European Resistance Archive/European Resistance Archive (ERA)

Joining the partisans

Later I went up to the mountains and gave myself this nickname, "Mirko".

He was a Yugoslavian partisan leader, a tough guy of whom we were very afraid.

On the mountains I also got to know "Frigio",

the one that wrote books about the Resistance. He was a sergeant, too.

He knew some people and we established some contacts this way.

By then we used to ride bicycles, he was displaced to Barco di Bibbiano

and so he used to give us a ride with the bike but it was risky,

you could see he was a youngster in his twenties

and we didn't have documents, nothing at all, so it was risky for us to be caught by the fascists.

But everything went well; thanks to him we got involved and went up to Cà Roma,

which was a small house near Canossa, an isolated peasant's house.

That was where the partisans were staying,

they were waiting to get in touch with the commanders up there.

We were quite a few, though: when we started there were 45 of us

and to the time we arrived at the Villa Minozzo

and at some other village in the province of Modena, I can't remember the name now,

there were seven more partisans.

All together, we had only nine rifles and one hunting rifle ... for 45 persons ... crazy.

We had to be very careful because we didn't know the people,