I17 A soldier went crazy

Narrator: Dosolina Furlan Reporter: Nurten Tukel

I am Dosolina Furlan, I live in Vedelago and I am 78 years old. When I was a girl, I lived in a house in the centre of the village along the main road. During World War II, when the Germans were retreating, I saw lots of German soldiers passing down the road. They were in a hurry because the Americans were coming closer, freeing the Venetian plain. The partisans got more organized and attacked the German columns and captured soldiers. They took them to the House of the Fascio and they kept them under control. The partisans often captured German soldiers just near my house because there was a crossing of local roads.

I remember one day when the partisans took a group of prisoners near the yard of my house. There, one of these German soldiers escaped and took shelter in our stable. He took off the chain that tied our cows and kept it tight as a weapon, next he put a fork across the door so that no one could enter. He seemed to go crazy, he ran from one side of the stable to the other until he reached our house and he entered from the back door.

Furiously he opened wide the door of the bedroom where my relatives and me were hidden and shouted this sentence to us, “Morire…! Tutti! Morire tutti!“ (“Die…! Everybody! Everybody die! “) He kept on shouting those words, meanwhile he settled the machine gun that he had in his hands in the middle of the room. He shouted one more time that we all had to die. My mother said some words in German to him and soon he gave up shouting and stared at her from head to toe.

In that moment some American soldiers came in and stopped him otherwise he would have killed us. My mother was German; she had met my father in Germany when he got there for work. They got in touch and they fell in love, she followed him to Italy and married him. I have never learnt which German words she had said to that soldier, but he was shocked and hesitated just long enough for us to be saved.

In the days after blood was spilt, this time it was German blood. A lot o Germans died; also in our field we saw lots of dead bodies. We had a cherry tree that blossomed even in those bad seasons. Under that tree there was so much blood from the soldiers and I noticed that the grass didn’t grow up for at least eight years.