European Resistance Archive/European Resistance Archive (ERA)

Torelli at a certain moment told me: “Laila, what you’re doing is not enough.

You do so much for the partisans and for us, but you need to think about what your future will be”.

I replied: “Well, let’s just hope it will be a little bit better than now”.

He said: “If you agree, organize a meeting with all the women you work with and I’ll get a communist leader to come”.

To us, communists and socialists were just the same, what did we know about politics?

We had never got involved in it.

With fascism, you could only read what they gave to you, and you didn’t even have the right to make comments.

So before we did this meeting I met Paolo Davoli,

who explained how important it was for women to discuss their future.

After the war, women would take part in elections and have the same rights as men.

That was great for us.

At that point we understood that we could change our future,

that we had to be more than partisans, acquire consciousness about our role.

But we were really so ignorant, it was sad.

I set up two women support groups, we did two or three meetings.

This worker came, I think he was a mechanic of the factory Bloch.

Decision to resist

Torelli was an old antifascist living in our house. He was persecuted and had been in jail.

One day he told me he wanted to talk to me.

“The things you’re doing are very important; we were quite surprised by you”.