European Resistance Archive/European Resistance Archive (ERA)

The partisans of Modena were a very large group, and they also had to coordinate the Russians who were with them.

So there were many of us when we arrived at Lupo.

We left Secchio at night and made it to Valestra at dawn.

We stayed there the whole day and left again in the evening, arriving at Lupo at two thirty in the morning.

Leaving Valestra, as we were on the road that goes from Casina to Albinea, you could still see the long line behind.

There were so many people: the English, the paratroopers, the Gufi Neri, all the partisans from the Central Headquarters.

We stayed there the whole day and then the following night, at around midnight, they went down for the attack.

Soon you could hear shots, as well as the sound of bagpipes,

since the English were used to going to battle playing bagpipes.

I can’t recall how many women we were, myself and another skinny girl from Villa Minozzo,

but later Kiss told us that our task for the next day would be to search for any wounded, since anyone wounded had to be retrieved.

The following day, as soon as it was light enough, we were asking ourselves what we had to do.

Nobody was around and no partisans had returned. They must have dispersed in all directions.

We wondered if there were any wounded men or not.

We looked around the house, and there was an English soldier with a bullet in his knee who was hiding in a wagon.

He was waiting for the dark in order to move or for somebody to go look for him.

They put him and Gordon, who were wounded, in the house of a blacksmith, a sort of shop, and began taking them away at night.

They finally got them to Palanzano, in the province of Parma, from where they were taken to Florence by helicopter.

Then we had found this man in the house of a family nearby, hidden in a wagon.

He had been put there by some partisans, who had left him there.