Written by Teresa Catinella
Dedicated to God
Ida D’Este was born in Venice on February 10, 1917, to Giuseppe D’Este, head physician at the Civil Hospital and a man of liberal tradition, and Gisella Turkovich, of Julian origin. Ida D’Este grew up in an educated family of wealthy social class, along with her other two siblings. She was educated at Catholic schools and at the age of fifteen decided to make a vow of complete dedication to God, a fundamental act in her life and for her spiritual path that she would never deny.
With respect to her higher education and her desire to study medicine, D’Este had to face opposition from her family, which forced her on a path toward teaching, first with a diploma from the magistral institute and then with a degree in Modern Languages and Literatures at Ca’ Foscari University in Venice, obtained in 1941. During her university years she became active in the Italian Catholic University Federation (Fuci), in a context in which relations between Fascism and the Catholic Church, and consequently also between grassroot associations such as the university Guf and Fuci respectively, were beginning to be, even if not always explicitly, strained.
Her first steps in the resistance movement
The events of September 8, 1943 [Italian armistice with Allies] caught up with her while she was working in secondary schools as a French teacher, and together with her friends from Catholic Action she chose to provide relief to Italian soldiers who had been taken as prisoners by the Nazis in ships in the port of Venice. Such activities were instinctive and immediate, dictated by those feelings of Catholic humanitarianism and moved by ideals of freedom and homeland different from those of fascism. Her memoir of the partisan period, encapsulated in the volume “Cross on My Back,” begins with this very act of assistance that she and other women put into practice, bringing food to prisoners screaming from the portholes of ships: “The Germans promised us not to shoot […]. There is something screaming in our hearts. This ship of humiliated and suffering Italians is now our Homeland. It rains down from above mess tins that we quickly fill. Our faces drip with tears and bean soup”.
And so Ida D’Este introduced herself to the Resistance movement, first with an activity based on propaganda and assistance, later by making contact with the Veneto regional CLN [National Liberation Committee], thanks to a meeting with some regional members of the Action Party. “One has to work. The first weeks pass interwoven with little things. We rescue the first stragglers who escaped from sealed trains. We print and spread propaganda leaflets. At times we flower the tomb and monument of Manin. But this is not enough for our hunger for action. Don’t Italian antifascists organize themselves yet? Do they still limit their activities to jokes whispered in secret or writings in the latrines of taverns, becoming brave because no one sees them? No, patriots organize themselves. I feel that the homeland still exists, at least in the hearts of those who love it, and I search desperately and in vain for a link. I finally find a link in the chain. It is Gastone, born Giancarlo Tonolo, Meneghetti’s courageous collaborator. Now that I am working in earnest, life has another light. A pinch of risk and carbon air gives it that new youthfulness that I will never find again”.
Crucial to her involvement in the Resistance was her meeting with Professor Giovanni Ponti, a professor of Greek and Latin languages at a high school in Venice and a member of the CLN. With these words she will remember him years later: “Giovanni Ponti, hero without rhetoric, politician without demagogy, partisan without hate, party man without intolerance. Modern in the face of every novelty, but centered in the unchanging principles that know no fads. Heroism, after all, is nothing but constant consistency to principles, an impossibility to yield to compromise. And this was Giovanni Ponti’s heroism: simple, humble, spontaneous as breathing”. The professor was a very important figure in the education of D’Este and other women, to whom, as Anna Sonego wrote in her poem in Venetian, he taught “robe nove: democrassia e libertà” [new things: democracy and freedom].
Giovanna
Ida D’Este became a courier girl liaison between the regional CLN and the provincial ones, and took the battle name “Giovanna” under which she was recognized as a fighting partisan after the war: “A courier girl never asks for more than she needs to know. She lives the fragment of her activity, hooks up threads and goes on happily”. She went into hiding after having her teaching assignment revoked. In her testimonies about the “marvelous period”, D’Este tried to recount the non-subservient role of women: “How many services in clandestine life could be done only by women: because they were less suspected and in certain things more skillful and casual […] Without knowing or claiming to be heroines, many lost their lives. Being a courier, being a “lookout,” often acting as a screen for the man. […] Those who speak of the weaker sex, of chattering women, have not known these patriots of the last Italian Risorgimento!”.
D’Este’s activity increased in equal measure to the security precautions: “I can no longer stay in my house, I know that the fascists are beginning to keep an eye on me, and I am seeking lodging for the first time, but not for the last at this time”. Despite the dangers involved in harboring those wanted by the police, Ida D’Este found shelter with a lady who collaborated with the Resistance, Mrs. Bertolini: “She had already been working for the partisans for some time, helping them, advising them, directing them. Sometimes she gathers at her home some of the most distinguished ladies of the city to prepare flags and tricolor rosettes for when the time comes. It is an old-time scene that smacks of romance and young Italy. I try my hand at it too, but to no avail, with the needle I have never been friendly. ‘She is not made for a drawing room conspiracy’ – she tells me”. Despite the stalking, Mrs. Bertolini “remained at her post and continued her activity with her calm and serene confidence that she would not lose even later, in the long months of her imprisonment in Santa Maria Maggiore”.
As the war and Resistance activity proceeded, arrests multiplied, as did the number of those wanted by the Fascist police and the stalking at the expense of courier girls. It therefore became necessary for Ida D’Este, together with Professor Ponti and family, to move to Padua. Unfortunately, however, they were unable to avoid arrest, which would take place on January 7, 1945, along with other members and leaders of the Veneto CLN. They were locked up for more than a month in Palazzo Giusti, used by the fascist Charity Band as a place of detention and torture. Here Ida D’Este suffered humiliation and violence: “Never before have I hated to be a woman.” The Carità Band interspersed interrogations, threats, slaps and electric shocks in order to “get her to talk” and obtain information about the Resistance: “Shut up I look at them bewildered, like madmen suddenly enraged, while I am amazed and offended by the insults”. D’Este maintained her demeanor, even when they made her suffer the humiliation of torture and denudation. “I cannot believe such enormity […]. They will not go that far. In any case anything but betrayal. […] ‘Why don’t you beat me? Give me the shakes instead.’ I wanted to barter, but they understood the weak. […] I am ashamed, they mock me. Every smallness hurts equally, despite the horror of the situation […]. It’s a good thing I had a very thorough toilette this morning, all the underwear is freshly laundered. The silliest, most futile thoughts come to my mind”.
She was, therefore, deported to the Bolzano internment camp, where she was forced to work both as a factory worker and as a cleaner in the camp. From captivity, she emerged only after liberation with a lung infection, which cost her a stay in a sanatorium.
“A new light”
After the war she immediately became active in the ranks of the Christian Democratic Party (DC): in January 1946 she became provincial vice-president of the party and then a delegate together with Tina Anselmi to the National Congress for the Republican motion. She also took part in the electoral rounds; in March 1946 she was elected city councilwoman in Venice, and in the national elections she was the first of those not elected to the Chamber of Deputies (where she entered in 1953). She was re-elected as a deputy and participated in the committees on education and fine arts, labor and social security, and worked on the bill to safeguard the lagoon and monumental character of Venice. She was among the founders of the Italian Committee for the Moral and Social Defense of Women (Cidd) and a supporter of the congresswoman Merlin law against prostitution. For the rest of her life, after leaving politics due to being isolated in the party after 1958, in addition to resuming teaching, she did her best to promote facilities for the support of former prostitutes and to take in all women in need. In 1963 she founded the secular institute of the Missionaries of Charity, and served as board member of the city’s geriatric hospital, where she died in 1976.
She always recalled the Resistance period as a time when, despite the atrocities of the war, a space of freedom was created: “Today I have all the sunshine, all the freedom for myself and I am not happy… I lost the patent of happiness, maybe it stayed up there in that cell, maybe I forgot it later at block F.” Resistance activity was driven by “an idea more intuited and loved than understood” of freedom, it was “a new light”, “a new world of peace and democracy that until then had been denied us”.
Sources
Bibliography
Ida D’Este, Croce sulla schiena, Cierre edizioni, 2018
Luisa Bellina, Ida e le sue sorelle: ragazze cattoliche nella resistenza veneta, in (a cura di) M.T. Sega, Eravamo fatte di stoffa buona. Donne e Resistenza in Veneto, Nuovadimensione, Venezia 2008
http://www.resistenzeveneto.it/Profili_partigiane_materiali/profilo_Ida_D_Este.pdf
https://www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/giovanni-ponti_%28Dizionario-Biografico%29/
https://www.enciclopediadelledonne.it/biografie/tina-anselmi/
https://legislature.camera.it/chiosco.asp?content=deputati/legislatureprecedenti/leg02/framedeputato.asp?Deputato=d17350&position=II%20Legislatura%20/%20I%20gruppi%20parlamentari