European Resistance Archive/European Resistance Archive (ERA)
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We didn’t only have to learn to fight, as the commander told us:
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“From this moment you’re not men or women anymore, you’re partisans.
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You’ll do what the others do, share things with us and sleep in the same rooms,
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share our meals and all the tasks we must carry out, like patrolling the area.
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You should learn to handle weapons, know how to care for them, load them, and how to use them.
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You’ll mount guard and take part in the patrols. Little by little you’ll become combatants.
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Here you have the same rights and obligations as everyone else.
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Nobody should put you into trouble and you should behave so that nobody else ends up in trouble because of you”.
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At night, at first they had given us a room which was full of bedbugs.
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We had to run out of it as we couldn’t sleep because of the bites.
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So the first night I slept with them I was between De Pietri, a partisan from Reggio
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and a young Sardinian carabiniere who had refused to follow the Germans’ orders and went to the partisans.
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We chatted all night long.
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They asked me about things in the city and I asked them how we should have behaved, etc.
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I really became aware of the differences.
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At home, there was no way you could sleep next to a man!
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Women were vital to the partisans. They could go where men could not. Men had failed to report for military service.
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Everywhere they went, even if they were young, they were taken, searched and sent out to concentration camps at the least.
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As women, we did not have to be in the army or with the fascists. We could move in a way they weren’t allowed to.
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We took care of things like printed materials, propaganda, weapons.
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