A story of courage, sacrifice, and individual heroism--a noble
episode in the history of a great people.
The story of the
underground battle of the Italians against the Nazis and Fascisti,
largely unknown outside Italy, was, unlike the French Resistance, a
spontaneous, city-by-city, region-by-region uprising. This book
traces the the growth of the wartime Resistance from its birth in
1943, against overwhelming odds, to its dramatic triumph two years
later. Here are Neapolitan youngsters fighting German tanks; patriots
operating an underground radio station inside Nazi-occupied Florence;
Romans ambushing a Nazi patrol; mountain fighters blasting enemy
convoys; peasants who hid partisans and Allied escapees; and priests
and nuns who outfoxed Nazi and Fascist patrols. It was a moving
episode, a lesson for all of us who live so easily in the kind of
society dreamed of by the partisans.
