I'm Enrica Morbello, and, alas, I'm a widow.
My married name was Core.
I live here in Casale Monferrato.
I was born in Casale Monferrato, in Corso Marentino.
I've lived in this avenue for 82 years.
It was January 2 1945 when, alas, I gave birth to a stillborn baby.
It still moves me to tears.
That Christmas, through a railway worker,
a certain Maschera from the village of Balzola,
my husband had sent me a bunch of flowers.
It was Christmas 1944.
He also brought a parcel.
It was a regrettable incident and maybe it caused what happened later.
It was a small parcel. He arrived, all smiling,this man,
I unwrapped it and inside there was my husband's watch.
The man had forgotten my husband's letter at home, in Balzola.
I should have seen the letter first, then opened the parcel.
In the letter my husband wrote that, not having any money,
he was sending me his watch as a present.
When I saw the watch I had an awful shock.
I thought he was dead, but that wasn't the case.
The Germans were after my husband.
Luckily, it was they who were searching for him
and I was able to get by.
I was helped by the mother of a local headmaster, Abate.
I went to his mother and she made it appear
that my husband was working between Bremen and Hamburg,
which had already been liberated then,
so they didn't arrest me.
Otherwise, I would have had to reported to the German headquarters here.
Instead, with those papers I avoided any more unpleasantness
It all started at Christmas 1944, then on January 2, I had the baby.
A lovely baby, a perfect baby, but stillborn.
I wrote to my husband to ask him to send a man.
This man's family had been evacuated to Casale.
He was called Mancio. He had already brought me letters from my husband.
Signor Mancio used to come to see his family, who had been evacuated here.
And even if he didn't have a letter to deliver to me,
he'd come by to pick up a letter from me to take away.
Which meant taking it to Rivoli, from Rivoli to Collegno,
from Collegno to Condove.
It would go from hand to hand because he worked on the outskirts of Turin.
I wrote this letter and this gentleman took it away.
Then one day, shortly afterwards, my husband turned up.
A man had lent him a suit, because he didn't have any decent civilian clothes.
He'd travelled on a German goods train.
The train was going to Turin and he'd pretended to be chummy with the Germans.
Laughing and joking, with a trilby hat on his head, he got off in Turin.
He went to see some relative and borrowed a bicycle,
and from Asti he rode all the way here.
I was feeling better, because I'd had milk fever and so on.
That morning it was foggy and it was bitterly cold.
My father and my brother-in-law accompanied us to the ferry,
two bridges were impracticable,
and we boarded it with our one bike.
We bade each other farewell.
It was like a scene from a film.
They were waving as we crossed the Po on the barge.
Then partly sitting on the cross-bar, partly running alongside him,
we got as far as Brusasco.
We left the bike in a courtyard there,
then we took the train.
They stopped us at Chivasso, where there was a checkpoint.
"Everybody out!"
The Fascists were there, all armed.
My husband and I didn't stay too close to one another.
"If they stop me," he said, "I don't want them to stop you too."
The first to get off were people mixed up in the black market.
They had sacks of rice and the like.
A very modest sort of black market.
They must have given them a bribe or something.
The fact is that they made us get back onto the train.
My husband hadn't even got off.
They made us get back on.
The train driver said, "In Turin they're sure to stop us again".
But when we got to the checkpoint in Turin,
the people were all flocking around a truck.
The driver accelerated and we got to the station.
We then took a train to Condove.
My husband went up into the mountains and I stayed there.
I met a lot of partisans because I was part of it all.
At first I lived at the bottom of the valley.
I had to join the formation up in the mountains.
I let a TOT marshal court me.
They were building a new road from Turin to Bardonecchia.
When I was down in the valley, I lived in an empty hotel.
between the main road and the railway station.
So it was subject to bombardments and machine-gun fire, all sorts of things.
It was a kilometer outside Condove.
Every morning, as if I were a clerk from Condove,
I would enter the Moncenisio factory and go into a department office.
It was a big department, it was the workshop
where the Germans used to make torpedoes,
but after September 8 they didn't need torpedoes any more.
The navy didn't exist any more because it had surrendered
to the British and the Americans,
and part of it had been sunk by the Germans.
So they were using the workshop to repair their motor vehicles.
This TOT marshal used to wait on the bridge over the river Dora,
which divided the hotel from the village.
He used to walk me almost as far as the factory, where I worked.
I let him do this because it gave me a greater sense of security.
I didn't even want to know the names of the partisan messenger girls.
You had no idea about how you might react under torture.
I didn't want to know any names. In fact, I was in the local CNL …
You know what CLN means, right?
National Liberation Committee,
It was made up of socialists, communists, liberals, monarchists,
Christian Democrats, all the parties.
Anyway I didn't even want to know their names.
If I had to cite the name of one of them now, I wouldn't be able to.
I didn't want to know them.
I knew them as people, of course,
but I never wanted to find out their names.
Anyhow, I got to know this German.
I knew the partisans because later I lived with them.
In 1945, I found myself in the Susa valley.
On April 25 I was coming down with my brigade to go to Turin.
To liberate Turin. Unfortunately, as we were walking along,
one of my comrades started coughing up blood.
The commanding officer and the commissioner took my bag off me.
I had it because I was the administrator of the brigade.
In my bag were the little money we had and our papers.
I gave the bag to my husband, who was my commissioner.
I stopped to take this boy to a doctor.
I stopped on the "walls" of Condove.
I'd been living in Condove, in the Susa valley.
We found a doctor and we put the boy in a hayloft.
I looked after him until he got better.
The next morning I intended to join my brigade in Turin.
I looked down from the "walls".
They're called the "walls" but actually they form
part of the mountainside, not very high up,
and allow you to see Condove below.
I could see the Germans going from house to house
and taking away anything at all.
There was a state of siege.
It was impossible for me to get away.
They would have arrested me.
Nobody could move when there was a state of siege.
I stood there for a while watching all these goings-on.
The Germans were taking way sewing machines,
bicycles, anything, from people's houses.
The people were all shut up in their homes, terrorized.
Then an aeroplane appeared. It was a Pippo.
It used to fly around everywhere.
It started dropping bombs and machine-gunning.
The Germans ran to their anti-aircraft guns
and I made a run for it.
I dashed through the village of Condove and took the Turin road.
I walked and walked and walked.
Thirty-two kilometers on foot all the way to Turin.
I was in tatters.
During a roundup the Germans had taken all my clothes
I had nothing to change into.
The soles had come off my shoes.
I had to walk like this,
toc-toc-toc!, to get along
I met a girl on a bike.
I asked, "Will you give it to me? Will you lend it to me?
"I've got to go to Turin.
"If you give me your address, I'll see it's brought back to you."
But she said, "No, no, no, no".
I had a little camera that a partisan had left with me.
A Polish partisan who was with us.
He'd said, "Look after it, I might lose it".
I said, "Hands up or I'll shoot!"
She saw it was a camera and pedalled off.
I got to Buttigliera Bassa and I was walking past the Fiat ironworks.
It was a factory and in it were the SAP.
It meant Proletarian Action Squads, or something like that.
The used to defend the workers, who defended their factories.
The Germans were blowing up everything.
Bridges, anything they found on their path.
They were burning down the factories
so that there'd be no work when they left.
They arrested me and made me go inside.
At the factory gates they made me put my hands up
and they searched me.
They'd belonged to a spy
who had been condemned to death a few days earlier.
I've still got them. I stuck them up over there.
So they arrested me.
I was among four of them, walking with my hands up.
There were crowds of people there.
They were all anti-Fascists and they thought I was a Fascist,
my having been arrested like that.
They shoved me around and called me all sorts of names.
My captors even had to protect me.
They took me to a small villa in Rosta,
a small village higher up.
One of them said, "I've seen you making roundups
"in a truck with the Fascists".
I said to myself, "Surely they can see how I'm dressed?"
I was in tatters, they could see what a mess I was.
How could I be a Fascist? If anything, the Fascists were on the run.
They pretended they wanted to shoot me.
But there was an elderly man among them and I spoke to him.
"Listen," I said, "if you'll allow me to search in my pockets,
"in my pocket bottoms," which were all torn,
"I'm sure to have some proof there."
Not everything would fit into that bag I had.
He allowed me to do so and I pulled out a small piece of paper
with the words, "The sun also rises".
It was the password for coming down to Turin.
It was signed by Valerio, one of our quartermasters in the valley.
So they let me go.
I came down on foot and I got as far as Rivoli.
There was a bridge on which there were Germans with a machine gun.
They were shooting at the Fiat aeronautics factory in Corso Francia.
I went through Collegno, Cascine Vica, all those villages
that are now part of Turin, but then there were lots of fields.
In fact, I didn't go down the main road but went through the countryside.
I came out in front of the Venchi Unica factory.
I crossed the road and I went into the aeronautics factory,
where they were responding to the German fire.
And there I met my husband.
It was April 26 and I'd met up with my husband again in Turin.
After conquering the aeronautics factory we set off
to defend the Martinetto electric power station.
We spent the night there.
You couldn't move around, otherwise you'd get shot.
It was right that Turin should have electricity,
so we defended the power station.
Then we went to other places.
During those days, Fascist snipers used to fire at us from the rooftops.
They killed some of my comrades.
Massimo Bui, who was the division quartermaster,
and a number of others.
It was impossible to catch them because they used to fire from above,
and as we rushed to get them, they would come down.
As in all the other cities, in Turin
they had connected one house to another by the cellars.
by moving to the cellar of the next house,
which maybe hadn't been affected.
So they used to come down and run off.
They would hear us coming as we went up to catch them
and they would run away through the cellars.
On May 1, there was a column of Germans and Fascists
who were trying to break through to create a way out
to get to the Brenner Pass and up into Germany.
Unfortunately, in those days people kept turning up saying,
"I've just got out of prison and I'm an anti-Fascist"
or else "I used to be a partisan".
So there were people joining us whose background we weren't sure about.
We liberated … No, sorry, first we had an accident.
We were on the first truck.
My husband and I were siting on the mudguard.
I had my little rifle with me as usual.
Crossing a bridge over the River Dora
a part of the side of the truck broke off.
Our comrades were standing in the truck and they all fell out.
Some of the lads broke their legs, some their arms.
Thanks to the Red Cross, they were taken to hospital.
So instead of being the first truck, we became the last.
We were lucky because what happened to the ones in front was tragic.
While they were surrendering ...
We had an armoured car with our division's commanding officer in it ...
He had negotiated with them and they were already surrendering
when one of these newcomers who we didn't know
fired and killed a German.
a special weapon designed to blow up armoured cars
and nine of our boys were killed that day.
They eventually surrendered after hiding at La Mandria.
They surrendered to the allies.
It would have been a glorious achievement for us to make them surrender that day.
We were a a borderline case, I don't know whether for good or for evil,
Because they sent us back to occupy the place we'd come from, Condove.
To divide the French and the Americans,
who'd been fighting over girls.
So we had to go back to Condove,
In Turin, we'd stayed at the Cavour barracks.
It was our last residence, the last place we conquered.
In the Cavour barracks we found white and pink telephones,
which were fashionable at the time,
open sports cars, motorbikes, records, anything you can imagine.
Passoni, a socialist, the chief of police in Turin, ordered us to go back to our valley.
We caught the train and took the two horses with us.
On the outskirts of Turin my brigade had taken
a whole Alpenjager regiment prisoners.
They were German Alpine troops and they had mules
and a few donkeys, so we had all these animals as well.
We handed the Germans over to the authorities and they were imprisoned.
Maybe they let some of them go home.
There were no trials here in Italy.
So we had all these animals.
We went back to Condove, where there were some stables.
The Alpine troops had been there previously,
so there was a barracks with stables, where we put the animals.
The French regaled us with military honours.
They fired a hundred and one blank shots.
For the first time in his life, my husband made a speech
from a balcony to thank the French.
Meanwhile, the Americans were withdrawing to Avigliana, the lakes of Avigliana.
The French withdrew to Susa and we stayed in Condove.
The Americans came back later and hoisted a huge American flag
on the balcony of the building where our offices were
and, in shifts, two partisans always kept watch night and day.
But how were we to survive day by day?
Nobody gave us anything and we hadn't any money.
So my husband and I went to Venesio to ask him for a loan.
We intended to set up a haulage cooperative
with the mules and the two horses.
He said, "Done deal!", but he don't give us anything at all.
So we went to Gondrand, a haulage company that still exists,
and they gave us some old carts and some harnesses,
which we took back to Condove.
And we started doing some haulage work.
We used to carry potatoes for farmers,
do removals, that sort of thing,
just to be able to have food to eat.
Only a few lads were left because the ones from the mountains
who lived nearby all went home.
The whole group of lads from the south was still there.
They couldn't go home because there still weren't any railway lines
to take them back to Naples and Sicily.
Thanks to the work we were able to eat, I cooked what I could.
Then the mountain people started to come with their requisition coupons
and they took our animals.
We were left with the two horses.
We assembled the lads together and said,
"Listen, they've made an offer of 60,000 lire each for the horses.
"If we shared out the money, we'd only get a pittance each
"And we don't think it's logical to do that anyway.
"What do you think of the idea of building a monument to our war dead?"
They agreed, so we came down to talk to the sculptor Guido Capra,
who was a friend of mine and we ordered this statue.
We intended to erect it on a rocky spur up in the mountains at Mocchie.
This figure of a partisan looking down over the plain,
with the desire to come down onto the plain.
There wasn't a war memorial in Condove,
so they asked if they could put the statue in a piazza,
but they put it on this horrible base, which ruins the statue completely.
It took the sculptor some time to make the statue
and we were already back living in Casale.
The mayor of San Giorgio saw the statue
and he asked our permission to have one made for his village.
So now there's the same monument in San Giorgio.
We stayed in Condove until the end of August, the start of September.
The railway lines had been mended and the boys had gone home.
In Turin they'd forgotten all about us.
So we took the train and came home.
Coming home meant that my husband was now unemployed.
So what had changed?
Seven years earlier, he'd done his military service.
He'd been called up seven years before
and he'd been sent to fight against the French.
Then we got married because he'd come back to the barracks here.
After our honeymoon, he was supposed to leave for Russia.
But the Russian front collapsed, so he left for Sicily.
I'd already had a sad experience.
I'd received this pink postcard.
It meant I'd been called up into the women's auxiliary corps.
I was only 16 or 17.
So as not to go and serve the Fascists,
I went to see Doctor Cimino,
who was the manager of the silk factory
to ask him if he would give me a job.
He agreed and gave me a job in the factory, in the chemical department.
On April 21, we were supposed to march in a procession
to hear a Fascist provincial party secretary,
who was giving a speech in the piazza.
I ran away from the procession.
I ran off and I got the sack, but I couldn't go there to suffer.
They went straightaway to report me to the party secretary Banco,
The went and informed him that I'd run away from the procession.
I was too young, so they didn't intern me,
but I was sacked on the spot,
and my name was posted in all the departments,
and I had to pay a fine of 312 lire 35 cents,
which was a lot of money at that time.
But my dismissal was worthwhile.
They didn't to check to see that I had been sacked
and why I was working there.
So they didn't call me up any more.
Mine was a borderline case
because none of my friends ever received that call-up card.
Somebody must have played joke on me,
knowing that I wasn't keen to go.
It was a way of tying me up.
There were some amusements to be had even then.
It was in that period that I met my husband.
One day went to see a cousin of mine in Bozzole,
who sold me some eggs.
On the way back, a man in civilian clothes on a bike
I was with my uncle and aunt
because in those days you didn't go around alone.
You were always in the company of somebody else.
He said, "Did you hear Coppo the lawyer?
"How well he spoke in Valmacca." "No, I didn't," I said, "I'm on the way back from Bozzole.
"My cousin gave me some eggs."
I said that because I thought he might be from the food rationing authorities.
I though that, if I said that, he wouldn't make me open the parcel
and take my eggs away.
All the prices were controlled in those days
and there were ration books with coupons for everything.
When we got to Ticineto, I turned one way
and he told me he was going towards Casale.
A few days later, I met him again and he was dressed in military uniform.
I was so happy to see that he wasn't a Fascist
and, five months later, we were already married.
There wasn't the freedom that there is nowadays.
For the war effort, there was the collection of iron,
the collection of copper, the collection of gold.
There was a friend of mine, Giacinta she was called,
who wasn't involved in politics, she just wasn't interested.
But when they were collecting gold,
among other things she handed in a beautiful brooch.
She honestly believed that this gold would help the nation.
Two days later, she saw the provincial secretary's wife wearing the brooch.
She was appalled. The woman was a friend of hers.
"That's mine!" she told her.
"No," said the woman, "it's a present from my husband."
By pure coincidence, the aunt who had given Giacinta the brooch
had had the words "To Giacinta" engraved on the back of it.
So Giacinta turned it round and showed it to the woman.
They had an argument on the street
and Giacinta was arrested.
She was released three days later
after she'd apologized and declared it had all been a mistake,
that what they said was right etc. etc.