European Resistance Archive/European Resistance Archive (ERA)

Fascism had set up an alliance with the Germans and had wanted war by all means:

the war in Spain, the war in Ethiopia, the occupation of Albania, the last war.

We despised the fascists more than the Germans.

Although the Germans were responsible for brutalities, the fascists weren’t any better.

It was time to stop this war.

I started feeling this, searching my conscience.

I might have even seemed responsible,

and somehow I was, given my job, given the fact that I was producing weapons.

I felt a bit guilty, an accomplice in all this.

That’s why we were trying to go to the mountains to fight the Germans and the fascists,

with such a drive you couldn’t even imagine.

Toni starts antifascist activities

Fascist propaganda was telling us the communists in Spain

had raped and stabbed to death some nuns, so I really didn’t like communism much.

Then what happened?

It was 1943, the war was starting,

people were talking about our retreats in Russia and in Northern Africa, the bombings, etc.

In spring 1943, strikes began at the Reggiane plant.

Not in my department or in the tooling department, where some of my friends were arrested.

From then on I started some soul-searching: what was I really doing?