Where I Was on 25th April 1945
There had been a fire in a wood: I remember the long line of partisans coming down between burnt pine-trees, the hot ash under the soles of our feet, the trunks still white-hot in the night.
It was a march that was different from the others in our life of constant movement in those woods. We had finally received the order to come down from the hills to attack our own town, San Remo; we knew the Germans were retreating from the Riviera; but we did not know which strongholds they still held. These were days when everything was shifting and our leaders were certainly kept informed on an hourly basis; but here I am trying to stick just to my memories as an ordinary partisan in the Garibaldi Brigades following my detachment and limping because of an abscess on my foot (from the moment the frost had hardened and crumpled the leather of my boots, my feet had constantly been plagued by sores). It seemed certain that this time Germany was done for, but we had had too many illusions in those years and too often we had been disappointed: so we preferred not to make any forecasts.
The front nearest us – on the French border – showed no sign of moving: for eight months, namely from the moment of France’s liberation, we had heard the rumble of cannons on the Western front; for eight months freedom was just a few kilometres away, but meanwhile the life of the partisans in the Maritime Alps had become harder and harder because, as a back route to the front line, our area was of crucial importance for the Germans who had to keep the roads clear at all costs; that was why they never gave us any peace, nor we them; and that was why our area was one of the zones that suffered the highest percentage of casualties.
Even in those weeks when spring was in the air (it was, though, a very cold April) and we felt that victory was imminent, that feeling of uncertainty that had shaped our lives for so many months still persisted. Even in the final days of the war the Germans had reappeared by surprise and we had suffered mortalities. Just a few days prior to this, while on patrol, I had nearly fallen into their hands.
The last camp our group made was, if I remember correctly, between Montalto and Badalucco: the fact that we had already descended into the area of olive groves was in itself a sign that this was a new season, after the winter up in the chestnut-tree zone which meant constant hunger. By this stage we were not able to reason in any other way except in terms of whether something was good or bad for our survival as partisans, as though this existence was still to last who knows how long. The valleys were once again covered in leaves and bushes, meaning a better chance of staying under cover during enemy fire, like that clump of hazel trees which had saved our lives, mine and my brother’s, twenty days earlier, after action on the Ceriana road. As long as our lives hung by a thread, it was pointless conjuring up even the notion that a new life was about to dawn, one without machine-gun fire, reprisal raids, the fear of being caught and tortured. And even afterwards, when peace had come, rediscovering the habit of functioning in a different way would take time.
It seems to me that that night we slept for only a couple of hours, lying on the ground for the last time. I thought that the next day there would be a battle for possession of the Via Aurelia, my thoughts were those you have the night before a battle, rather than about the imminent Liberation. It was only the next day, seeing that our descent continued without any interruption, that we realized that the coast was already liberated and that we were marching directly on San Remo (in fact after some rearguard clashes with the town’s partisan groups, the Germans and Fascists had retreated towards Genoa).
However, even that morning, the Allies’ ships had appeared off the San Remo coast and started the daily naval bombardment of the town. The town’s National Liberation Committee had assumed power under the bombardment and as its first act of government had ordered that ‘Liberated Zone’ be painted in huge white letters on the walls of Corso Imperatrice so that the warships could see it. When we got near Poggio, we began to encounter the people of the town standing on the sides of the road: they had come out to see and cheer the partisans marching along. I remember that the first people I saw were two elderly men with their hats on, coming along and chatting about their own business as though it were any old holiday; but there was one detail about them that would have been inconceivable up to the day before: they had red carnations in their lapels. In the following days I was to see thousands of people with red carnations in their lapels, but they were the first.
I can certainly say that for me that was the first image of freedom in civilian life, of freedom without any risk to life any more, which appeared to us just like that, nonchalantly, as though it were the most natural thing in the world.
As we gradually got closer to the town, the crowds of people grew, as did the rosettes, the flowers, the girls, but coming nearer to my home brought back the thought of my parents who had been held hostage by the SS, and I did not know whether they were alive or dead, just as they did not know if their sons were alive or dead.
I see that these memories of Liberation Day are more concerned with ‘before’ than ‘after’. But that is the way they have remained in my memory, because we were all caught up in what we had lived through, while the future as yet did not have a face, and we would never have imagined a future which would make these memories gradually fade as has happened in these thirty years.
[Domenica del Corriere, April 1975. Supplement issued to commemorate the thirtieth anniversary of the Liberation, containing twenty-eight pieces on ‘That day, 25 April 1945 …’ (Author’s note.)]