European Resistance Archive/European Resistance Archive (ERA)

We went to Ligonchio and there really was a crowd of partisans there.

Unfortunately, not all of them were armed.

More partisans came, who wanted to fight, to enrol.

More than weapons dropped from the sky or taken during attacks to the German garrisons.

I was luckier than others, since I was given an English machine gun, a Sten gun, which was quite short.

You could disassemble it in three pieces and hide it, and put it together quickly.

And I also had a 9 mm Beretta and four hand grenades.

I stayed there with the First Battalion

and we used to go on road 63, where German garrisons were all over the place.

Not long after, around July, there was a great mop-up.

The Goering attacked, we fought back for a day and a half, two days.

Then there was a disbandment,

because it’s really hard to resist against an attack

from a German division with armoured vehicles, artillery, small airplanes, special forces.

Maybe it wasn’t even right to fight back as we did,

since guerrilla means attacking and withdrawing, coming back and so on.

That time however it was decided to fight back jointly. We suffered many casualties in the end.

Then the Germans took away more than a thousand men:

all those who were able to work, and I think also a few women, were sent to Germany.

That time there was a complete disbandment.