European Resistance Archive/European Resistance Archive (ERA)

Brother at war

My oldest brother had already left for the war in 1939.

I was looking at some postcards the other night, and the first were sent in 1939 from Albania.

He was in the Julia Alpini Brigade and had been in Udine for a while,

before he was sent to Albania and then to Greece and Russia.

It was really rough for my brother, poor guy!

He was sent to Albania, then to Greece and finally to Russia. When he came back from Russia he was ill.

Actually, they thought he was dead. They were picking up bodies from the Don

and they thought he was dead, but he was only frostbitten and suffering.

I guess they slowly revived him and managed to bring him back to Italy, to Rimini.

They kept him there for three months and we never even went to visit him,

because there was no way for us to get there.

I did go to Milan by foot, but Rimini seemed really too far.

Fortunately, my father was at home during the war.

He would check to see if there were Germans around in order to tell the partisans.

When he wasn’t working he wouldn’t sleep much, because he always had to go see if there was somebody around.

Did you know that they burned down a whole village if a German was killed?

They would destroy whatever they found, and kill ten of our people for each German who had been killed.

That’s why my father was very careful, they burned down only one house in Marola.

I don’t know if someone was wounded, since I was rarely at home at the time.