European Resistance Archive/European Resistance Archive (ERA)

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.

I was always on the move between the mountains and Reggio.

No, thank God! Not my father!

He was already a partisan

when he would go to meet the others in the drying-rooms in a forest called “trenta pere” (thirty pears).

These drying-rooms in the mountains were empty in the winter, so they would hold meetings there.

Before the fascist regime began, was it 1922? No, maybe in 1928 or 1930 then.