Carla Ferro (1927-2024)

Carla Ferro was born in Portovenere (in the province of La Spezia) on October 12, 1927, but spent most of her childhood in Sampierdarena (Genoa), where her family moved to.

Although she belonged to that generation of young people who grew up under Fascism – her Italian teacher “was a fanatical Fascist who made us buy the newspaper every morning to cut out pictures of the fallen soldiers, paste them in our notebooks and make laurel frames around them!” -, to this day she says that an anti-fascist consciousness was always present, although not in a markedly political way.

In the family, “of course, politics were never discussed, however, there were behaviors of my mother and statements of my father that gave an idea of how they thought. Then I learned my father was a socialist…”. In the family context, the mother figure assumed an important role, demonstrating on several occasions that she was a woman of firm principles: Ferro recalls that time when her mother railed against Mussolini when the French fleet bombarded the port of Genoa, or the “you’re not going” sentence addressed to her brother Pietro, when faced with the decision of whether or not to join the Salò Republic’s call for enrollment, determining his immediate state of military service evasion. Moreover the brother, who in 1943 had been called up as a soldier and was sent to Sicily at the time of the Allied landings, after September 8 [Italian armistice with Allied Forces] had managed to sail up the Peninsula and return to Campo Ligure (province of Genoa), where the family had been displaced to. “To say how the Italian army was set up: he [Pietro Ferro] was qualified as a driver and not only did he not have a license, but he never even drove a car in his life”. Ferro recalls her brother’s camouflage operations to conceal him from the eyes of the fascist and Nazi authorities, “my brother fortunately did not show his age, in fact my mother made him a pair of shorts”. “A bank was headquartered in our building and the janitor (an anti-fascist and our friend) residing on the premises of the bank often invited my father to his home to listen to Radio London [radio broadcasts of the BBC, starting from 27 September 1938, aimed at the populations of German-dominated continental Europe]. It was thanks to this person that my brother’s identity card could be forged, using the stamps of the bank. However, when there was a roundup by the Germans, he was hidden as precaution in the attic of the building, under the heating wood stored there”.

Together, brother, sister and a group of displaced friends got in touch with the resistance through the local National Liberation Committee, “we were already hearing about the Gap [Patriotic Action Groups] and the partisans […]. We let them know that we were available, so they approached us and gave us some leaflets to distribute, to leave around in doorways”. “At that moment we were beginning to become aware that we were doing something and began to collaborate”.

But the need to contribute more arised, and Pietro Ferro got the idea of forming an amateur dramatic society, which to cover they called by the term of fascist tradition “Youth”, which after the war would become “Aurora di libertà – Freedom dawn”: “At that time I had not done any action with the Resistance and we were performing comedies in Campo Ligure. However, it was because of this that we began: the earnings officially were going to the Red Cross while we were giving them to a person in Campo Ligure in favor of the partisans. This person disappeared at some point, and we got a little scared”. His name was Piero Rossi, “we thought he had gone up into the mountains, I learned only sixty years later that he had been captured and taken to Mauthausen, where he then died”.

Ferro recalls the roundup in the days leading up to the Benedicta massacre: “Of course because of a spy, they manage to find all the ambushers. That morning they broke into my house […] and took my brother to take him away. My brother thought it was for the money from the plays and the manifestos. When he went out the door and saw that it was a roundup, he gave a sigh of relief, because otherwise it would have been tragic. And where are all these young people taken to? To the station, in a cattle car. Of course the family members, especially the mothers, were all clinging to the train. But this roundup would last seven days”. Women, as in many other similar situations, were protagonists of a form of civil resistance, tried directly with their bodies to intervene to oppose Nazi and Fascist orders. Ferro continues the narration of the events, with a half-smile: “So I, there I started…as they took my brother I went to the partisan with whom we were collaborating and I said […] ‘you have to free my brother or else I will denounce you all’ he goes ‘be calm, look: […] deliver this piece of paper to the German officer’. I straddled the bicycle, crying, pedaling”. And again in another interview, “I think I set off in my nightshirt with my coat over it […], I met this German and he gave me a card that said that my brother was part of the Todt organization”. Thanks to this document and her elementary knowledge of German, she was able to get her brother off that train: “When my brother got off the train my mother and I hugged him but we felt a shame towards the others, that we took him away”. “We felt a great shame on ourselves, in accompanying him away from there, with all the people looking at us… Because he was the only one who did not leave, all the others ended up in the concentration camp”. The shame is that of not being able to free the other men, of having acted – in spite of themselves – only on behalf of their loved one with the knowledge that for the others there would be no hope. In the following days for the surrounding territory of the Ligurian Apennines, the situation worsened further when Nazi units, assisted by fascist companies, encircled the area in which the two partisan brigades, the Autonomous Alessandria Brigade and the 3rd Liguria Brigade, were operating. After some fighting, Nazi and Fascist troops managed to capture many partisans, who were shot and buried in a mass grave. The event went down in history as the Benedicta massacre.

It were these last two events, the fear for her brother during the roundup and the Benedicta massacre, that convinced her that she needed to become more active in the Resistance, “I want to do something, because I can’t take it anymore”. Therefore she began to be a courier girl carrying small arms from Campo Ligure and Rossiglione, acting as a liaison with the workers employed in the displaced optics industrial plant in the village. She carried out this activity unbeknownst to the rest of the family, even her brother, and to conceal her movements she lied by saying she had heard about distributions of goods and food.

Hunger, fear and desire for peace emerge strongly in Ferro’s recollections: “You may ask if I was afraid. You were afraid because of what you were doing, but there was such a great desire for the war to end, because I suffered a lot of hunger, a lot of starvation, because my brother did not have the fascist badge […]. Then the bombing we had had before, the starvation…”. That of hunger, of the “empty stomach at that time may seem an irrelevant fact compared to everything else, yet it was no small problem”: “I remember that with some women I used to go for potatoes all the way to the village of Cantalupo, and despite my slender build as a sixteen-year-old I managed to carry thirty kilos. It was all energy spent without adequate nutrition, so it happened one day that I found myself walking along the side of a road that bordered rows of grapes. The bunches were so covered with dust that I could not distinguish whether they were white or black grapes. As my companions continued their walk toward the station, I stopped and began picking fistfuls of dusty grapes that I devoured greedily. I couldn’t stop, I couldn’t swallow the grapes swelling my cheeks in time that I was already shoving another handful into my mouth. Juice, berries and dust eventually formed a paste so thick that it clogged my airways, and I felt hopelessly choked. There was no water nearby, and I realized that even air was beginning to run out of my lungs, I thought with dread that I was going to die. Fortunately, I was seized by an attack of coughing and gagging that forced me to empty my throat and mouth and allowed me to clear my larynx to breathe again. To this day, if I have to eat grapes, I treat them with a certain diffidence.

I was able to be satiated when my mother baked a mixture of bran and polenta”.

In one of the testimonies given in recent years Ferro recalls that at the time there was another feeling, which only a prolonged state of war, pain, deprivation and loss can bring with it: hatred. “It got to the point that when one knew that a German died one would say ‘thank goodness one less’, it seems inconceivable today that one could think of this though, eh, it had come to this”.

In continuity with what has been generally found in historiography regarding women’s participation in the Resistance, Ferro was as much aware of the danger of her activity as she took for granted the subalternity and lesser value assumed by her role with respect to the struggle in arms: “This was my task, I didn’t do a great thing then, eh… because let’s be clear: in front of those who died […] all right, it could have gone wrong for me, but it’s not like I did who knows what”. Such consideration of oneself and one’s actions – now fortunately reevaluated in light of studies that especially from the 1970s onward have recognized the importance of the unarmed struggle, without which the Resistance could not in fact have existed in such qualitative and quantitative ways – is probably related to the consequent failure to apply for any partisan qualification in the postwar period.

Some episodes are recalled years later with a certain satisfying hilarity, but they conceal courageous behavior, a boldness in some ways unconscious. “The experiences I lived through at the time and the scenario of the war that made everything precarious were magnified in my head as a girl little more than a teenager, and with the constant thought of any tragedy that could have occurred at any moment, it made me feel attached to life as never before. And the fear that I myself or any of my loved ones might be in danger or at any rate be harmed, made my actions exasperated, taken to the limit of recklessness”.

“There are funny episodes in which I made fun of both the Germans and the fascists. The Germans came to Campo Ligure one day and said that everyone must present radios to be taken to school [to be seized because radio London was being listened to]. […] I saw a closet and stuck the radio inside. The next day I went there, got the radio and took it to my father and my father said: ‘but I destroyed it inside, all of it! What did you do?’ [laughs]”. Or that time when the gamble was greater, when after the fascists had commandeered her brother’s bicycle, Ferro decided to go to the barracks, “I went in with the fascist salute and said, ‘They stole my bicycle, but I know you found it, I came to get it back’”.

Ferro was also the protagonist of another important moment in the territory’s resistance: “We went to the house of a girl who had a typewriter and plotted out the surrender to the Germans who were at the station and had taken refuge at the station with an armed train; I wrote the surrender slip for them in German, telling them that they were surrounded by partisans”. The Germans refused to surrender to the partisans, but still decided to flee.