European Resistance Archive/European Resistance Archive (ERA)

I was in the Arbeitsdienst for six months.

Then I returned in December 1942. By the time I got home, the call-up for the German army was already waiting for me.

„The women gave so much“

Maybe my sister had a harder time than I did, as she was always in the mountains with all the boys, but they all truly loved her.

I know that when she came back to Maro during the summer they would all come to visit her.

She got married with the commander of her unit and they moved to Genoa, but they still had a house in Maro,

and when they came back a lot of people would go and see them.

Women were so respected at that time.

When I went to the mountains, all the boys from Reggio would come and ask me if I had seen their parents.

They listened to whatever news I had. You could say I brought life back to them, small as I was, looking like a gipsy and always dirty.

Honestly, you washed yourself in a ditch when you stopped, and at times you even ended up drinking from the same ditch.

You were so thirsty that you would drink water wherever you found it, even from a hole in the ground.

I always say that we were born old, but we also grew day by day.

You might have forgot about the things of today, but then you’d start thinking about what the future held for you,

and at the same time you couldn’t forget the things you had to report. My head was spinning the whole time, thinking.

I would leave Reggio and I would start thinking, remembering all the things that I had not written down.

As I made it to Albinea I would be thinking again, then in Casina, in order not to forget, until I finally made it up there after a full day.

I think that women helped a lot during the war.

Otherwise, how could all these men know when things were happening?

Sometimes we would even use children, getting them to run somewhere and tell the partisans to run away because the Germans were coming.