“Mine has always been a family of fighters.”
A book necessary for the collective memory. An isthmus of land, submerged by the ocean of ingratitude, returned visible after too many years, which connects the memory of those who sacrificed their youth, and even their lives, to those who enjoy the fruits of that sacrifice.
The role of women during the civil war of 1943-1945 in Italy was soon forgotten, sometimes not even acknowledged, although honoring it means respecting ourselves, our mothers, our grandmothers and great-grandmothers. Those who with their actions have given us life twice. In fact we don’t think it’s a coincidence that the author herself has dedicated two chapters to this theme: Shut Up and Good and Rhetoric.
In the majority of cases, women were couriers, employed in delivering messages and listeners, a role no less important than those who used firearms, as they were complementary.
A prominent support therefore for partisan action, of which the cost to be paid once arrested would have been torture, violence, rapes, or hopeless journeys to the Ravensbrück camp. If they weren’t soldiers, who voluntarily took the field, claiming a key role for women in the conflict, then who?
All the stories of these women have been expertly collected by the author, with an accurate historical work. Simple and direct tone, leaving little to the feelings, and focused on reporting the facts. Story interspersed with an excellent choice of photographs of the time, selected together with the historian Barbara Berruti.
Women who saw in deserted soldiers and partisans not only those men who would have left them widows, but the children some of them would never have had, in need of being hidden and fed and cheered up, to play their part in history after the armistice of 8 September 1943.
A book that we would like to recommend to today’s young people, to understand what yesterday’s young people had to face, and to keep their memory alive, the first element of a nation.
_____________________________________________________________________________________________________
Benedetta Tobagi, The resistance of women, Einaudi, Torino, 2022