European Resistance Archive/European Resistance Archive (ERA)

We were about fifty, but there were some who ...

I was placed in front of the barracks of the fascists, it was full of people inside,

I could hear them sing their songs.

I was a good marksman

but I was fifty meters away in a hole and couldn't get out because ...

We had a hard time because a plane came to shoot at us,

so we got stuck in the ditch like frogs, surrounded by nettles.

Hard moments.

I told my fellows that were 70-80 meters away and said:

"Shoot there, you shoot and we will walk under the shooting line!"

It was an operation for covering people we wanted to rescue.

They weren't experts, they shot like idiots with the machine guns, they shot a lot,

whereas they were supposed to fire two or three shots and then alternate them

in order to keep the enemy under pressure while we were passing underneath.

Instead, we turned up running with the bullets from machine guns in our back.. These moments ...

The enemies were experts in war, whereas our guys were there but didn't know anything.

For instance, there was "Jack", a friend of mine, who died some time ago,

whose machine gun got stuck one time. So I told one partisan colleague:

"Drop the hand grenade!" and he dropped it without the safety catch, like a stone.

Throwing a hand grenade is not such an easy thing, you must count, you have to ...