Eyewitness Testimony Giacomina Rinaldini

[…] When I arrived at the camp, the women were in the kitchen peeling potatoes and turnips, whereas before they had been sent, along with the men, to dig a tunnel that was to house the installations of an airplane factory. They walked fourteen kilometers every day to and from that location. Fatigue, malnutrition, and tuberculosis created large gaps in their ranks. Often in the kitchen we managed to hide some cooked potatoes under the ashes, at great risk, because if we were discovered we would be beaten and tortured. As the end of the war approached, the potatoes decreased and the turnips increased, large and woody, not even suitable for animals. Kahla-Tur was a small town with about ten camps of every kind: near ours there was a military one, some of them sometimes came to our infirmary. That is how I met a teacher and a soldier, respectively from Mantua and Brescia (Gheno Giovanni, from Via Milano). These young men had values to defend and I felt united with them. They were the memory of my brothers. With them it was possible to establish a brotherly relationship, in remembrance of our homeland (sometimes I managed to feed the one from Brescia). The only good person among the guards was a Wehrmacht marshal. I fell ill, like almost everyone, with dysentery, exhaustion. The only hope that sustained me was the thought of being able to return to Italy, so as not to let my parents die of grief, to whom I wrote, saying I was well. They also wrote to me, and I read “brothers well,” while Emi had been killed on February 10, ’45 and Federico sent to Germany, to Mauthausen. Source: B. Franceschini, From Stories to History, Grafo, Brescia 2007, p. 441; reproduced by ANED Brescia.