My Brother Raul
Sometimes I think about the sad period of the war 1943/1945.
Before the arrival of the Allies, there were many German troops in our Apennines.
The Germans marched armed and in formation through the streets of Porretta Terme, singing military songs loudly.
Today my memory has returned to those years: I think it was in the spring/summer of 1944, when in the cellar of the house in Gaggio, after we had fled from Bologna, there were hidden: my father, a militarized railway worker from Bologna, my only brother Raul, a deserter from the Railway Police in which he had to enlist because otherwise they would have shot my father or he would have had to join the Black Brigades, or the alternative was to end up in a concentration camp in Germany, two of my cousins Gino Zuccarini and Scopi Luigi, draft dodgers; a neighbor of ours, Mr. Silvio Barzini, who at first had been captured by the Germans and forcibly enlisted in the TODT to dig anti-tank ditches and concrete gun emplacements on the borders of the province of Pistoia, all to stop the advancement of the Allies, but then escaped from the TODT and returned to Gaggio.
My brother was initially assigned to the Railway Police in Bologna, but one evening with one of his superiors, a brigadier, he noticed that at the San Donato freight yard two German soldiers were about to break into the door of a freight car full of sugar.
The brigadier - after futilely giving the order to stop - fired with the "Glisenti" drum pistol but missed the Germans. So he asked my brother to shoot with the "Carcano" 91/38 rifle, which had a 6-round magazine and an iron rod acting as a bayonet, foldable towards the rifle barrel.
The two Germans fled through the gap between one car and the other.
The shots hit partly the right edge of the first freight car and the rest on the left edge of the neighboring freight car.
As a precaution and to avoid German reprisals, my brother was transferred to Porretta Terme, still in the Railway Police.
In the square of Porretta there was and still is the jewelry store Pranzini.
One day some residents of Porretta presented themselves at the Railway Police station, the only police force present, as the Royal Carabinieri had been deported to Germany, saying that a German truck was in front of the jewelry store, and the soldiers had connected the handle of the shutter with the front bumper of the truck with a chain.
With violent pulls they were trying to break open the shutter.
The non-commissioned officer ordered my brother and another policeman to go see what was happening.
The two young men arrived in the nearby square and ordered the Germans to leave.
The response was "DIAMONDS".
So the two young men, with their rifles at the ready, opened fire on the truck.
The Germans fled, and the two cowards returned to the barracks.
Their commander asked what had happened, and the two recounted what they had done.
At this point, the non-commissioned officer-commander began to curse and shout in despair: You shot at the Germans! Are you crazy! Now they will come here and shoot us or take us to Germany. Both of you disappear immediately, I don't want to see you anymore.
And so they were expelled. However, before leaving, the two filled two backpacks each with ammunition, hand grenades, etc., took two MAB submachine guns (Beretta Automatic Rifle) and fled towards Montefiorino.
When they arrived there, my brother decided to return to our family in our house in Gaggio, while the other policeman, having family and relatives in the deep South of Italy, stayed with the partisans of the Republic of Montefiorino.
Around two or three in the morning, we heard knocking on the door of the house: it was my brother Raul.
He was hidden in our underground cellar, accessed through a hatch in the house floor made of long wooden planks.
Many times the Germans had entered our house, walked on the floor with boots with iron-rimmed heels.
None of them had ever noticed that the floor "sounded hollow".
Once a German, the last in a long line, entered our house, bent down to the floor and with his hand cleaned a stretch of the floor where a certain amount of sticks had been thrown and which was near the camouflaged hatch.
I was there, at that moment I knew that my brother, holding the "Glisenti" (a drum revolver with 6 large bullets and a round cylindrical wooden handle, with a metal ring at the end), was waiting for the German, if he had discovered the existence of a hatch, to lift it.
We knew what the other German soldiers would do.
In the house we had and still have a large painting of St. Anthony of Padua.
Maybe He knows why the German did not notice anything.
During the first months of 1944 and until about the end of September 1944, I was tasked with staying outside and walking around our house. In my pocket, I kept a handful of wheat or barley grains.
The agreement with the neighboring farmers was that they should not feed their chickens. When I saw a German patrol approaching from a distance, I had to call the chickens loudly, with the classic "...PEEP, PEEP, PEEP..." I threw some grain on the ground and the chickens ran.
But also running to hide were the men living nearby.
My "...PEEP, PEEP, PEEP..." was also picked up and repeated by other boys in the nearby yards.
In mountain houses, it was customary to keep photos of living or deceased family members behind the glass of furniture or cabinets.
The Germans entered our house, went upstairs, and with their hands felt if the mattress was still warm under the sheets.
They counted how many beds there were, how many of us were there, my mother and I, how many photos of men were behind the glass of the furniture and then they yelled threateningly in German that the photos were of men, who were partisans for them.
I had never studied the German language, but I confidently replied in German "Mensch arbeiten in Bologna fur Deutscher Kameraden", meaning that the men were working in Bologna for the German comrades.
One afternoon in late autumn 1943 or early 1944, my brother Raul and my cousin Luigi Scopi, tired of being hidden and confined in our underground cellar, decided to see if the sky still existed.
Along with them, I went to our garden and started throwing rocks at the branches of a large walnut tree.
The walnuts fell, but on the nearby road, the rocks also fell with a loud noise.
The unfortunate thing was that at the top of the road (via Luigi Tanari) there was a German sentry who, hearing the falling rocks and, instead of minding his own business, cautiously began to descend towards us.
At the sight of the soldier, my brother and my cousin hid inside a small wooden hut, functioning as an outdoor toilet.
At that time, that's how it was used.
But the German who had seen them, started shouting who knows what in his language, and was on the verge of shooting because the two didn't have the courage to come out.
I watched everything, terrified.
At that point, I heard the sound of other boots coming down the road towards us.
I thought that if another German soldier arrived, it was the end.
Instead, those boots held the feet of an old, dear family friend Mr. Luigi Bartoloni, father of a Carabiniere, who immediately realizing the situation, called out in the Gaggio dialect for the two frightened ones to come out immediately, pick up the fallen walnuts, and offer them to the German.
The soldier, whom I will never forget, not very tall, chubby, surely over 50 years old, who probably saw those young men as his own sons forced to fight in a war they perhaps didn't agree with, did not accept the offer of the walnuts, looked around, lowered his gun and without saying a word, walked back up the road and left.
It is needless to say that my brother and cousin did not feel like going outside for some time.
For my part, fear had paralyzed me.