European Resistance Archive/European Resistance Archive (ERA)

I was surrounded by farmer boys, all relatively awkward in the Italian language,

even for simple communicative purposes, and it was I who accompanied and brought the entire unit back to the Primorje region and directly to the Partisans.

Three hundred young men.

First contacts with fascism

The first time I ever entered a school building presented me with my first personal contact with fascism.

I was six years old and the teacher demanded that all newcomers greet with the characteristic fascist raised arm salutation.

Subconsciously, I immediately sensed the pressure of something foreign and hateful and I didn’t want to raise my arm in the fascist salute.

Upon the teacher’s persistence that I must salute, some sort of childish impetuosity, a stubborn anger arose in me.

Nothing could make me raise my arm.

Eventually, because he insisted, I raised my arm, albeit in childish wounded vanity.

The teacher was standing over me and he gave me a hard slap.

That was my first encounter with fascism. I was a six year old fighter.

My second encounter was about two years later when my father took me to Trieste.

Of course we walked from the town of my birth, 30 kilometers.

I so wanted to see the city for the first time in my life.

I was fascinated with the palaces in Trieste, especially on the Via Carducci, the main road.

I asked my father to tell me what was what.

At that moment someone wearing a fascist uniform spat in my face

and threatened to bash me in the face if he heard one more such obscene word.

Even though I was just a child, this was the moment when fascism instinctively emerged within me in the form of identification: