European Resistance Archive/European Resistance Archive (ERA)

He managed to pull it out, but Fiorello hit him with the sub-machine gun.

Fiorello then left with the motorbike, while we put the captain in an icehouse.

At the time we had these ice-houses: people used to make holes in the ground,

pave them and put snow in them, to use the ice in the cheese factories.

At night we headed for the mountains with this blindfolded SS captain.

We sent a dispatch to the Podestà again, telling him to inform the German headquarters

that we had captured captain “whatever his name was”. On the same day the prisoner exchange was done.

First partisan action; Cervi brothers

The first engagement I took part in, we disarmed two German soldiers.

They were by the railway tracks, on the Via Emilia railway bridge. They were really young.

Fiorello had a gun, since he was a Carabiniere when he had escaped from Yugoslavia.

I had a fake one he had made out of wood, which looked just the same.

We sneaked behind these two boys, pointed our guns at their neck and got them to raise their hands.

We took away their P38 guns. From then on we felt armed.

We had a meeting in the fields with the Cervi brothers.

They were worried and said that they wanted to go to the mountains.

Their house at the time was a hideaway.

They welcomed a lot of people, maybe too many. They also welcomed fleeing foreign soldiers they didn’t know.

Some of them might have been spies. So they went to the mountains for a while and then came back.

I guess they went on letting too many people in. We all know what happened afterwards.