European Resistance Archive/European Resistance Archive (ERA)

I told him: “Giving birth to a child for a man is just a matter of seconds.

I share my life with him for nine months. He lives in me,

I’m the one who feeds him, who looks after him and gives him a chance to live.

And you tell me that I have no decisional power, that I can’t say how he should grow up?”

His reply was simply that it’s up to the man to take decisions at home. So I told him he could go home and be the man of the house there,

while I’d go back to the mountains, because that was the choice I had made.

It wasn’t an easy decision, after so many years of engagement.

Staying with him was what I had envisioned for my future. Now I put an end to it.

I also had to take into account that I might have no other chance to get married.

After such a long engagement one was considered a widow.

It would be difficult to find a young man willing to marry me.

But I didn’t feel like starting a family with a man who had such principles.

Battle name Laila

As a partisan I chose the battle name Laila.

I would be Anita for my friends, but I was only known as Laila with the partisans.

At times with people I didn’t know or whom I met for the first time.

It was my battle name.

The names we were given increased our chances of survival.

If one was arrested and talked under torture, he handed out the name he knew, not being your real name.

Many saved themselves this way.