"We made a mistake, but it’s not that we didn’t know how to say no; it was that it never even occurred to us that we could say it. We had been raised in a bubble and indoctrinated by the regime, from the cradle to the front lines; our brainwashing had been thorough and total, and we had been stuffed with grotesque lies that to us were absolute and total truths.
I developed the germs of antifascism when I witnessed, in Poland and Ukraine, the ways in which our allies treated the Jews who were forced to work on the repair of the railway tracks; at the slightest hesitation, a blow to the head, and then I saw how they treated us, on the front lines at the Don.
How could one ally with such monsters devoid of humanity?
It had to be us, those dead bodies that Mussolini needed to sit at the table of the victors. Only he needed just a few hundred, he thought, and he ended up with at least 320,000, to be cautious, just among soldiers, partisans, and republicans. And then there was the involvement of civilians, for the most varied reasons, on both sides.
Mario Rigoni Stern
November 1, 1921
June 16, 2008"