Memories of Resistance 2
27 April 1945
What did I think on that day? I went back in my thoughts to July 25, ’43, and to that September 8, when down there I decided to become a partisan, against Nazifascism and those who supported it. That time it was me—along with my fellow soldiers—who made an important decision, finally and freely, on our own.
Let’s be honest: on that day we did not think about the grand things that many today claim they were thinking at that moment. We looked at each other, calm and silent, with a shy smile of inner joy—we of the Italian Partisan Division “Garibaldi,” who had fought together for a full eighteen months with Tito’s partisans, with Garibaldi as our guide and emblem. A modest smile, because we were aware that we survivors, in the presence of the Fallen, had done very little. We left it to others—those of the last hour—the “happiness” of shouting about the great event of Lib-er-a-tion…!
Perhaps we, who had been partisans in someone else’s land, among peoples in many ways different from our own—even if we didn’t proclaim it loudly to the winds—felt a little different from the partisans at home, aware of carrying a very different experience. Yet we had learned that peoples want the same thing: peace and individual and national freedom; and that no ordinary person, unless driven by those who “are always right,” thinks of taking freedom away from other peoples.
We thought of our homes, of our loved ones, hoping to find them all again… Can I say what we did NOT think? Here it is: we did NOT think that after more than thirty years, schools would not speak about the Resistance, with a serious program of study to analyze all the complex causes that led so many peoples to ruin. Nor did we think that—while we were still alive—insidious attempts could take hold among so many people to belittle the values of the Resistance, or that the hard-won freedom would be misused at so many levels.
STEFANO GESTRO, Officer of the Garibaldi Partisan Division in former Yugoslavia.
Source: Patria Indipendente