European Resistance Archive/European Resistance Archive (ERA)

As he was killed in battle she took his place.

Laila was the first name of a woman fighter, so I thought it would be right for me to choose that name.

She was a combatant, and I chose a name that would reflect what I was doing.

Becoming a partisan: rights, obligations

After a while of walking, a partisan patrol came towards us.

They were from the Rosselli detachment. Rosselli was one of the local partisans. Then we reached the detachment.

There, the commander started talking to us. He wanted to know why we went to the mountains.

We explained to him what had happened. And the situation changed again. A different reality hit us.

We didn’t only have to learn to fight, as the commander told us:

“From this moment you’re not men or women anymore, you’re partisans.

You’ll do what the others do, share things with us and sleep in the same rooms,

share our meals and all the tasks we must carry out, like patrolling the area.

You should learn to handle weapons, know how to care for them, load them, and how to use them.

You’ll mount guard and take part in the patrols. Little by little you’ll become combatants.

Here you have the same rights and obligations as everyone else.

Nobody should put you into trouble and you should behave so that nobody else ends up in trouble because of you”.

At night, at first they had given us a room which was full of bedbugs.

We had to run out of it as we couldn’t sleep because of the bites.

So the first night I slept with them I was between De Pietri, a partisan from Reggio

and a young Sardinian carabiniere who had refused to follow the Germans’ orders and went to the partisans.