From the summer of 1944 to the spring of 1945 the front stopped on the Gothic Line. It was there that the lives of civilians were indelibly marked. Grandma Anna was 11 years old. The worst came after the armistice, when air raids razed Rimini to the ground. Grandma was in a field outside the house while they were bombing. She had taken shelter under a chapel hit by a bomb. She remembers her mother’s screams and machine gun shots killing a woman in a field. Her house was taken by the Germans and she and her children moved with other displaced persons to the caves of the town. They lived there for weeks by candlelight, in terrible conditions, with little food, sleeping on straw. On 21 September 1944 Rimini was liberated. The Gurkhas tried to liberate Montebello, but were decimated. The next day the Allies bombed the country, but the Germans escaped. Back then news circulated by word of mouth, few had radios. Today her grandmother is 91 years old, she doesn’t remember much about the Jews, but she hasn’t forgotten the fear of the bombings. In those years she was just a child. The war took away the joys of childhood and the possibility of going to school, which was very important to her.
Virgilio Montironi 3 F
