I think I must have begun my story at that moment—around four o’clock in the afternoon of 10 September 1943—when, while I was distributing leaflets with Paolo, Ettore, and Lisetta at the corner of Via Cernaia and Corso Galileo Ferraris, with incredulous eyes, I saw a string of German automobiles pass by.1
At first, during Badoglio’s forty days, I truly did not take it seriously.2 Excitement, a continuous celebration, yes. From the first moment, on the morning of 26 July, when I heard the news on the radio in Meana, gradually, confusedly, first in Czechoslovakian, then in Greek, I reacted with almost hysterical laughter. Then the precipitous return to Turin, and the house filled with people, and all the friends who could see each other freely at last, and those who, day after day, returned from confino, from exile, from prison—Rossi and Ginzburg, Venturi and Foa.3 The excitement of the first semi-clandestine press. A whirlwind in which it was wonderful to feel myself drawn, a joy that seemed just compensation for so many years of isolation. I plunged into “working” with the friends I found around me, those with whom I had remained in touch, or come into contact in the preceding years, and who to some extent espoused Piero’s ideas, without fully understanding them very well, without even trying to understand, with pure sentimental attachment and enthusiasm, full of faith. Today, when I think about it again, it seems impossible that, despite my age and experience, I was able to be so much like a young girl in those days, so superficial and free, almost with a spirit of innocence, a state of mind of being on vacation. (I believe, however, that this was the state of mind of many among us.) Perhaps the only serious thing was the feeling that, as on the most wonderful vacation, all this “could not last,” and the waiting for something that would otherwise and more profoundly engage us.
Therefore that day, when I saw the German automobiles pass by, suddenly I had the feeling that the vacation was over. It was not that I was aware of the reality of the situation, not even partially. On the contrary, I continued to reason with my customary foolish, subconscious optimism: certainly the German automobiles were carrying some parliamentarians, the proposals would be rejected, and Turin would be protected.
People crowded around us. One of my most poignant memories of that day was the anxiety of the passersby who, seeing us with the printed sheets in our hands, believed us to be well informed about secret things and questioned us, hoping to know, to understand. They were pitiful in their isolation, in their abandonment. Left to themselves, with neither material nor moral weapons, without direction, without one watchword. Yet, if a hand were extended to them, who knows how many of those who turned to us with such touching hope would have known how to forget their ineffective selves and become “companions” in the highest sense of the term. I wanted to hold out a hand to them, but I was neither better off nor better prepared than they. I continued to say stupid words of encouragement, watching the façade of the Camera del Lavoro.4 Only a few hours had passed since the morning’s meeting. That joy, that enthusiasm of feeling truly close to one another in a crowd of many, that sense of fraternity acquired through common hope and common suffering, was it possible that such strength had been an illusion? Yet every time I lowered my eyes again to the leaflets that I had in my hand, the printed words (“resistance,” “desire for revolution,” “liberty,” “justice”) appeared to me to be more and more futile, pitiful, and unreal.
Renato Martorelli was the one who convinced us that it was almost absurd to hope. This was also the last time I saw him.5 (How many faces—noble, dear faces like his—appear for an instant in these pages, and then disappear into a shadow, never to return.) He was with someone else and came toward me, determined, his habitually pale face marked by worry and fatigue: “Leave. What is there left to do? Adami Rossi has handed the city over to the Germans. Leave quickly.”6
The crowd around us began to thin out. We went away reluctantly, still incredulous. At home, a young man who was listening to the radio greeted us excitedly: “Farinacci is speaking from Monaco. They have reconstructed the Fascist Party. It is a true incitement to civil war!”7 I shrugged my shoulders with a sense of annoyance. At that moment, Monaco and Farinacci mattered little to me. I thought there were more urgent things to do right now, like burn documents, especially the cards of those who were registered in the “Volunteers of the Armed Nation” for the “Italian Resistance Front.” A heavy physical weariness began to weigh on me. While Lisetta made me a cup of coffee, I set about collecting the dangerous documents.
Meanwhile Paolo was arguing heatedly with some friends: “We have to do something. We cannot surrender like this. Let’s remove the rails; let’s raise the barricades,” he shouted with a tone of desperation that rang strangely in his still young voice. It was the first time his heart had been broken. It was the first time when, as a young fellow, he had loved something and believed in something, in that strong desire to resist that he felt inside instinctively. Now he did not want to believe that this faith and this love had been illusory.
Ettore arrived with the news that one of his colleagues had found a gun. What should he do with it? “Take it,” I said quickly. Ettore went away again, running, and Paolo disappeared behind him.
The documents were burning. The study was deserted. In the dining room—as if they were obeying an instinctive need for greater prudence—they held a kind of war council. Andreis, Agosti, Foa, Venturi, and Peccei were there. Luigi Scala was also there—Scala, who had been released from his long imprisonment only two days before, and whom I was to see again for a moment three years later, on his return from Mauthausen, so physically destroyed that not even his indomitable spirit could save him.8
Decisions were made quickly. We had to disappear, break up, and yet keep in touch with each other secretly. It remained to be seen what forms the police offensive would take, and how it would be possible to work. One group would go into the Pellice Valley, another into the Cuneese Valley. For the time being, we would move into the Susa Valley, to Meana.
Someone arrived, panting, with the news that a car laden with SS was about to arrive at my house, on Via Fabro. I shrugged my shoulders again. It seemed quite unlikely to me that the SS would attach so much importance to us. Nevertheless, we agreed that it would be prudent to disappear as quickly as possible. I agreed, unwillingly, that we too would have to spend that night at the Vigna Allason.9 We said goodbye quickly, without particular emotion. I too went downstairs to the front door. Ettore had arrived, carrying a ’91 model gun with which I had learned to shoot as a little girl, during the other war. “Bury it in the cellar,” I suggested, caressing the long barrel fleetingly. It stayed in the cellar for twenty months until, during the nights of the insurrection, it was used to fire at the last German tanks.
But where was Paolo? “He went to the Valdocco barracks to see if he could find more weapons,” said Ettore. I ran there too, somewhat anxiously. He was there indeed, with a small crowd that, bewildered and powerless, watched the soldiers at the window, “confined” in the barracks. “Poor boys,” commented the women. Someone yelled, “Run away! Go home, to your mothers! After all, you do not want to be taken by the Germans!” The soldiers were looking at them, tentative and uncertain. How could we find our bearings in this world in ruins where even the only remaining benchmarks of discipline, patriotism, and honor, which had already been wavering for some time, were now breaking down tragically?
Meanwhile someone passed by with a coil of rawhide. He was clearing out an abandoned military warehouse nearby. So just as the morning’s heroic aura had appealed to what was loftiest, now a sense of dissolution reinforced man’s baser instincts. The little crowd dispersed rapidly, taking advantage of the opportunity to flee that was afforded it. The soldiers remained alone to stare at the deserted street with empty and melancholy eyes.
We did not see any weapons nearby. We went home in silence, heavy with sadness. As we went back in, the house seemed like an abandoned battlefield: cinders, torn-up documents, cigarette ashes everywhere, and two Beretta revolvers and a hundred cartridges on the table of the dining room.
While Ettore and Paolo were hiding the weapons and I was cooking eggs in a hurry, Luigi Capriolo arrived.10 For as long as I had known him—and it was already many years by that time—I had always seen him smiling. He was smiling when, freed from his first period of imprisonment, he announced his upcoming marriage. He was smiling when, after more difficult years in prison, he told me that his marriage had gone up in smoke, but the “work” went on, and he was happy all the same. It was to him that we ran during the most intense periods of anxiety and serenity—at the time of the declaration of war on France, as well as during the time of the German attack on Russia.11 In his simplicity we felt something solid and constant, and everything about him was absolutely genuine. But on that night of 10 September, he was not smiling when he entered our house. His face, which was not very expressive, was marked by the same serious fatigue that I had seen on the faces of the soldiers in the barracks and on the faces of many whom I met on the road. Profoundly conscious of the political significance of the moment, his mind and body were still suffering from the tragic loss we felt all around us. He agreed with Paolo immediately. While he ate quickly, I heard them talking with expressions and terms that, after a few days, would become part of our daily routine, but that at the moment still sounded new to me, and were accompanied by an obscure menace: “Organize the resistance”...“sabotage”...“armed squads.” For now, tomorrow morning they would go together in search of weapons.
As he was leaving, Momi Banfi arrived, exhausted.12 A member of the military, he had managed to avoid being taken by the Germans. He had not slept or had any peace for three days. He staggered from fatigue. We could not leave him in the house that we were about to abandon, considering the danger, but how could we make him walk the six kilometers to the Vigna? Capriolo said that he would take him to a safe place to sleep, at the house of a companion. That night I saw him smile for the first time. Human empathy, the joy of being able to help someone who was fighting the same battle, even if he had not known him before, restored his optimism and hope. We parted under the glow of that smile of his. That is how I saw him again in my mind sixteen months later when, in France, in an underground newspaper, I read the news of his horrible end.13 And that is how I still see him today.
Outdoors, in the street and on the tram, outside life appeared drearily normal. Now, for most people, the resigned, subdued passivity of the Italian people began to replace the incredulous bewilderment and angry rebellion. They had endured the bombings, the fires, the famine. They would also endure the occupation. Deep in their hearts, everyone was certain that they would come out of this; but how, very few knew.
Certainly I did not know. After all, our climb toward the hill in the evening did not represent anything unusual for me. How many times during the periods of bombing had we traveled that road! The eighteenth-century house, guarded by two old cypress trees, was always the same, and we always found the same cordial, serene welcome there.
Only the next morning did I truly begin to become aware of reality when, passing in front of Porta Nuova in a tram, I saw some German soldiers on guard, armed to the teeth, in camouflage uniform with machine guns close at hand.14 Suddenly the absurd, incredible hope that my heart had nourished in order to protect itself crumpled. The pain was unbearable. I started to cry, and I could not stop. Another woman who had followed me with her eyes also began to cry. A man coughed gruffly and turned his head. Another lowered his head and closed his eyes. “Mah!” said the conductor with a sigh.
The morning passed quickly in taking care of small practical matters. Paolo went off with Capriolo. I saw Carlo Galante, who had come from Cuneo, where Galimberti and Bianco had already begun to round up squads of armed men. I saw Grosso, one of our union organizers, who spoke to me of the work he had done that morning and the previous evening to reestablish contacts with the worker groups. I saw Perosino, a young man who had been my student at the Sommeiller [school] that year—it was strange how he had singled me out and had come right toward me. He had two hand grenades in his pocket (two “Balilla” bombs, the first I had seen) and many plans in his head for the organization of young men, surprise actions, etc.15
From the despondent weariness I felt around me, from the emptiness where I seemed to have found myself, initiatives and hopes were born. The desire for resistance was taking shape.
More than ever I felt that I had to stay in my house, that my instincts did not tell me that I was in danger, and that perhaps my house might be the only meeting place for many people. Nevertheless, I decided that we would leave for Meana in the afternoon. Monday—it was then Saturday—I for one would return. I made an arrangement with the concierge—the valiant Espedita—who, for twenty months, indefatigably, day and night, watched over us and over our house and to whom in large part I believe we owe our surprisingly safe existence. I urged the lawyer Cattaneo, who lived on the ground floor at that time, to move the canary cage out of a specific window sill, in the event of some alarm, so that I would not end up involuntarily in a cage myself.16
At the station, among the crowd that looked like the habitual mass of “evacuees,” everything was as usual; there were only the Germans on guard, immovable and hostile, as if they were closed off by a magic circle. “What a change from yesterday morning,” I heard someone behind me say. I turned around. There were two young men in overalls. Evidently they too had been at the meeting at the Camera del Lavoro, and there was the same pain that we felt in their incredulous eyes.
I saw the saddest dejection, however, in the soldiers whom we found at the station, and especially in Bussoleno when we climbed up the valley again. They were what was left of the Italian Fourth Army, which, after having tried to resist and fight in Moncenisio and Modane (someone had been able to block the Frejus tunnel), found themselves without a leader, and without orders. Abandoned, they now tried to flee the Germans and go back home.17 After they had endured three years of “national service” without conviction, for two days they had really believed they had to fight. But then they were alone, and increasingly oppressive disillusionment and bitterness had replaced their blaze of heroic enthusiasm. One had begun drinking in order to dull his senses. Another had tried to console himself with the idea that the war was over for him. But their relief and drunkenness tasted of desperation, and sadness without any hope of consolation arose from that spectacle of useless strength and useless pain. As always, in the most tragic moments, alongside the generous goodness of most (in those days thousands of fugitive soldiers were supplied with civilian clothes in the Susa Valley), the stingy selfishness of others was revealed. When the train left the station, the action of someone who, with an old jacket in his hand, tried to bargain with a drunken and half-nude soldier remains in my memory.
When I arrived in Meana, it was like finding a forgotten paradise. Here the dejection had not yet arrived. Among the chestnut trees adorned by the sunset, the carts came back, laden with straw, and from each house the smoke from the fireplace rose toward the sky. We could hear children playing and animals calling, as if the whole world were at peace.
Paolo slipped away quickly and returned after an hour, his eyes sparkling. With a gesture of triumph—the same gesture with which a few years earlier he had shown me a four-leaf clover or a mushroom he had found—he deposited two hand grenades and a gun on the table. He had been to the nearby crossing keeper’s cabin, which the militi had abandoned.18
Tomorrow, he said, I will go with Gianni to take a tour of the other signal towers.19 You’ll see that we will find a pile of stuff.
I wanted to ask him, “And then? What do you want to do? What do you need to do?” But I did not have the courage. I felt tired, like I was drained. I could not face the situation and make decisions. For one moment more, I wanted to ignore, to forget, to forget and to sleep.
The following morning—it was Sunday—after a night’s sleep and the prospect of an entire day of peace, I finally had the free time to think.
I understood, at first somewhat confusedly, that for us a grave and difficult period had begun, when we would have to act and fight ruthlessly and continuously, assuming responsibility and facing every sort of danger.
Personally, none of this surprised me. After all, as a little girl and as an adolescent—and indeed, alas, also as an adult—had not my model been “La piccola vedetta lombarda”?20 But I was terrified for my son, who had thrown himself into action so decisively.
I tried to talk to him in the afternoon, on the terrace that was dominated by the Rocciamelone, associated with the memory of so many faraway hours of innocent repose and quiet games.21 But, perhaps in response, Paolo loathed the romantic heroic attachments that were so essential to my character, despite my efforts, through long and painful self-discipline, to control them. There was no need to make decisions, he said. He thought that the situation itself would tell us what had to be done.
Whistling, he slid down from the terrace to the meadow below, and set out toward the railroad. Ettore and I looked at each other. For him everything was so simple. Perhaps he was right. At such times, words and plans were useless. Day by day we would do what had to be done.
1 Paolo Gobetti was the son of Ada and Piero Gobetti. Ettore Marchesini was Ada’s second husband and brother of dear friends Maria, Ada, and Nella Marchesini. When she was a law student in Turin in 1941, Lisetta Giua had organized other students into what eventually became a nucleus of the Pci’s Fronte della Gioventù (Young People’s Front). See Jane Slaughter, Women and the Italian Resistance, 1943–1945 (Denver: Arden Press, 1997), 46.
2 I believe Ada meant Badoglio’s forty-five days, the period between Mussolini’s fall on 25 July 1943 to the armistice of 8 September 1943.
3 Confino was a punishment conferred under fascism by which offenders were sent to remote locations in Italy in a type of domestic exile. Ernesto Rossi was part of the group who published the antifascist newspaper Non Mollare in Florence, along with Carlo Rosselli and Gaetano Salvemini. Leone Ginzburg, a Russian-born immigrant and the first Italian professor of Russian literature, served as Piero Gobetti’s mentor for his writings on Russian novelists and intellectuals. He died under torture in the Regina Coeli prison in Rome in 1944 because of his antifascist activities. See Nadia Urbinati, introduction to Piero Gobetti, On Liberal Revolution (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), xl n. 26. Franco Venturi was the famous historian of the Enlightenment. Vittorio Foa was a lawyer convicted by the Special Tribunal as a member of the Giustizia e Libertà movement and representative of the Action Party in the Committee of National Liberation (Cln) of the Piedmont region.
4 Ada gave this description of the Camera del Lavoro: “Built with contributions from the workers, the Camera del Lavoro was...on Galileo Ferraris between Carlo Promis, Papacino, and Sebastiano Valfrè Streets. Burned and occupied by the Fascists in 1921, leftist union members retook it after 25 July 1943. It was from its balcony that on 10 September, after the armistice, representatives of the various parties incited the Turinese people to resist the German occupation.” Ada Gobetti, Camilla Ravera. Vita in carcere e al confino con lettere e documenti (Parma. Ugo Guanda, 1969), 10 n. 1.
5 Renato Martorelli was a lawyer and representative of the Socialist Party on the Piedmontese Military Committee. Killed by the Germans in 1944, he was decorated posthumously with the gold medal for military valor.
6 General Enrico Adami Rossi was the military commander of Turin.
7 Roberto Farinacci, a loyal Fascist and party secretary from 1925 to 1926, became part of Mussolini’s puppet administration at Salò. Denis Mack Smith called him “one of the more crude and brutish of the hierarchy.” Mack Smith, Modern Italy, 326.
8 On 29 April 1932, the Special Tribunal sentenced Mario Andreis and Luigi Scala to eight years in prison. Andreis was a student of economics and a leader in the Action Party. Scala was a professor of natural sciences who joined the GL movement in 1930 and who, after his release from prison in August 1943, became active in the Action Party in Turin. He was deported to Mauthausen a few months later. Giorgio Agosti was a magistrate, a member of the Piedmontese Military Committee of the Action Party, and regional political representative of the GL formations in the Piedmont region. Aurelio Peccei was an industrial manager and political organizer of the Action Party.
9 The home of Barbara Allason (1877–1968), the celebrated Turinese writer, journalist, scholar of German literature, and close friend of Ada and Piero Gobetti. In her memoirs, Memorie di una antifascista, 1919–1940 (Milan: Edizioni Avanti, 1961), Allason revealed the high degree of resistance to fascism in Turin during the 1919–1940 period, long before the Resistenza of 1943–1945. In 1934 Allason spent a period of time in prison for her antifascist activities.
10 Luigi Capriolo had been convicted by the Special Tribunal as a member of the Communist Party. He served as a liaison officer between the Susa Valley and the Lanzo Valley and later as an inspector for the Garibaldini Command in the Cuneese Valley.
11 Italy declared war on France on 10 June 1940, entering World War II on the side of the Germans. Hitler invaded Russia on 22 June 1941.
12 Arialdo (Momi) Banfi, a lawyer, was a representative of the Action Party in the first Piedmontese Regional Military Committee.
13 Capriolo was hanged by the Nazi-Fascists on 3 August 1944.
14 Porta Nuova is the main train station in Turin.
15 Carlo Galante Garrone was a magistrate and supporter of the Action Party. Dante Livio Bianco was a lawyer, member of the command of the Italia Libera partisan band, political representative of GL Division I in the Cuneese Valley, and regional commander of the GL formations in the Piedmont region. Grosso was a union organizer for the Action Party.
16 The lawyer Giovanni Battista Cattaneo, a tenant in the same building where Ada lived, helped devise a scheme to protect her, and to warn her if the police were in her home or had passed by recently. Cattaneo would place his canary’s cage in the window if there were no danger, and hide it if there were danger.
17 The Frejus tunnel links Italy with France.
18 Militi were members of the Milizia Volontaria Sicurezza Nazionale or Mvsn, a military organization of the most fanatical champions of the fascist regime.
19 Paolo’s friend Gianni Jarre.
20 “La piccola vedetta lombarda” (The Little Lombard Lookout) was one of eleven parts of the book Cuore by Edmondo De Amicis, which tells of heroic acts carried out by children.
21 The Rocciamelone is a mountain peak in the Italian Alps that stands at 3,538 meters.