Letters from the women of the last resistance messages European revolutionaries

The messages contained in Carrying Our Hearts are messages from resistant women. Letters from Women on Death Row in the European ResistanceEdited by Chiara Meyer Colombo, Giovanni Barella, Ada Perla. Foreword by Tamara Ferretti, 4 punt ed., p. 128, 13.30 euros). The last thing they wrote after they were sentenced to death for participating in the partisan struggle. Letters from Italy and from ten other European countries, some of which are no longer there: from Austria to Czechoslovakia, passing, among others, Yugoslavia, Belgium and the Soviet Union. The final letters have been collected into a short but condensed volume that gives us first-hand testimony of the last days and final hours of the lives of mothers, sisters, wives, girlfriends, and daughters.

It’s messages The authors take advantage of the little time left before the execution to say goodbye to their parents, children, and life partners, and ask forgiveness for the pain they have caused. Both poignant and proud messages, expressing firmness, and the certainty of making a risky but correct decision. “I acted according to my principles. It is not a sad death when one receives such consolation. I think I have always acted with dignity,” reads one of his books, written by a Belgian defendant.

In none of the documents copied into the book is there any trace of rethinking or regretting the choice made; Instead, there is an affirmation of love of life and pride rather than solace in sacrificing it for the cause of freedom: “I died to testify that one can madly love life and at the same time accept a necessary death,” writes another one.

Love life, sorry to leave it, take time off from loved ones and above all to give them pain. Sorry, but also courage and dignity, which are also constant in these letters. Women were captured by the Gestapo, possibly for espionage, confinement, prolonged interrogation, and torture. Women who were not even by the most outrageous means succeeded in getting people talking and denouncing comrades in the struggle. They paid dearly for this, preserving to the end a connection with life, real, full of meaning and passion. Today, March 26, 1943, at half past six in the evening, two days after completing the twenty-second year of my life, I will take my last breath. However, I will breathe until the last moment. live and believe I have always had the courage to live, and I will not lose it, not even face to face with what in the language of men is called death.”

It’s an invitation Not despondency, but as in all other letters, it is also a request for those who still remember. Remember Mary, Eva, Fernandy, Herta, Ludmila, Sarah, Hilda, Dmitra, Paula (Mirka), Ivanka, Esther, Olga, Irina and the others. In addition to those whose names we do not know. In addition to the letters, the book also contains messages on the walls of the dungeons in which the resisters were imprisoned; Some of them, written in the blood of those who have just been “interrogated” by the thugs of the Nazi secret police, are real butchers. The walls that tell of the last moments of life in the prisons of the former Soviet Union, in the prison of Fresnes, in Paris and in the cells of the Gestapo headquarters, in Warsaw where we read among the various letters: “Of our torments, of our sufferings, a better Poland. People’s Poland.”

the number The testimonies in the volume were provided by Cetimia Spiccino, who was deported to Auschwitz after a tour of the Rome Ghetto and a concentration camp survivor. Setemia passed away in her hometown in the year 2000 and until the very last moment she reached out to the new generations to keep the memory alive, the memory of the victims of the horrors of the past and present, those who committed themselves and those who are still committing themselves to fight them. And they have only one request: “Carry us in your heart!”