War and Women across Continents: Autobiographical and Biographical Experiences

By Shirley Ardener and Lidia D. Sciama

Drawing on family materials, historical records, and eyewitness accounts, this book shows the impact of war on individual women caught up in diverse and often treacherous situations. It relates stories of partisans in Holland, an Italian woman carrying guns and provisions in the face of hostile soldiers, and Kikuyu women involved in the Mau Mau insurrection in Kenya. A woman displaced from Silesia recalls fleeing with children across war-torn Germany, and women caught up in conflicts in Burma and in Rwanda share their tales. War's aftermath can be traumatic, as shown by journalists in Libya and by a midwife on the Cambodian border who helps refugees to give birth and regain hope. Finally, British women on active service in Afghanistan and at NATO headquarters also speak.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Release date: Feb 1, 2016
• ISBN: 9781785330148

Book preview

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The Resistance of Francesca Tonetti in German-Occupied Venice 1943–1945

Lidia Dina Sciama

We will glorify war – the world’s only hygiene – militarism, patriotism … Beautiful ideas worth dying for, and scorn for woman … We will destroy the museums, libraries, academies of every kind, will fight moralism, feminism, every opportunistic or utilitarian cowardice.

(Manifesto of Futurism, an inspiration to fascists!)

Introduction

In a lively and detailed autobiographical narrative, Francesca Tonetti describes her wartime experiences under German occupation, from September 1943 to May 1945. A strong theme in her book is her dramatic transition from adolescence to maturity, as she had to face responsibilities and take decisions that would have been quite unthinkable in peacetime. I too experienced war in a very direct and personal way, but I was then too young to follow and understand its strange events.¹

After the war, as I was naturally keen to know how life in Venice was under Nazi occupation, I was lucky to meet some of the people who, just a few years older than myself, had fought for the city’s Liberation – among them Francesca Tonetti. During several meetings at friends’ houses in Venice, and holidays in Abano and in Puglia, an awareness that those years had had a strong impact on our lives implicitly led to mutual interest and understanding, but neither of us was disposed to speak much about the war. However, like many people with comparable experiences, Francesca did write and speak about the past many years later (1970, 1994).

Before I turn to her narrative, I shall introduce a brief account of events that took place before and during the German occupation of Italy – and more specifically Venice.

The Context

Benito Mussolini entered Parliament in 1921. After his March on Rome in October 1922, the opposition was violently repressed, and after the fascist murder of socialist MP Matteotti in 1924, Italy’s Parliamentary Democracy came to an end. Friendship between Italy and Germany, developed throughout the 1930s, led to the Rome/Berlin Axis Alliance of 1939 (also joined by Japan in 1940). Italy entered the Second World War on 10 June 1940. To fulfil Mussolini’s dream of empire, Italian troops first fought in Africa; they conquered British Somaliland in August 1940, but held it for only a few months, as it was soon taken back by the British. The Italians were defeated in Greece, France and both East and North Africa. But their worst losses took place in the Russian campaign (Hitler’s ‘Operation Barbarossa’). In the battle of Stalingrad, from August 1942 to February 1943, the Italian 8th Army lost 20,000 soldiers, 60,000 were captured and many died in captivity. By 1942, as losses on the Russian front had a devastating effect on the population, Italians had had enough of the war; the Futurists’ celebration of ‘militarism and patriotism’ had had its day.

After the Allies landed in Sicily on 10 July 1943, members of the fascist Grand Council advised Mussolini to resign (25 July). He was arrested by carabinieri and spirited away to an isolated place in Abruzzo: Italians believed that the dictatorship had come to an end, but their newfound freedom only lasted for forty-five days. As the Allies advanced up the peninsula, and, on 8 September, the new head of state, General Badoglio, announced that an armistice was signed, in no time at all, the Germans invaded Italy. The army was disbanded; about 100,000 Italians continued to fight alongside the Germans, while those units that were able to join the Allies fought alongside them as a ‘co-belligerent’. But 710,000 men were transported to Germany as slave labour. To escape that fate, large numbers of soldiers, left with no orders or instructions by their officers, abandoned their uniforms and weapons. They were helped by the population, who sheltered them and gave them civilian clothes; many of them would eventually join the Resistance.

Meanwhile, Mussolini, rescued by a German commando, was forced by Hitler to set up a new fascist state, the ‘Italian Social Republic of Saló’ with its own army, the ‘Esercito Nazionale Repubblicano’ or ‘Black Brigades’.

The Germans Arrive in Venice

After Italy’s ill-fated armistice with the Allies in September 1943, German forces poured into Italy through the Brenner Pass. They arrived in Venice mainly by sea, while some frighteningly low-flying airplanes dropped large numbers of leaflets signed by the new ‘National Fascist Government’, urging the population to collaborate with the German forces. The leaflets were then followed by bombs aimed at a number of ships, as they were trying to leave the port in the hope of joining the Allies in the southern Adriatic. Venice’s historical centre was not considered a ‘useful’ military target, while Marghera’s industrial area was spared because it would have been valuable for the war effort.

Because the Venice port had so far been relatively safe, several ocean liners, as well as hospital ships were anchored there. One luxury liner, the Conte di Savoia, was repeatedly attacked by German planes and left near Alberoni, completely burnt, like a ghostly reminder, until the end of the war. Venetians, who until then had not come into direct contact with war, were shocked at the sight of a procession of half-naked wounded soldiers, their tattered clothes soaked in oil and blood, struggling to land at the city’s embankments from a German patrol boat; they were deeply angered when armed Germans did not allow them to assist the wounded and help them to reach the navy hospital.

Meanwhile a German general demanded the surrender of all the city’s military authorities and establishments, threatening to carry out some violent reprisal against the civilian population, if his orders were not complied with. As two German submarines had ominously reached Saint Mark’s basin, he also threatened to order the destruction of ships that continued to arrive from Fiume and from the Balkans. Large numbers of Italian soldiers and pupils from a naval academy were thus held hostage in their own ships, fearing they would be blown up, or at best sent to some labour camp in Germany or Poland, had a compromise not been reached.² Some Italian officers were advising their soldiers to obey German orders, while a Venetian colonel, seeing that there was nothing he could do to help his men, committed suicide (Bobbo 2005: 70).

As the situation in the ships was deteriorating, the population did their utmost to help; it was at that time, under those distressing and dramatic circumstances, that women and men began to work together to offer some relief to the starving and dejected soldiers. Under threat of German fire, they approached the ships in their rowing boats to bring the men water, medicines and food. For those who had already been transferred to sealed cattle trains about to leave for Germany or Poland, some of the women who were committed to helping, instructed students to bring paper and pens, so they could send a note to their family (G. Milner, personal communication; Bobbo 2005: 63–69).

Figures 1.1 and 1.2. ‘We soon learnt how to use our weapons.’ Courtesy of the National Association of Italian Partisans (ANPI).

Francesca Tonetti

Francesca Tonetti was then in Venice – a full participant and keen observer of the disastrous events of the German invasion. Her autobiographical book, The Wind of Quarnero (1994, Il Vento del Quarnero), is of great anthropological and historical interest: in narrating her life from childhood to adolescence, adulthood and maturity, she not only relates her wartime activities, but also provides her own, certainly subjective, but very valuable, vision of social change and intergenerational relations. Thanks to her strong interest in people, in narrating their vicissitudes and changing circumstances, she also probes their motivations, ideas and thoughts in the historical context of the Second World War.

The book’s dedication reads: ‘To my father / and to my great love, / the wind of Quarnero, the Bora’. Indeed a strong theme – one also present in many other women’s accounts of their resistance – is that of the great importance of her relationship with her father. It is of interest that part of Francesca’s narrative was included as a chapter in her father’s autobiography, A Patrician Revolutionary (G. Tonetti 1970, Un patrizio rivoluzionario). When she published her own book in 1994, she in turn quoted or paraphrased passages from her father’s writings. With a clear division of intellectual labour, Francesca based chapters on Italy’s political history on his rather dry journals, while her narrative of her actions and thoughts, based on her own memory as well as old diaries, is far more open, emotional and, in parts, poetic. The way father and daughter’s writings are woven together is an example of a then conventional set of gendered oppositions between ideas, political competence and action as male prerogatives, as against sentiment and alleged maternal/feminine motives for women’s participation in the Resistance. Like other male/female oppositions, that is now widely critiqued and rejected; it does, however, effectively mirror Francesca’s family’s lifestyle and circumstances.

Very briefly, Francesca is the daughter of Count Giovanni Tonetti (1888–1969) (from now Giovanni), heir to a Friulan family of ship owners and captains long established in Istria,³ where they owned vast tracts of land surrounding their castle. Her mother was Lucia Caracciolo-Borsa, a Neapolitan noblewoman of princely descent. She died of tuberculosis aged twenty-eight, when Francesca was only three years old.

The Tonetti family usually divided their time between Venice and Istria, where they mainly spent the summers. Giovanni, who, as we shall see, was a powerful figure in Francesca’s life, is affectionately described throughout her narrative. As she writes, referring to his autobiography, the most important turning points in his life took place in 1919, first when he married Lucia, with whom he was deeply in love, and, second, when he read the works of Marx, Engels and Lenin, and decided to dedicate his life to the socialist cause. He abhorred fascism and was continually harassed for his participation in workers’ protests and strikes. Because of his political activities, he and Lucia had to spend long periods in exile, leaving Francesca with Giovanni’s mother. Francesca recalls that the first words she learnt, while living in Venice with her grandmother, were the cries of gondoliers touting for passengers, and the more threatening ‘mandato di arresto’, ‘warrant of arrest’, of the fascist police. She remembers the days when, still in the arms of her nurse, she watched them while they searched her playroom.

After her mother’s death, Francesca with her father and grandmother shared their lives between Istria, Venice and Rome. She was not allowed to attend school, because she was thought to be frail, but during their long stays in Istria, where she enjoyed great freedom, exploring her family’s vast estates, and where she was allowed to own all the dogs, horses and pets she desired, she toughened up and developed a deep love of nature that sustained her in difficult times. She also grew very independent and competent, because, still a child, she had to care for her grandmother who suffered from angina. The book’s early chapters include lively descriptions of her life in 1930s Rome, with her two aristocratic grandmothers, both forever wearing deep mourning and entertaining high prelates and bishops, because at that time of political uncertainty they turned to the Church, while Giovanni would escape to his rooms and bury himself in reading.

Come September 1943, as soon as they heard of Italy’s armistice with the Allies that followed Mussolini’s resignation in July, they returned to Venice and Giovanni joined the Resistance as a representative of the Socialist Party. Their palace, Ca’ Giustinian, had been requisitioned in earlier years, when he refused to accept membership of the fascist party, and in it were then housed the offices of the Fascist National Guard and Nazi propaganda.

Francesca and her grandmother then had to stay at a hotel near Saint Mark’s Square. Crowded with different, and potentially hostile people, thrown together by the absurd circumstances of war, the hotel became an excellent vantage point for Francesca’s observation of the confused and rapidly changing life of the city. On the ground and first floor were Francesca’s grandmother and a number of old ladies, most of them titled and bejewelled, mainly longstanding clients and friends of the kind hoteliers. There was Countess Fabbro, who was ancient but extremely elegant in a black breitschwanz and ermine suit with diamond and emerald jewellery, a generous and warm-hearted lady from Rome, and then Mrs Miollo, a rich landowner who was secretly in love with Francesca’s father and wrote him love letters that caused him terrible embarrassment every time he chanced to meet her.

Mixed with them, especially at mealtimes, were people who had taken refuge from the Allies’ bombing of inland cities, and a number of Roman officials transferred to Venice with various fascist ministries. Indeed it was at the hotel that Francesca met and married a young man who offered her and her grandmother solidarity and help – and shared his food rations with them! On the top floor lived and worked an elderly Viennese baron, at that time a colonel, who edited a German-language newspaper, Adler in Suden. Thanks to Francesca’s grandmother’s title, bestowed on the family by none other than Emperor Franz Joseph, the colonel held the lady in great respect and never failed to click his heels as he encountered her in the hotel.⁴

Francesca, just sixteen, was immediately plunged into the war situation. As she writes, ‘On the 8th of September, Venice was in chaos. Italian Navy officers, some in uniform, others in their ordinary clothes, stood about in the hotel’s lobby, wondering what to do … They had to rid themselves of their weapons’. She then decided to collect their guns and munitions; she hid them in her room and, childishly, she said,

I will bring them to papá. Perhaps it is time for the Revolution. Grandmother sees me and she says that I am just like my father and I always want to play with the most absurd and dangerous things. (112–113)

Giovanni, then staying at one of their properties in Piove di Sacco in the neighbouring countryside, sent a local woman to fetch them. As at other moments when she had to face some testing situation, Francesca looked at herself in the mirror; as she recalls, ‘I was pleased to see that in my light cotton dress, red with little white flowers, my tidy tresses, and my nose covered in freckles, I looked younger than my age’.

With her grandmother and the woman accompanying them, she left for Mestre, where they had to change to a local train. They found that the Germans had arrived. The station was in total confusion; on the walls were large notices: ‘Anyone carrying weapons will be shot on sight’. Francesca’s bag was heavy; she needed to get out of there as quickly as she could; she got the country woman with the luggage on the train to Piove di Sacco, then, walking arm in arm with her grandmother, under her other arm the bag full of guns, and over it the chihuahua trembling with fear, she made her way through the armoured cars in the station square. She went straight to the station hotel, she ordered a good meal, and then a taxi that would drive them to join Giovanni in the countryside. Back in Venice, against her father’s and grandmother’s advice, Francesca joined a Red Cross nursing course.

Some Resistance leaders favoured a steady but low-key opposition to the German and fascist oppressors, but Giovanni was a maximalist: he knew that in Venice’s jail there were prisoners waiting to be executed or deported to Germany, and that the archives concerning political prisoners and Resistance fighters were kept in Ca’ Giustinian, formerly his family’s property, then ruled by the ferocious Zani. With another senior fighter, he planned the destruction of the palace wing in which the Nazis and Fascist Republican Guard (actually ruthless torturers) had established their offices.

When, a few days later Francesca heard a loud bang and was running through St Mark’s square to go and see what had happened at Ca’ Giustinian, a man caught her by her pigtail and told her that he was a friend of Giovanni’s and that she had to go right back to the hotel. Knowing that her father was behind that action, Francesca ran to find him in the home of a woman friend and persuaded him to spend the night elsewhere. As she writes,

My father is playing the violin. The setting sun lights up the Venetian drawing room and makes his blond hair shine. He is dressed in white and is very handsome. The scene is peaceful, and for a moment I look at him as if he were a painting. Then, breathless, I urge him not to sleep there. And he tells me that a lady must not get agitated and speak so excitedly. (122–123)

And that lesson probably served Francesca well in the following days. Indeed members of the Fascist National Guard did arrive at dawn; they were so disappointed at not finding Giovanni that they stayed on the premises for four days. Then they decided to take Francesca as a hostage. Again, to appreciate the strangeness of those times, and Francesca’s fluctuation between her adolescent concern with her body and her overwhelming anxiety over her father’s safety, it is probably best to quote her own words:

At the hotel with my grandmother, at seventeen, I had a grave problem: the device for straightening my teeth and the war. I was half asleep and I was feeling the heat, even at dawn. Then, loud banging at the door, men with machine guns order me to get up. I was a hostage; I had to go with them. My eyes were closing with sleep.

At the fascist headquarters they lock me up in a cell. The following morning a man in a black shirt opens my cell and takes me downstairs. His name is Gallo and I know all about him: he is bad, bad, the worst … On the floor below, he orders a soldier to open a door; for a second I only see the pearl grey sky of dawn through the window, then as I look around me: on the floor are men, they are leaning against the wall, almost lying. I look at the man nearest to me: his face is covered in blood that flows from one of his eyes, his ear and his mouth. This is what they call … torture!