Resistance Eyes EN

Carlo Travaglini was German on his mother’s side, and was an independent partisan who managed to save numerous Italian soldiers through his skills as a forger.  

Carlo Travaglini was born in Dortmund in November 1905 where his father was serving as a conductor of a military symphony orchestra. Carlo left the family at the age of eighteen and worked various jobs to maintain himself while studying literature at university.  

In 1935 Carlo ran into trouble with the Nazi regime after he wrote a novel in which he stated that “a poor honest Jew is worth exactly as much as a poor honest Christian”. Carlo was arrested in 1936 and sentenced to four months in a concentration camp by a special tribunal. After serving his sentence he was expelled from the Reich as an “unwanted foreigner”. He then moved to Italy where he had to fulfil his military service obligations and was assigned to the Alpini corps. 

Eventually Carlo found a job as a technician in the Magneti Marelli factory in Milan. After the German occupation of northern Italy on 8 September 1943, the fate of the scattered Italian military soldiers was dramatic and hundreds of thousands were deported to Germany. One day Carlo noticed some women in front of the Hotel Titanus which was occupied by the Nazi command looking for news about their husbands. Carlo passed himself off as a German and entered the hotel to ask the Nazi soldiers for information. From this moment on, Travaglini displayed incredible skills as a forger and showed an uncommon ability to deceive people.  

Travaglini managed to convince the Nazis that it was better to have soldiers work in Italian factories instead of deporting them and created fake demands from the factories for manpower. Thanks to this risky activity, he was able to save many soldiers from deportation and bring back many more. Travagliani also stole stamps and produced false documents to support his activities and to allow Jews and Allied pilots to flee to Switzerland. On 30 June 1944, he was discovered by the Nazis but he managed to escape. He was sentenced to death but luckily he was never caught. Carlo joined the 89^th Garibaldi Alpi Grigne Brigade with whom he served until the end of the war. 

Alfredo Malgeri was the commander of the Guardia di Finanza (Financial Guard) in Milan. He played an important role in the Italian resistance movement and the liberation of Milan.  

Alfredo Malgeri was born in Reggio Calabria on 14 August 1892. In 1912 joined the Guardia di Finanza (Financial Guard). He had a successful career with many prestigious jobs around Italy.  

In July 1942 Malgeri was assigned as commander of the Guardia di Finanza in Milan. After the Nazis occupied northern Italy the Guardia di Finanza was not disbanded like the other armed forces of the Italian government and Malgeri and his men remained in Milan.  

Malgeri managed to secretly make contacts with partisan commands and the Comitato di Liberazione Nazionale Alta Italia (National Liberation Committee of Upper Italy) and decided to help them. Under the command of Malgeri the Guardia di Finanza helped Italian and Allied soldiers who had escaped from prison camps and also allowed Jews to cross the border into Switzerland when they could. The organisation also protected partisans and Jews against round-ups and persecution. Malgeri would also organise fake actions against partisan bands in which he did not attack them but instead brought the money, weapons and information.  

In April 1945, Malgeri made arrangements with general Raffaele Cadorna of the Corpo Volontari della Libertà (Freedom Volunteer Corps) to support the partisans in a general insurrection. The Guardia di Finanza numbered less than 450 soldiers against an estimated presence of tens of thousands armed fascists.  

The local resistance leadership in Milan ordered Malgeri to take possession of the Prefecture of Milan and to seize several other important buildings and factories throughout the city. Malgeri and his men left their barracks to carry out the order. At 06:00 on 26 April, the Prefecture was taken over and at 08:00 Malgeri sounded the air-raid alarm three times to give the signal that Milan had been liberated. 

In 2007, Malgeri was posthumously awarded the Gold Medal for Valour of the Guardia di Finanza with the following motivation: “In an extremely difficult political-military situation […] he decisively and at great personal risk opposed the republican fascist government’s intentions to use the Guardia di Finanza against the clandestine expatriation of Jews and persecuted persons and in anti-guerrilla operations against the Resistance”. 

Validio Mantovani was a factory worker and a member of the Milanese Gruppi di Azione Patriottica (Patriotic Action Groups). He was executed by the Nazis for his role in the resistance alongside five other partisans in 1944.  

Validio Mantovani was born in Ariano Polesine in Veneto on 20 October 1914 into socialist family. After the rise of the fascist movement the family was faced with intimidation and violence. In 1924 the Mantovani family moved to Milan. Validio found a job in the Pirelli Sapsa factory and came into contact with the communist party which was popular in the industrial regions of northern Italy.  

After the German occupation of northern Italy in 1943 Validio became an important member of the Gruppi di Azione Patriottica (Patriotic Action Groups: GAP). The GAP carried out risky tasks such as attacks on enemy units and headquarters, and assassinations of German and Italian Social Republic officers, fascist leaders or spies.  

One of the first actions Validio took part in was an unsuccessful assassination attempt on Gino Gatti on 20 October 1943. Gatti was a captain of the Guardia Nazionale Repubblicana (Republican National Guard) and had a reputation for torturing partisans. Validio was then promoted to command the Gramsci detachment, a smaller group within the GAP, and took part in numerous actions in Milan, including the successful assassination attempt on Aldo Resega, a Milanese fascist official on 17 December 1943. Because of his actions, Validio was transferred to Genoa to serve as the deputy commander of the local GAP.  

On 26 July 1944 Validio was captured because of his alleged participation in a series of attacks in Genoa. He was sent to the San Vittore prison in Milan where his father, Rottilio, was also being held for his involvement with the resistance. On 31 July 1944, Validio, Rottilio and four other partisans, including a seventeen-year-old boy, were executed near Milan. In total, seven members of the Mantovani family were executed for their involvement with the resistance. 

Ferruccio Parri was a key figure of the Italian resistance movement. As the Deputy commander of the Volunteers of Freedom Corps, he played an important role in the liberation of Italy from Nazi-Fascism.  

Ferruccio Parri was born in Pinerolo on 29 January 1890. He graduated from the University of Turin with a degree in literature and afterwards began to work as a teacher. Parri was called up for service in the First World War in 1915. After the war he became politically active and began a career as a journalist and newspaper editor. 

The assassination of Giacomo Matteotti in 1924, an anti-fascist and socialist politician, marked the beginning of his militant anti-fascism. He left his job as a newspaper editor and dedicated himself to spreading the clandestine anti-fascist press. He also helped anti-fascists that were in danger from the fascist regime to flee abroad. In 1926 Parri was sentenced to ten months in prison and ​​​​​​​​three years in confinement for helping the socialist Filippo Turati escape to France. Despite all this, Parri managed to establish connections between the various clandestine anti-fascist groups in northern Italy.  

After 8 September 1943, Parri worked in parallel with the Italian communist movement to form the first armed resistance groups in Nazi occupied Northern Italy. Parri helped to smooth over the relations between the different anti-fascist political forces. In 1944 Parri became the deputy commander of the Corpo Volontari della Libertà (Freedom Volunteers Corps). The goal of this organisation was to coordinate the efforts of the various partisan groups active in Northern Italy.  

Parri was captured by the Nazis in January 1945. He was released in March after negotiations by the Allied Forces. After his release Parri formed an important link between the Allies and the various resistance movements during the last phase of the war.  

On 25 April 1945 Parri was appointed to lead the first post-war Italian government with the support of the majority of the political factions of liberated Italy. Parri also played an important role in safeguarding the memory of the Italian resistance. In 1949, he founded in Milan the National Institute for the History of the National Liberation Movement in Italy, today Istituto Nazionale Ferruccio Parri, with the aim of defending and preserving the heritage of the resistance. 

Enrichetta Alfieri was a nun who worked in the San Vittore prison. After the German occupation she helped the political prisoners and Jews incarcerated in the prison.

Maria Alfieri was born in Borgo Vercelli on 23 February 1891 into a Piedmontese peasant family. As a young girl, she joined a Sisters monastery under the name Enrichetta. She studied education and became a kindergarten teacher before a serious illness forced her to quit.

Enrichetta recovered from her disease and in 1923, she was assigned to serve in the San Vittore prison in Milan. Sister Enrichetta immediately created a dialogue with the female prisoners and instituted workshops, schools and nurseries for their children. She was in San Vittore at the outbreak of the Second World War and in August 1940 she was formally appointed as mother superior.

Due to the large-scale bombing of Milan, the prison was evacuated in August 1943 and prisoners and nuns were transferred to other prisons. After the Nazi occupation, the Nazis took control of San Vittore, which became a place of imprisonment for political opponents and Jews before they were deported.

In February 1944, the nuns were also transferred back to San Vittore. Sister Enrichetta and the other sisters began to secretly help the prisoners. The nuns had contacts with the Comitato di Liberazione Nazionale Alta Italia (Upper Italy National Liberation Committee, CLNAI) and helped to smuggle messages, money, food and other materials in and out of the prison.

On 23 September 1944 a clandestine message directed to Enrichetta was intercepted by the Nazis. They were already suspicious of the nuns’ activities and arrested Sister Enrichetta on charges of espionage on 23 September 1944. Enrichetta was taken to the cells of San Vittore and sentenced to death. The intervention of Cardinal Schuster managed to overturn the death sentence into a prison sentence. After the Liberation,. Enrichetta returned to duty at San Vittore.

Ada Buffulini was a doctor and anti-fascist. She was interned in the Nazi camp in Bolzano where she managed to set up a resistance movement.

Ada Buffulini was born in Trieste on 28 September 1912 into a well to do family. In 1930 she moved to Milan to study medicine at the university. It was here that Ada came into contact with life in the big city and she became involved in the anti-fascist movement.

In 1943, Ada met Lelio Basso, secretary of the Socialist Party, and from this moment her active involvement in politics and anti-fascism grew. Her activities mainly took place in the university environment. She distributed leaflets, translated documents, and attended meetings. She also edited an underground socialist newspaper for women.

In November 1943 she was forced to go into hiding: “From then on I had no home, no relatives, no work; I no longer even had a name […] So began that terrible and magnificent time, at times haunting like a nightmare, at times splendid like an epic; that time when everything was forgotten, of all that had formed my life up to then, to remember only one thing, the political passion for which I lived and for which I knew I could die every day”.

On 4 July 1944, she was caught by the fascists and taken to San Vittore prison in Milan. On 7 September 1944, she was deported to the Nazi camp in Bolzano together with other prisoners. Among them was Carlo Venegoni, a communist leader, whom Ada would marry after the war. Political prisoners were marked by overalls with a red triangle and prisoner number sown on to them. Ada thus became number 3795.

Because she was a doctor and spoke German, Ada was assigned to the camp infirmary. Inside the camp she managed to continue her resistance activities. She coordinated the resistance in the camp, kept in contact with a group outside the camp which aided the prisoners, kept them in contact with their families and sometimes organised escapes.

The SS-guards suspected that Ada played a role in the resistance movement in the camp and imprisoned her in the Cell Block from February 1945 until the liberation of the camp.

After the war, she returned to Milan where she continued her political commitment in the ranks of the Communist Party and where she dedicated herself to the memory of the resistance in the Bolzano camp by being a member of the Associazione Nazionale Ex Deportati Politici Dai Campi Nazisti (National Association of Former Political Deportees from Nazi Camps).

Piet Meerbug was a member of the resistance in Amsterdam. He was the leader of a resistance group that helped to save hundreds of Jewish children from deportation and provided them with hiding places.

When the Netherlands was occupied, Piet Meerburg had just started studying law in Amsterdam. During the first two years of the occupation, he simply studied, but gradually he also became involved with the resistance.

In July 1942, when the deportations of the Jews from the Netherlands began, a resistance group from Utrecht asked Piet if he could help to find hiding places for Jewish children. “Then I realised that this illegal work would give me a day job. I quit my studies completely.”

In Amsterdam, the Hollandse Schouwburg theatre was used as a deportation centre. Jewish children would stay in a nursery opposite the theatre before they were deported. The Jewish staff at the theatre and nursery smuggled hundreds of children away with the help of non-Jewish students, like Piet. He looked for hiding addresses, often in Friesland and Limburg, regions far from Amsterdam: “Babies were never a problem. But when it came to older boys with distinctly Jewish looks, that was a different story.”

A major obstacle was that parents didn’t want to hand over their children. Piet understood that. Who would just give their child away?” Walter Süskind was the linchpin. As a Jewish Council employee, he knew which parents wished their children to go into hiding.” Jewish nursery director Henriëtte Pimentel helped children to secretly escape through a smuggling route provided by the director of the adjacent school.

According to Piet, a special atmosphere developed among the young helpers: “The tension, fear and camaraderie. Sometimes this aroused strong feelings of love.”

After the war, Piet went to work for the Commission for War Children. Some 5,000 Jewish children survived the war in hiding, often in the homes of Christian foster families. Around 2,000 of these children lost both parents. A conflict emerged around them: should they stay with their Christian hosts or be raised by their Jewish relatives? Piet left the Commission because of this conflict.

Marga Grunberg was a 17-year old Jewish refugee from Germany. In the Netherlands she joined the resistance and distributed false papers, took people into hiding and helped to set up an escape route to France.

Because of anti-Semitism in Hitler Germany, Marga Grunberg fled to the Netherlands with her family in 1934. When the Netherlands was occupied in 1940, one anti-Jewish measure after another was introduced.

From 1941 Marga had to attend a separate Jewish school and as for all Jews a large ‘J’ was stamped in her personal identity card. From 1942 she had to wear a Star of David on her clothes. “In June 1942, the roundups and deportations began. As I was walking along the street close to home, a raiding van suddenly arrived to pick up Jews.” With help from a stranger Marga managed to escape. “But, from that anxious moment, I decided to adopt a new identity and dyed my hair blond.”

Through Piet Landweer, head of the Amsterdam Registry Office, she received a false identity card by reporting her card as lost. He issued her a new one without the required ‘J’. Marga also removed the Star of David from her clothes.

Piet and Marga began to work together. Piet Landweer provided false identity cards using the personal details of deceased Amsterdam residents. In the wake of an attack on the Amsterdam Registry Office by the resistance in March 1943, this became a bit easier: the chaos provided more opportunities to tweak documents. Marga’s job was to distribute forged papers, to find housing for people in hiding and provide them with ration coupons.

Marga went to live in Amsterdam with her mother and brother in the apartment above a Nazi sympathizer. “She saved our lives several times, without knowing it herself. When houses on our street were raided, for example, she opened the door and said that only pro-Nazis lived in her house. ‘In the lion’s den you are safest.’”In the apartment, Marga and her brother Manfred provided housing for people in hiding and organised an escape route to France.

Marga survived the war. Piet Landweer was arrested and executed along with five colleagues in the summer of 1944.

Johan Snoek helped people in hiding. When he and his family were driven from their home by the Battle of Arnhem in September 1944, they moved in with their aunts. Johan continued his resistance work and helped a British general cross the front, back to his troops.

Johan was almost 20 years old when the Netherlands was occupied. Gradually, the family became involved in the resistance. Johan came from a reformed protestant family and saw the war as a battle between good and evil. In his diary, he wrote of his resistance work: “You would lose your self-respect if you wouldn’t do it.” The family hid a Jewish child in their house, and Johan organised hiding places elsewhere. During the Battle of Arnhem, their house was in the middle of the front line. The family had to move in with their three aunts.

British general John Hackett had been badly wounded during the Battle of Arnhem and was trapped in the occupied part of the Netherlands. Hackett went into hiding with Johan and his family. It was not an easy situation, as there were major food shortages and the Snoek family were guests in their aunt’s house as well. But Hackett and the family got along well.

After Hackett recovered from his injuries, he became eager to return to his troops. In January 1945, Johan helped him reach De Biesbosch, a nature area with many streams and swamps that provided an escape route to the liberated part of the Netherlands. They set out by bicycle, Hackett wearing a badge that meant ‘Hearing Impaired’. It was a way to hide his inability to speak Dutch should he be addressed by German troops.

After a journey of several days two members of the resistance managed to deliver Hackett into liberated territory by canoe. One week later, Johan heard the coded message on Radio Orange: “The grey goose has gone.” That meant that Hackett had successfully made the crossing!

After the defeat at the Battle of Arnhem, some 350 Allied troops went into hiding in the area, at least 145 of whom were taken back to friendly lines by the Dutch resistance. There were 374 ‘Biesbosch crossings’, most of them involving Allied soldiers trying to rejoin their units in liberated territory. Supplies such as medicine were transported in the opposite direction, into the occupied Netherlands.