They worked day and night to get the car ready and only left the following day,

while I had to leave before, by foot. They arrived the day after.

I had to get there earlier to tell everybody that a German car was arriving,

but that the three men in it were partisans. I had a document.

I don’t know if you noticed that there’s a copy of it in Gordon’s book.

The English had written that whatever happened they would have rewarded us.

So I had this letter and I told them not to shoot at the car

since the men in it were three partisans who were coming to blow up the bridge.

Everything went well that day and I stayed there even the day after,

because it took me more than a full day to go back down from Baiso to Soliera.

I wrote it in a book in order to remember where it was: Cortile, near Campogalliano.

I walked through the ditches, following the canal as it went down,

after Modena, around Rubiera, and managed to deliver the letter.

The following day they arrived with the car.

If three Germans had arrived at this farmhouse, a small house right in the open,

they would have been immediately killed by the partisans.

They would have thought: “What are they doing here? They came for us”, and they would have shot at them.

But everything went well, they waited for night to fall, placed the bombs, and succeeded in derailing the train.

They stayed near the bridge the whole night, since the partisans had taken us to the right places.

If they weren’t covered properly they couldn’t have done anything.