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Organisation was Berta’s great gift. Within weeks of her arrival, our little town had a growing network of girls and women who carried messages, smuggled illegal publications and false papers, and took essential supplies to the various partisan groups that were forming in the hills south of Florence. Our partisans were young and old, communist and socialist, monarchist and liberal, Catholic and Trotskyist and anarchist. Many were completely new to combat, while some had served in the military or the police. If all these different people were going to work together, and do so effectively, then they needed all the help they could get.
Berta understood this perfectly. The women in her network belonged to no party, espoused no faction. We went where we were asked, when we were asked; we worked for anyone who needed us, and we never quibbled. This was my Resistance: the everyday routine of messages on cigarette paper and guns in shopping bags, of delivery runs fitted in around school and church and home. If I have no spectacular stories to tell you, it’s because my Resistance was unspectacular, necessary, quiet. But it was dangerous, too.
On the evening of 15 February 1944, Berta was returning from Florence, where she had collected copies of the clandestine newsletterThe Workers’ Struggleto distribute in Romituzzo. As she often did, she’d sewn the newsletters into the lining of her handbag. When she got off the train, she was stopped by a German soldier who checked her papers and looked in her bag. A routine check and one she’d passed so many times, but this soldier had a sharp eye. Perhaps the worn old lining, unpicked and restitched so many times, had begun to give way; perhaps the stark black newsprint peeked through a rent in the silk. He took the bag from her, tore open the lining and found the newsletters hidden there.
Berta didn’t go easily. That’s what people tell me, people who were there. She fought like a cat, screaming and clawing as the Germans bundled her into their truck. The next day, her broken and violated body was left at dawn outside her father’s shop on piazza Garibaldi, in the very centre of town, as a warning to those who dared resist.
My friend Berta Gallurì was a strong woman, stronger than you can imagine. She died without giving up a single name. I know that because our little network went on existing. I know because the Germans didn’t come for me.
*
I didn’t see poor Berta that morning, thank God. I didn’t even know that she had been caught. But when I came downstairs to make myself breakfast before school, I found my father sitting at the kitchen table with his face in his hands and I knew that something was wrong.
‘Papà,’ I said, ‘what’s happened? Why aren’t you at work?’
My father raised his head. He was a big man, an impressive man – rather like Peppone in theDon Camillostories – but that day he looked tired and old. ‘Achille has gone to open up the garage,’ he said, in a voice quite unlike his usual one. ‘Your mother is having a lie-in.’
If my mother was still in bed, something must have beenverywrong. I sat down next to him and watched as he rubbed a hand over his face. I didn’t know what to do, and I’m not sure he did either. Eventually I put my hand on his arm, and he briefly held it in his own rough hand before letting go again. He took a clean rag from his pocket and pressed it to his eyes.
‘Stella,’ he said, ‘promise me you won’t get involved with the partisans. It’s enough that we have to worry about your brother. Promise me.’
‘I promise I won’t get involved,’ I said. And it wasn’t a lie, technically, because I was already involved. I’d been part of Berta’s network for months by that stage.
‘Good,’ my father said. For a moment he looked as if he were going to say something else – as if he were looking for the words – but then he cleared his throat and repeated: ‘Good.’ He got to his feet and went to the stove, moving a little painfully as he always did in the mornings. Back in the 1920s, my mother once told me, he had refused to fix the car of a local Fascist leader. The Fascist and his henchmen had shattered both his kneecaps. My father never told that story, or not in my hearing.
‘I’ll make the coffee,’ I said. ‘I have time before school.’
He was already spooning the chicory powder – nasty stuff – into the coffee pot. ‘I’m making it. And you’re not going to school.’
Now I was really alarmed. My father never made anything for me, and he never let me have a day off unless I was very sick. And I had to go to school, because I was supposed to drop something off on my way there. I often managed my work that way. Since I was clever and wanted to be a teacher, my parents allowed me to keep studying even though the nearest high school was at Castelmedici, twenty minutes or so along the train line towards Florence. And since I was small and plain and looked young for fourteen, and I took the same train at the same time six days a week, I could smuggle all kinds of useful stuff without attracting the attention of either the Fascists or the Germans. Or my parents, for that matter.
‘Papà, what’s wrong?’ I asked. ‘Please tell me. Is Mamma sick? Is that it?’
My father shook his head. He was staring at the coffee pot, watching it as it started to hiss and bubble. I know now that he was fighting with himself, caught between telling me what he had heard – and perhaps even seen – and keeping it from me, keeping me innocent for as long as he could. ‘There are Germans at the station,’ he said at last. ‘More than usual, and they’re checking everyone.’
‘But that’s all right,’ I said, though my heart was beating fast. ‘I don’t have anything to hide.’
‘I still don’t like it.’ His voice was grim. ‘I don’t like to send you there alone.’
‘Then get Achille to walk with me, or Enzo. Please, Papà. I have to hand in a Latin composition, a really important one. I’ve been working on it for days. Please.’
My father grunted to himself. He poured out a cup of chicory and put it in front of me with a piece of bread. ‘I suppose Enzo could take you along, if you absolutely must go,’ he said. ‘He’s working today.’
I was relieved, though I didn’t dare show it. Enzo was a friend of my brother Achille, and he helped out at the garage whenever there was spare work to be done. Both boys were ardent communists, although – unlike my brother – Enzo had the good sense to keep his clandestine work a secret from my father. Papà thought he was a good influence. I thought he was wonderful; but, more to the point, I knew he had my orders for that day’s run. How simple it would be, how much easier if we could do the handover somewhere quiet, well away from the garage and my father’s tiresome vigilance.
‘And if he sees me on to the train and meets me when I come back, then there’s really nothing to worry about,’ I went on. ‘Honestly, Papà, I’ll be quite all right. You’ll see.’ I knew that I was on the point of being insolent, that I had already pushed my father much harder than he would usually permit, but he didn’t seem to notice. ‘Please,’ I said again.
For a long moment he seemed sunk in thought, and then he nodded, just once. ‘Very well. Finish your breakfast, and I’ll go across the road and tell Enzo to get ready.’ He went out before I could thank him, his hands in his pockets, defeated.
When I went out into the cold hazy morning, Enzo was waiting for me at the gate. He looked serious, but I didn’t think anything of it because Enzo was always serious. His father had died in an accident before the war and he’d lost his mother recently, too, when a stray bomb destroyed the factory where she worked just outside Castelmedici. Enzo’s parents had moved to Romituzzo when they were newly married, and they had no family in the area. So he had been taken in by the Frati family, who lived in the next street to us on the very outskirts of town. It made perfect sense for him to live there because he was practically part of their household already. Sandro Frati, Achille and Enzo had ganged up together on their first ever day at the local school and now, at fifteen, they were still the best of mates.
‘Ciao, Stellina,’ Enzo said, and kissed me on each cheek. It was the most innocent thing in the world, but I still remember how it thrilled me. ‘Come on – let’s get you to the station.’
‘And make sure she gets on the train,’ Achille’s voice rang out. He was standing in the garage forecourt in his greasy overalls, his cap pulled down over his curly black hair and a thick woollen scarf around his neck. ‘Don’t just leave her there and piss off.’
Enzo rolled his eyes. ‘Ma dai!’
We set off together along the road towards the station. As soon as we were out of sight of the garage, Enzo pulled me into a narrow side alley. He took hold of my shoulders and looked at me with that serious expression of his. For just a second, I thought he was going to kiss me for real.
