April 21, 2025 • 47 mins
Author Suzanne Cope teaches Margaret about the history of women partisans in the Italian resistance, from her upcoming book Women of War.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Cool Zone Media.
Speaker 2 (00:04):
Hello, and welcome to Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff,
your weekly reminder that we all have to go to
work even though the world's largest military has been taken
over by fascists, or at least that's what it feels
like to me. I'm your host, Margaret Kiljoy. This is
a show about cool people did cool stuff. It's in
the title. But this week we're gonna try yet another
(00:26):
new format. This week, I have a guest on who's
going to explain stuff to me about a book that
she wrote. My guest is Suzanne Cope. Hi, how are you?
Speaker 3 (00:36):
Hi? Am great? Thank you.
Speaker 2 (00:39):
Suzanne Cope is the author of the upcoming book Women
of War, The Italian Assassin, Spies and Couriers Who Fought
the Nazis, which is out on April twenty ninth from
Dutton and you can pre order it now. And I've
never done the like I'm interviewing the author of a
book on this show, but like, and I usually I'll
be real. Usually when I get like emails that are like, hey,
(01:00):
you should totally have this author on your show, I'm like, no,
I shouldn't, but this book was so perfect for you
all the audience. I think you'll like it. You probably
figured that out because it's called Women of War the
Italian Assassin, Spies and couriers who fought the Nazis. That's
just basically like cool people did cool stuff in a
thick hardcover that looks really good. This book profiles for
(01:24):
women anti fascist partisans, all of whom spoiler alert survived
the war, so we get sort of happy endings this
time too, despite taking enormous risks, and also like really
challenging the idea of what it means to be a
frontlines fighter versus a support person and how everyone kind
of does both in a really interesting way. Is that
(01:44):
a fair summation of your book. I don't know.
Speaker 4 (01:48):
Yeah, that sounds great, and I know I love that
you picked up on that because in the epilogue I
mentioned that I don't want to not honor the people
who are doing the support work, but those stories are
just a little less exciting. So I did try to
cover both sides. That the support work was so important,
but also, you know, killing Nazis is really important work too.
Speaker 2 (02:11):
It is really important work speaking of people who don't
do anything criminal. Sophie is our producer, Hi Sophie Hi allegedly, Yeah,
allegedly our producer and our audio engineers, Rory. Everyone wants
to say hi to Rory.
Speaker 1 (02:26):
Hi.
Speaker 2 (02:27):
Rory Hi, Rory Hi.
Speaker 1 (02:28):
Ri.
Speaker 2 (02:29):
Our theme music was written for us by unwoman. So
I'm like, how do we start? Like where do we start?
Do you want to start by maybe talking a little
bit about Italian fascism and like how that came to
be a problem that people decided to try and solve. Sure, Also,
you should tell us about you and then we will
(02:49):
talk about the contents of your book.
Speaker 3 (02:52):
Sure.
Speaker 4 (02:53):
I am a professor at NYU. I teach writing, and
I am a little bit of a taught journalist because
I used a lot of my skills from my social
science degrees and my MFA and creative nonfiction to figure
out how to do this kind of deep dive research.
Speaker 3 (03:13):
And so it was really exciting.
Speaker 4 (03:14):
This is the second book now where I spent a
lot of time in the archives, I interviewed people.
Speaker 3 (03:19):
I went to places.
Speaker 4 (03:20):
And it's always a thrill when folks for my last book,
Power Hungary and this one call me a historian, because.
Speaker 3 (03:26):
Yeah, I think I legitimately am.
Speaker 2 (03:28):
Right now, people sometimes call me a historian, and that's
not technically true, because I don't do much original research.
Every now and then do but I'm mostly using secondary
and tertiary sources. But yeah, you actually are a historian.
This is a history book. You went and looked at
things that other people hadn't put together yet? Is that
a fair way to put it? Like?
Speaker 4 (03:48):
Yes, And I had to do a deep dive into
this time period. I really you know, you think about
what you learned or didn't learn in high school and
middle school. I have a middle school kid, and I'm
thinking he actually hasn't learned a lot about history, and
we learn even less. I've found speaking to a lot
of people in the United States about World War two
(04:11):
or global history if it doesn't have anything to do
with the United States. And so I really had to
educate myself on what was happening in World War two
in Italy at this time, and then of course backtracking
and figuring out what got them to be on the
side of the axis powers.
Speaker 2 (04:28):
Yeah, you mentioned you had a different book. I think
you should plug that other book too, because I think
people will like it. It's a subject we've covered a
lot on this show.
Speaker 3 (04:36):
Excellent.
Speaker 4 (04:37):
Yeah, it's called power Hungry and it's about the women
of the Black Panther Party and Freedom Summer, and this
is the subtitle, and their fight to feed a movement,
and it, you know, everything feels so resonant for our times.
But it's really about these women in these two kind
of side by side movements, but there are characters that
(04:57):
cross over and really bring them together, about women who
were using food as a means for social and political change,
but also as a way to kind of show their power.
But what I found through that book, so you have
the Black Panther Party. They have these free breakfasts for
children that they're most known for, but that was such
a political act and they were really teaching the kids
(05:21):
and the families that this is the way it should be,
Like socialism should be a thing.
Speaker 3 (05:26):
We should we have the food, we should feed people.
Speaker 4 (05:29):
And likewise you have Ellen Quinn and other folks in Macomb, Mississippi,
where they are she was using food as a means
to bring people together and show people they're welcome, but
also to show that people are loved.
Speaker 3 (05:41):
This community is supported.
Speaker 4 (05:43):
And so this book, as I was turning my eye
towards this time period that I had been interested in
in previously, I realized, well, first of all, it's war.
There's not a lot of food, so those stories would
not be as interesting. But also what was what I
found about the power of food and power hungry was
(06:04):
that it really was about feminized skills, about the way
that women were kind of allowed in these circumstances to
show their power. And it wasn't just food. It ended
up being other kind of feminized.
Speaker 3 (06:15):
Ways of power and leadership.
Speaker 4 (06:17):
And so that's the lens that I took to women
of war is how women were able to do a
lot of the things that they could do, like being couriers,
because they were women and they were underestimated and they
were allowed to move around with a little more security
until it was the Nazis and the fascists were like, oh, women,
(06:38):
they're political too, and then the gig was up a
little bit, but yeah, that they didn't lose their nerve
despite that.
Speaker 2 (06:46):
I think it's funny because, as far as I could tell,
everything I've read about a war has women doing courier work,
especially in an occupied kind of area, like the Irish
Revolution had women riding bicycles around Ireland and stuff, delivering
messages and all this, and I'm like, how have people
not caught on? I guess, like misogyny just runs so
(07:07):
deep and the idea of like women can't do anything useful,
Like I don't know.
Speaker 3 (07:11):
Exactly, No, it's so true.
Speaker 4 (07:13):
And there's this story from later in the book this
is not a spoiler, where one of the women, Anita,
is she has this big prisoner and she told I
got the story from her testimony, and so I love
hearing her tell the story. And she's like chomping through
the forest to take him from one camp to another
with this machine gun in his back, and she said.
Speaker 3 (07:34):
He kept stopping and being like, but you are a woman.
You are made to make love.
Speaker 4 (07:39):
She's like, just keep walking, like you couldn't believe it,
this whole wander through the woods.
Speaker 2 (07:48):
Well, that was one thing that actually struck me that
we'll get to you more when we start talking about
this woman that a lot of them were like, oh,
I'm just a courier, and like the if you read
the cliffs notes versions of these women's story like, oh,
a courier, and then you're like, wait, but you also
led a prisoner with a machine gun through the I mean,
I guess you're courier. In a person at this point,
but like.
Speaker 3 (08:07):
Yeah, it's so much more than that. Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 2 (08:09):
So okay, wait with this book and this is just
my own side interest. Did I read or did you
maybe just also talk about did it start as I'm
going to do a food related thing and then you
moved away from that? Is that?
Speaker 3 (08:22):
Well?
Speaker 4 (08:23):
The origin of this book was, and also of Power Hungry?
Was that eight years ago and change. That number is
not a random number. I was looking around at the
protests that were erupting around me, and I was doing
a lot of work around food studies at the time
and thinking about food and culture. And I saw people
(08:45):
I knew were groups I was connected with. They were
feeding immigrants or refugees, were cooking and teaching about their culture.
They were sending pizzas to people who were protesting. And
I thought, okay, these are all great things, but what
were people doing in the past? And so I thought,
I'm going to do this deep dive kind of for myself,
but also, you know, thinking how to share this of
(09:06):
how food was used during these moments of inflection in history.
And so I had this great book proposal I love
that almost sold, that had these five different stories of
food as I call it now, food is a tool
for social and political change. And the feedback I got was,
these stories are great, but people just want to read
(09:27):
American stories now. And so that ellen Quinn story was
the one that was the American story, and so I
pulled that out and that turned into Power Hungry. And
so as soon as that was done and I could
focus on the next project. And this was also, you know,
pandemic was waning. Maybe we could travel again. I thought,
I need to go to Italy. This is where I
want to go for my next book. I just and
(09:48):
plus that story was very compelling. It changed very much
from what I had researched for the original proposal. And
then it turned in yeah, into finding these four different women.
I wasn't even actually Bianca was was kind of in
that version, but I was really focused on her colleague,
Ada Gobetti, who does make an appearance in the book.
And yeah, and so that's and then it morphed in
(10:09):
many ways since since that proposal to this book.
Speaker 2 (10:13):
Because we've done a couple episodes about we haven't done
a lot of episodes about World War two fascist Italy.
We've done a couple episodes about early resistance to fascism
in Italy, and one of them, I don't remember which one.
We talked at length about this thing that I learned
that Mussolini hated pasta.
Speaker 3 (10:30):
What oh, I didn't come across Massolini.
Speaker 2 (10:33):
Thought that pasta was basically like turning the Italians into
soy boys. Was sort of the equivalent, you know. It
was like, oh, it reduces their masculinity. And I think
it relied on imported wheat, and so he was a
big proponent of rice, whereas Italy is the primary exporter
of rice in Europe. Because then the other, okay, the
other story about food in Italy. I'm just I'm very
excited about telling these things. The song Bella Chow was
(10:57):
originally written by the migrant rice workers in northern Italy,
and it wasn't it actually wasn't a partisan song, or
there's no evidence that it was a partisan song. But
it's I don't know anywhere. I did a told two
parter about Belichow, and then we've done a couple episodes,
and I'm just telling you about because say about food history.
It's another food history, another radical food history, and named
(11:21):
ren AWRAI has done episodes with us about food co
ops and a bunch of other stuff.
Speaker 3 (11:27):
Oh I'm a park Slip food co op member.
Speaker 2 (11:29):
Oh okay, cool, Yeah you should go and talk about it, right, Yeah, okay.
We've talked a little bit on this show about the
rise of fascism, and we talked a little bit about
people trying to kill Mussolini. That was the angle of
one of the episodes, with all the people who tried
to kill Mussolini, including some people eventually succeeded at it.
(11:49):
But could you kind of set the scene for us
anyone who hasn't listened to previous episodes, or as you
pointed out, American history doesn't really talk about this very much.
And I actually think that understanding the rise of fascism
in Italy is maybe more important than understanding the rise
of Nazism in Germany in terms of our own immediate situation.
But maybe I'm no, it's miss.
Speaker 3 (12:11):
It's absolutely true.
Speaker 4 (12:12):
Is so post World War One people and this was
happening around the globe. People had traveled, soldiers had traveled,
There was more awareness of what was happening globally, and people.
Speaker 3 (12:25):
Were getting a little, you know, a little more progressive.
Speaker 4 (12:29):
And women were making art and they were in the workforce,
and this was something that yeah, mostly and well a
lot of right wing folks were not so into in Italy,
and so he actually was a pretty liberal guy, and
he flip flopped during World War One and he was
(12:51):
anti war, and then he changed his tune and he
saw that he could kind of rile up this conservative base.
And he was a media guy. He was a newspaperman,
and so he created this his own newspaper that was
catering to this right wing perspective, and he, yeah, whipped
(13:12):
some people up into a frenzy kind of saying, we
need to get rid of this progressive notion. These women
who are in the workforce, maybe their skirts are getting shorter.
Speaker 3 (13:22):
You know, this woke nonsense exactly.
Speaker 4 (13:25):
And so he got a bunch of you know, Squadristi
as they were would come to be known, these kind
of proud boys of Italy, and he threatened to this
is the whole thing. He threatened to march on Rome
and say if you don't, if you basically don't hand
(13:45):
over Rome, hand over the government to me, then I'm
going to set these like couple hundred I think that's
all it was.
Speaker 3 (13:52):
Guys, loose and we'll make you.
Speaker 4 (13:54):
And the king was just this weak dude, and he
was like okay, and he just kind of let him,
let him take it over, and so he you know,
it took a couple of years to fully kind of
grab control of, you know, all aspects of government.
Speaker 3 (14:06):
But he, you know, he was not dealing with a
lot of pushback, and.
Speaker 4 (14:10):
People immediately started to make deals with him, and they thought, oh,
maybe we could work together, and that quickly was you know,
there didn't seem to be very much resistance, and he
quickly shut down. I mean, he just changed the government,
like he started to change what people learned in school.
He was dictating within a couple of years what the
(14:30):
curriculum should be. He was separating schools by gender in
a lot of places, and women girls would learn certain
things and boys would learn other things. And then there
was a lot of indoctrination where kids from the very
youngest ages were I mean, it was voluntary, but there
there's even a couple of stories in the books of
(14:51):
kids whose parents didn't put them in these fascist kids
groups were sometimes punished in other ways, and it was
definitely looked at as being subversive by not putting your
kids in these groups where they learned girls learn to
sew and boys learned to be soldiers, and they were
also indoctrinated with this fascist ideology. But you know, Muslim
was kind of inventing fascism in a way. I mean,
(15:13):
he had these you know, scholarly guys that were helping
him form an ideology. And it was funny when I
was writing there, when I was going through the is
of the book, and there's some quote that said, I'm
going to roughly remember it was like the inherent inequality
of people. And my editor said, oh, this is a typo.
You mean equality, And I'm like.
Speaker 2 (15:34):
No, they said fascists. Yeah, they said.
Speaker 3 (15:38):
It straight up.
Speaker 4 (15:38):
They said, no, people are unequal. That's the way it is.
And so this is what people were taught. And this
is starting in the early nineteen twenties. So the folks
in this book, the people who were in their twenties
during World War Two, they had been completely brought up
under this system. And even if your parents, like one
woman today's a matte, her parents were the most outspoken
(16:01):
out of these four families. And you know, so she
was taught what was going on as far as like
taught anti fascist ideology. But the other women, it turns
out their families didn't support fascism and did things that
were would be considered anti fascist, but they didn't. They
kind of had to come to their own political understanding
on their own because their parents were so afraid to
(16:23):
tell them. They're afraid they would, you know, say something
at school or or that they would in some way
be found out because they were kids and the whole
family would be punished.
Speaker 2 (16:33):
Because I'd actually several of them did that as kids.
They like said anti fascist stuff and got in trouble, right.
Speaker 3 (16:39):
Well, I mean kind of you know Anita where.
Speaker 4 (16:42):
She was, you know, kind of admitted, you know, she's like,
I'm not in this, in this you know, little fascist program.
Speaker 3 (16:48):
And she came home and she's like, mom, I got
in trouble. I didn't win this.
Speaker 4 (16:52):
Award I was supposed to win because they said I
wasn't a fascist. And her mom just her mom slapped
her and said, now I'll give you something to cry
about it. And she didn't realized for many years later
that it was her mother protecting her. And yeah, and
so she very much she didn't even tell her parents
when she did join the resistance. She didn't tell her
parents until she had to escape into the hills, and
(17:13):
they were they were shocked that she had been doing this.
Speaker 2 (17:17):
So what happened with like what happened to because Italy
immediately before the rise of fascism was full of socialist,
communists and anarchists. It was like one of the hot
beds of the internationalists left right, and then fascism takes over.
I've read about individuals who fucked off and went to
(17:37):
France or you know. I think some people went to
you know, the US and all of these things, right,
but did most people just kind of shut up to
try and stay alive and then come out more when
they when they got to be partisans when the tide
starts turning.
Speaker 4 (17:52):
I mean, I think most people capitulated, you know, and yeah,
they the ways. And I didn't research this greatly, but
of course it came up a lot. But it seems
like when you know, you have someone who people who
maybe were still trying to publish anti fascist publications early
in Mussolini's reign and he had, you know, quickly taken
(18:12):
control of the major publications, and then you have some
folks who are like, well, I'm going to I'm going
to publish what I want to say that I'm against you,
And they would be punished in various ways. Yeah, you know,
they might be maybe if they had another job, they
would be threatened with losing their job, or they would
lose their job.
Speaker 3 (18:32):
A lot of times, he'd liked to send people.
Speaker 4 (18:34):
To confinement in Kiinfino, where they just sent all these
radicals on a kind of a semi deserted island and
they just kind of hung out in this island for
a couple of years, and people could even visit them,
like their families could come visit them for a while,
and they lived in a little house. But his whole
thing was like, oh, I don't kill people. I just
you know, disappear them for a little bit, or lock
(18:56):
them up, or I forced them to Lackey's forced them
to drink castor oil. That was a favorite punishment that
they held you down and made you.
Speaker 3 (19:06):
Chug castor oil.
Speaker 4 (19:07):
So there was a lot of ways where yeah, you
were just intimidated into being quiet, and people they just
shut up for all of these yeah, all of these reasons,
and people like Terisa Matte's father, they also had this
interesting balancing act. And I did ask a couple scholars
about this who knew a lot about it, because I
was so confused. I'm like, well, how come her father,
(19:28):
for example, Mugo Matte, how come he was allowed to
like how was he a known anti fascist? And it
was this balance of allowing people to speak out enough
as long as he wasn't too influential. Because my feeling is,
and you know what other folks have said is that
when maybe people would have revolted if there were too
(19:50):
many people disappearing, right, So it was almost there's a
little balance you could let people, you know, almost seem
like some people could get away with speaking out. Yeah,
but it seemed like it's this very strange balance that
also was not an exact science.
Speaker 3 (20:05):
Yeah, And so there was some anti fascism that still existed.
Speaker 4 (20:10):
And Terrees's family, for example, they were friends with a
lot of intellectuals like in Italian Ginsburg and the Olavetti's
who made the typewriters, and the Rosselli brothers, and they,
you know, they met for a while, they would do
things to kind of meet in secret.
Speaker 3 (20:27):
Some of these people ended up dead.
Speaker 4 (20:29):
So it was like, when, at what point are you
crossing the line where they you kind of don't know
at what point you might cross the line and end
up end up dead.
Speaker 2 (20:38):
Well, do you know what won't leave you dead? It's
the product and services that support this show. They'll all
keep you alive forever. If you use any of these products,
you will live forever. I think it's the thing I
can legally declare about the products. Here's ads and we're back. Okay,
(21:07):
So fascism takes over. The resistance gets real diminished after
some people try some spicy stuff. At the beginning, there's
a bunch of people try and kill Mussolini from various
different political positions.
Speaker 3 (21:21):
See episode number.
Speaker 2 (21:23):
Yeah, yeah, exactly. I never remember the episode numbers, but
I went over a lot of them. There was the
cool religious lady, Irish lady, and then there was the
you know, a whole lot of anarchists, and I think
some communists got in there and tried to kill them too.
Clearly none of them succeeded until later. But when does
partisan resistance start kicking off, or rather does partisan resistance
(21:47):
only start kicking off kind of once the war starts
turning against Italy.
Speaker 4 (21:52):
Oh yeah, so the folks who were part of this resistance.
A lot of them went underground. They stopped, yeah, doing
things publicly. Maybe they were still connected with each other.
You know, probably if I did a deep dive or
even a medium dive, I would you know, could find
a lot of stories of folks like, for example, someone
that today's Mitte worked with. He was active when he
(22:13):
was in his twenties, and since he was in his
thirties during the war. This was, you know, midway during
his reign, Mussolini's reign, so he certainly was doing something.
Speaker 2 (22:22):
And so people were doing stuff, just not to the
same degree.
Speaker 3 (22:25):
Okay, exactly exactly.
Speaker 4 (22:27):
And so what happened was when there was this period
of time where Hitler goes to war. Everyone knows that
Mussolini and Hitler are friends. There's all this rumbling that
Italy is going to side and join the war as well.
And I mean this was everybody, even Mussolini's buddies, told him, like,
this is a bad idea. We do not have the infrastructure,
(22:49):
we don't have the money for this. We're not gonna
be ready to go to war for.
Speaker 3 (22:52):
A couple of years. We need to like kind of
ramp up production.
Speaker 4 (22:54):
And you know, he was pressured by Hitler to become
a member the Axis forces, and so he joins the war.
Italy joins the war, and it was instantly unpopular Italians.
Speaker 3 (23:07):
They didn't believe in what they were fighting for.
Speaker 4 (23:09):
They had been doing all these other military things that
they also didn't really believe in. At one point in
the mid thirties, Mussolani invades Ethiopia because he said, you know,
make Italy great again, bring back the Roman Empire.
Speaker 2 (23:23):
Yeah, wanted to be an empire again.
Speaker 3 (23:25):
Yeah, yeah, bring back the Roman Empire.
Speaker 4 (23:27):
But basically it was all the gist of that, and
so people were just not down with it. They're young
men are dying, they're under you know, under all these rationing,
and they just hate it. And so people were very
he was losing even what little popularity had, you know,
despite people were not big fans of him for a
long time, but they kind of were cowed into being like,
all right, he's our leader, he's keeping us.
Speaker 3 (23:48):
Maybe he'll keep us out of war.
Speaker 4 (23:50):
And then when he couldn't even keep them out of war,
that's really when his popularity started to decline. And then
life got more difficult for people in Italy. And then
there's this one moment that I think is kind of
a key moment. I don't think it's the only key moment,
but I think there's a couple moments like this that
happened that galvanized more and more people. So in March
of nineteen forty three, Italy had been in war for
(24:12):
a while and Bianca Guidetti Serra, she is, you know,
twenty something year old and Turin to Reno, and she
is kind of like a social worker where she was
studying law, but she got a job as a social
worker where she's going to these factories like the Fiat factory,
and she's you know, talking to all of these families
and you know, the husband died the sun.
Speaker 3 (24:33):
You know, they haven't heard from me in forever.
Speaker 4 (24:35):
The women are there working, trying to make money to
feed their kids. They're working these long hours, have horrible rations,
paid less than the man doing the same job, you know,
totally legally in the system. And you know, even the
men there were were just unhappy. And all of the
stuff that they're making, it's all going towards this war.
Speaker 3 (24:53):
That they hate.
Speaker 4 (24:55):
And so a handful of folks organized by the communists,
a very deep underground Communist party. They went on strike,
they went out and did this protest.
Speaker 3 (25:07):
Didn't last very long.
Speaker 2 (25:08):
But this is like the first one in like twenty
years or something.
Speaker 3 (25:10):
Right exactly.
Speaker 4 (25:11):
And so they're standing outside of the Fiat factory and
Bianca hears about it, and she's like, I have to
go see this with my own eyes.
Speaker 3 (25:18):
She's just so shocked. And this was really the moment
that she and I'm going to.
Speaker 4 (25:23):
Project but I think fairly that many other people said, oh,
we can stand up, we could do this, and they
you know, some of them might have gotten arrested. They
I mean, they weren't all killed for doing this. They
weren't all jailed. They were kind of sent back to work.
Nothing major happened. And so this was really the moment
that people saw that they could stand up.
Speaker 3 (25:44):
And they also saw, and this is what I think
is so important.
Speaker 4 (25:47):
About these kind of public actions, they also saw that
other people felt the same way. Yeah, So it was
just this you know, kind of snowball effect of a
lot of it was quiet. But I think from the
testimony I've read and what I've heard that kind of
not directly from that moment, but around this time, these
kind of things were happening where people were starting to
stand up for themselves. They were so fed up, and
(26:09):
it led to Mussolini being deposed. He was kicked out
of leadership by the king, who is pretty weak, and
they put in this other guy who was basically, you know,
a minor fascist, and then he dilly dally's This was
in I think it was July twenty fifth, but I
had to double check that date.
Speaker 3 (26:27):
Nineteen forty three.
Speaker 4 (26:28):
When Mussolini is deposed, and then Badolio, who is now
the leader, he doesn't he want He's negotiating terms of surrender.
I mean, Italy has been on the bad side of
history for decades, right, and now he's like, maybe I
can get a good deal as we surrender. And what
happens while he's dilly deallying is the Germans are pissed,
so they just start sending all of these soldiers into Italy.
(26:54):
They're occupying Italy for forty five days, and people are
kind of raising the alarm, like, hey.
Speaker 3 (27:00):
Should you maybe be stopping this?
Speaker 4 (27:02):
Do you know that there's just train loads of German
soldiers just going by at all times, And Vaduli is like, eh,
you know, it's not my problem. And then the moment
the armistice, the surrender is announced, fighting breaks out and
Germany's like, hey, we have occupied Italy, right, And so
that's the moment. During those forty five days when there
(27:24):
was kind of this vacuum of power, a lot of
the folks came out of the woodwork, people who were
in jail, political prisoners, they came out and started organizing.
They had already been organizing in jail, and now they're
organizing with other folks that people know that they need
to do something like, hey, we've been waiting for the
war to end, but I don't know is the war over.
We don't even know what's going on. So people got
activated in that time period. And then as soon as
(27:45):
the Nazis took over, of course now you get the
sense that being politically active is now suddenly very dangerous.
But people also understood that their their freedom and their
future was at stake, and so a lot of these
grew stayed active. And what happened too was a lot
of the men, particularly young men, They instituted a new
(28:06):
draft of people who are going to be forced to
be in this new new fascist army, and a lot
of people had defected from the previous Italian army, but
if you were still a part of the army, then
you are now officially on basically germany side. And so
if you were escaping this army or also they were
taking people off the street and sending them to Germany
(28:28):
just to basically work as labor. And so these folks
are like, screw you all, I'm not going to just
do what you tell me. Yeah, basically are a punk song
that says that I'm going to make my well. First
they were just hiding out in the you know, in
the mountains, in old barns, and then they're like, we're
going to come together and they're going to form their
(28:48):
own resistance army. And so that's what happened over the
couple months after Germany occupied Italy, starting at the beginning
of September nineteen forty three.
Speaker 2 (29:00):
It's fascinating to me because when I had my little
sort of impression prior to doing more deep dives into
Italian stuff, and I didn't know a quarter of what
you just told me, but you have the sort of
impression that you're like, oh, as soon as there's fascism,
there's partisans, right, Because in France, you can kind of
say that right as soon as the Vshi government takes over,
people are like, well, we don't like this, we don't
(29:20):
like fascism. We're going to take to the hills and
start fighting. And I'd always sort of imagined that in
Italy that as soon as the war had started, people
would take to the mountains and start fighting. But the
thing that you're describing makes so much more sense and
is what actually happened, which is once they're occupied by
(29:40):
another country, than they formed partisans and start fighting. And
that's it's interesting to me. I'm like a little sad
because I wanted to Italy to just be really fighty
and never put up with fascism, you know. But then
it also is interesting because then you're talking about so
some of the partisans were in the Italian Army while
it was an Axis power, so they were acts as
(30:01):
soldiers who then also then fought on the other side,
and that's fascinating.
Speaker 4 (30:07):
Yeah, well, you know, I went through kind of my
own awakening around that where you tend to think, yeah,
that as soon as something unjust is happening, that suddenly
people rise up and they're like, yes, we will fight
this thing.
Speaker 3 (30:23):
But yeah, movements don't come fully formed, right, and especially.
Speaker 4 (30:27):
When you have what was unique about what was happening
in Italy and a lot of historians, you know, call
it a war on two fronts, is that you had
a people who were fighting the Nazis, fighting World War two,
but they were also fighting for their own freedom.
Speaker 3 (30:43):
They were fighting a civil war.
Speaker 4 (30:44):
So you had plenty of Italians who were siding with
the fashions, siding with the Nazis, people who were like,
even if they weren't explicitly political, they thought, well, if
I tell in my neighbor, maybe I won't get looked at,
you know, Or if I can continue, you know, being
a night watchman or whatever and putting up with their agenda,
maybe I'll get better rations. And so you had plenty
(31:06):
of people who it wasn't an ideological choice, it was
just made their life easier to kind of side with
the guys who seemed to have power. And then you
had a lot of people who just most of the
people just tried to, you know, just just lay low
and not you know, even if they felt one way
or the other, they just didn't want to get involved.
And then you really only had a relatively small percentage
of people who were actively fighting who were part of
(31:27):
the movement. And what was so necessary is that as
the occupation went on, as we moved towards the end
of World War two, is you had more and more
people supporting the movement. And it was so necessary because obviously,
if you are fighting an entire army, you're much you know,
you're less resourced than the Nazis, but they were incredibly
(31:50):
scrappy for what they were able to accomplish despite the
fact that they were so under resourced.
Speaker 2 (31:55):
Well, I mean, if there's if you're ever the under
resourced army, you should be on your own territory and
in the mountain. Those are the two things you want.
Maybe swamps inaccessible and your own that's that's the territory
you want, you.
Speaker 3 (32:07):
Know, the paths.
Speaker 4 (32:08):
And then like the old lady up the street, you
know she's gonna hide you under her bails of Hey,
I mean these are ye like real like those are
the real stories.
Speaker 2 (32:15):
Well, let's let's hear some of the real stories. Do
you want to tell me about? Well, I'm going to
say some of them, but eventually I'm going to make
you tell me about all of the women that are
profiled in your book. But as Sophie has pointed out
to me, before we start profiling them, what we should
really profile is the fact that everything's moral compromise. Here's
(32:36):
ads and we're back.
Speaker 1 (32:46):
Uh.
Speaker 2 (32:46):
Do you want to tell me about some of the
some of these folks.
Speaker 3 (32:49):
Sure.
Speaker 4 (32:49):
So the woman on the front of the book of
which all of your listeners are going to go out
and find this book. I'm looking at the book right now.
So the woman with the cigarette. But don't smoke people.
Speaker 2 (33:01):
Unless you're about to die in a war, and then
you're allowed one cigarette exactly.
Speaker 3 (33:05):
I mean, they didn't know how bad cigarettes were, right, Yeah.
Speaker 2 (33:07):
And all these women survived the war, so really they
had no excuse.
Speaker 3 (33:10):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (33:10):
Anyway, I mean, sorry, Carla did get cancer, but I
don't know if it was Lincoln anyway, She this is
Carla Caponi, And I mean I can't well, I can't
play favorites, but she does.
Speaker 3 (33:22):
Have some really great moments.
Speaker 2 (33:25):
She's the fightiest of them, right yeah.
Speaker 4 (33:28):
Yeah, and she's well she's the gorilla fighter. Who is
who's right you know, in front of people like hiding
around buildings and things where you have Anita who will
get to is in the mountains fighting. But Carla, so
she's brought up. Her dad dies when she's in high school,
and she finds out kind of near the end of
his life that he was pretty anti fascist, because this
(33:50):
is the in and you know, a roundabout way that
he died.
Speaker 3 (33:53):
He was in mine. He was a mining executive.
Speaker 4 (33:55):
They had they had a decent amount of money, and
the fascist already wanted him to join the fat at
some party organization, and he refused, and so they got
mad at him and they sent him, i think, to
Albania and he ends up dying in a mining accident.
And so she's like, you know, of course upset about this,
and so she's kind of, you know, she knows that
(34:17):
her family has been kind of priming her to be
anti fascist her whole life.
Speaker 3 (34:21):
But she didn't really know what to do.
Speaker 4 (34:23):
And so in the very beginning, in fact, it's the
first it's in the prologue, the first scene of the book,
the Allies bomb Italy because of course Italy's on the
other side, and they bomb Rome the rally ards that
are right near the Tairmany station, and so she's working
pretty close by and she just is motivated. She's like,
(34:44):
I need to do something, and she's you know, dressed
very nicely, like she'd liked to be a little fancy,
and she just goes to where all this destruction happens
and she starts to you know, help out.
Speaker 3 (34:56):
And so this is kind of the first moment.
Speaker 4 (34:58):
And then this is before Musolini was deposed, and then
a couple of days later, actually about a week a
little over a week later, Mussolini is now kicked out,
and so now she starts to connect in those that
forty five day period, which is known as.
Speaker 3 (35:10):
The forty five days convenient I know exactly.
Speaker 4 (35:14):
So between when Mussolini's deposed and the armistice happens and
the Germans take over, that forty five day period is
when a lot happened. So she connects with a lot
of particularly women in the in the movement, and so
they're teaching her things that she never learned. She didn't
know about, you know, what was happening in the Russian Revolution,
(35:35):
she didn't know it. Have really had very much political
education at all, and so political education was so important
for all of these women.
Speaker 3 (35:41):
They all have their own moments of political.
Speaker 4 (35:43):
Education, and part of it is the actual history and
knowing about these different structures of you know, like what
is the communists and you know, reading these books, like
you know, books by Marx that were just very hard
to come across in Italy. I mean, I don't know
if they were outright banned, but I think they were
just very much suppressed. And so when they you know,
(36:06):
reading these things and like, oh my god, I have
this whole new understanding of this world because for so
many of these women and the Italians more broadly, they
just didn't know very much what life was like outside
of Italy because what do you.
Speaker 3 (36:20):
Do if you're an authoritarian government? You just try to
ignore history or.
Speaker 2 (36:24):
Change it and limit education and exactly.
Speaker 4 (36:29):
And so she gets hooked up with these resistance folks,
and then after the occupation she is kind of employed
to do some of this career ing that people start
publishing a lot of these underground newspapers, and so she
helps to bring those around.
Speaker 3 (36:46):
She's bringing information.
Speaker 4 (36:47):
It's basically an information network, these couriers where they would
you know, they all have these little cells or these
groups all around the city, and so they'd go and
get news and bring news and then bring them back
and she gets hooked up with the Gapesti and these
are the Gorilla fighters. And originally it was just dudes,
of course, but they realize that it's quite handy because
(37:08):
these guys are being snatched off the streets, especially young men.
Speaker 3 (37:11):
They might not have.
Speaker 4 (37:12):
Been they might have been a little old to be drafted,
but certainly they would be under suspicion. You have some
guys just standing in the square, I don't know, watching
Nazis walk by. So they needed the women to kind of,
you know, make kissy face at them on the park
bench and.
Speaker 3 (37:29):
Pretend that they were young lovers. And so that's what
they did.
Speaker 4 (37:33):
The women wear their cover, but she ends up, you know,
being an active member, and they would go into for example,
there might be a bunch of fascist trucks parked outside
of the Opera, which is very close to her house.
This was the fun part about researching this is that,
I mean, Rome has been roughly the same for a
(37:53):
really long time, and so I could.
Speaker 3 (37:55):
Map where she was and where all of.
Speaker 4 (37:58):
These places were, and so I went to this, you know,
I go to these squares where I know, eighty one
two years ago things were bombed, and you could.
Speaker 3 (38:06):
Just in some pieces exactly.
Speaker 4 (38:09):
In some cases you could see the marks still on
the buildings.
Speaker 3 (38:12):
It was really really wild, and so they would place
she and.
Speaker 2 (38:17):
Wait, wait I kind of spoiled it. But what happened?
She goes to the opera house and what oh, and then.
Speaker 3 (38:21):
She and her her this.
Speaker 4 (38:23):
Guy who ends up being her partner in in the
CAPSI do you know, I'd have to look up the
exact I mean they were called like the Yeah, it's
a it's an abbreviation GAP.
Speaker 2 (38:36):
That could be oh, the action probably.
Speaker 3 (38:41):
Yeah, something like that.
Speaker 4 (38:43):
And so she and her partner would put the bombs.
They have these sticky bombs that they would stick on
the trucks and then they'd have to light the fuse
and then basically run away before it blew up.
Speaker 2 (38:56):
So she's stuck smoking. I mean, if you're going to
go I don't smoke, and no one's just smoking. But
if you're stock putting sticky bombs in the fuse, I mean.
Speaker 4 (39:03):
You have to have matches, right, I mean yeah, yeah,
so they would, you know, they did different actions like this,
and there's a couple really dramatic.
Speaker 3 (39:11):
Ones and.
Speaker 4 (39:14):
So yeah, so she's kind of moving around Rome and
things are getting really desperate, and she becomes you know,
full on part of these partisans, and they her her
partisan group. I mean there's a different cells of capzies around,
but you know, a couple of books that she would
work with. I mean she you know, she assassinates someone
at one point, and then they planned this audacious act
(39:36):
where they're going to place this giant bomb. And they've
been watching this German battalion that would go take this
trek every day, and so they place this bomb and
it ends up having very dramatic and it makes them
totally This is they're now marked people. They are now
on the hunt because they've killed so many Germans. And
(39:57):
then someone gives.
Speaker 3 (39:58):
Them away a very I don't even want to spoil
this part of the story. And so they go on
the run.
Speaker 2 (40:04):
Okay, okay, that's fair. You should you should intentionally leave
some things to make sure that the listeners become readers.
Speaker 3 (40:11):
Yeah, story is so crazy.
Speaker 4 (40:13):
And then the amazing part is when they're I mean
this whole it was interesting, this whole part on the run.
You know, I'm getting things from Carla wrote a memoir
and her her partner in partner in crime. He wrote
multiple memoirs.
Speaker 2 (40:27):
And so I called the gap.
Speaker 4 (40:30):
Sorry, and so yeah, so I'm getting these stories from
a lot of different places, but yeah, someone betrays them
and they have to go on the run. But it's
this is still this is the via Rosella attacks that
I'm talking about, and it's still very controversial because the
Nazi retribution was pretty.
Speaker 3 (40:47):
Awful after that.
Speaker 4 (40:49):
But what pisses me off about this is that they're
mad that the Partisans did an action during war that
was against the people who were terrorizing, and they were saying, oh,
you should have known.
Speaker 2 (41:02):
That they would have done a reprisal.
Speaker 4 (41:04):
Yeah, And I'm like, that's victim blaming people. I mean,
this is a time of war. This is what you
need to doe.
Speaker 2 (41:10):
That is one of the most common stories in radical
history and just normal history and going about your life
is the like who are you more mad at? Are
you more mad at the fascists or the anti fascists
who are trying to stop the fascists, and like whether
or not you approve of the specific action, although that
action's that sounds totally normal, Like I just think about
it where you're like, the Allies are dropping bombs on
(41:32):
the city.
Speaker 3 (41:33):
And you're gonna be mad at yeah.
Speaker 2 (41:37):
Like I don't even think bombing civilian centers is ethical,
but I'm not. I'm glad I'm not in charge of
a military you know. Yes, But like I was reading
besides a little bit of your book, I read the
auto translation of the Wikipedia from Italian cup. None of
the good stuff is in the English Wikipedia, and I
was just reading about like, yeah, she would just like
(41:59):
go out at night and shoot random people, not random,
she would go shoot Nazis in the back at night,
but then felt really bad about it. It seems to
be there.
Speaker 4 (42:07):
There was one moment that I do detail in the book.
I don't know if she went around at least she
I don't think she would around.
Speaker 3 (42:13):
Not for my research she did.
Speaker 2 (42:15):
Your research is so much more likely than an auto
translation of an I don't use Wikipedia as a source
in this show. I just was trying to read about
this before I interviewed you.
Speaker 3 (42:23):
This was there was a moment.
Speaker 4 (42:24):
It was her first killing, and and she did feel
very bad, but she realized that this is this is
what you need to do. I mean, here are people
who are you know, killing so many Jewish people who
are killing, targeting her friends, terrorizing the entire city, the
entire you know, much of the world section of the world.
(42:47):
And she realized she made peace with it herself. She's like,
I can't I can't feel bad about this. This is
this is warm and this is what I have to do.
Speaker 2 (42:53):
Yeah, I mean, you're saving lives at that point, exactly.
You know, it is a net gain of human life
in that particular situation. I'm not making great and statements
more broadly, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 4 (43:02):
And so Rome is the first because if you're imagining how,
you know, how Italy is being liberated, you had the Allies.
They they landed in Sicily first, actually before MUSSLINI was deposed,
just southern Italy exactly, and then they started then they
then they made it their way to the mainland south
of Rome, but it took them forever to get to Rome,
(43:23):
and so Rome wasn't liberated until how many eight nine
months after they were originally occupied. And so now you
have the Allies coming up from the south. And you know,
even for people who have visited Italy, and I mean
I had visited a number of times before I was
doing this research, and it wasn't until this research where
(43:43):
I realized.
Speaker 3 (43:44):
Italy is full of mountains. There's many mountain ranges.
Speaker 4 (43:47):
And you know, usually you're going to these cities and
you're just like, oh, maybe I went through a mountain,
but you don't think about it because the trains, you know,
they go through mountains, and so it's really hard to
rain when when the Allies are coming, you know, up
northward from the south.
Speaker 3 (44:02):
And then they also were getting distracted.
Speaker 4 (44:04):
They don't necessarily care that much about liberating Italy because
Italy they were the bad guys anyway, so they didn't
have this great opinion of the Italian folks, and they weren't.
Speaker 2 (44:16):
Everyone was completely anti racist on the Ally side. You
must have misread something somewhere along the way. It wasn't
a segregated US army. I don't know what you're talking about.
Everyone had yeah.
Speaker 3 (44:26):
We're sorry, we're all friends, we work together.
Speaker 4 (44:28):
So it took a while for these for the Italian
Partisans who are now you know, they're they're obviously on
the same side as the Allies, like let's all just
you know, kill these Nazis, and it took a little
while for them to have the trust of the Allies.
And also they really could have used some more guns
and maybe some winter coats and stuff. They didn't have
a lot of supplies, and so you know, it took
(44:50):
a little bit for the Allies to start to give
them more more resources, and they would do drops into,
you know, in fields and stuff in this very you know,
interesting co orinated way that I talk about using secret
code words.
Speaker 2 (45:03):
And so if you need to know how to coordinate
that kind of thing, you're going to have to read.
Speaker 3 (45:07):
The book exactly if you want to do secret jobs.
Speaker 4 (45:10):
And so they but they eventually were making their way northward,
but it took much longer than you would think. So
Italy was the first place to be liberated at the
beginning of June nineteen.
Speaker 3 (45:19):
Forty four, and then it would take a while.
Speaker 4 (45:21):
Florence was next, and maybe we could talk about today's.
Speaker 2 (45:25):
A well, I was thinking that probably we should talk
about today's on Wednesday. That sounds great, But instead we're
going to leave people here in this land of they
don't know what's going to happen. Well they do, they
know that Italy is going to get liberated, but you
don't know what Today's is going to do. And I
would have said, Teresa, so I'm really glad that you
(45:46):
told me how to pronounce her name. So that's our cliffhanger.
We're going to learn about more people. But first, well,
I guess there's at least one thing you probably want
to plug, which is your book. But anything else you
want to plug here at the end.
Speaker 3 (46:00):
No, I would. I would love y'allda to buy the book.
Speaker 4 (46:03):
There's so much in there that that I can't talk
about in two episodes.
Speaker 2 (46:08):
Yeah, okay, well you're you're good at this. You should
be a professor. That was one of the main things
I was thinking while you were talking. So well, thank you,
and yeah, what do I have to plug? I have
a book coming out in June. It's called The Immortal
Choir Holds Every Voice. Yeah, it's a it's a It's
(46:28):
book three in the Danielle Kaine series. And if you
want to hear me read the first two, you can
check out Coolszone Media Book Club. So have you got
anything you want to plug?
Speaker 3 (46:40):
Listen to.
Speaker 1 (46:43):
Like, who do I want to plug today?
Speaker 3 (46:45):
It's like picking.
Speaker 1 (46:45):
It's like picking like your favorite child.
Speaker 3 (46:48):
It's horrible.
Speaker 2 (46:49):
I know it could happen here. I don't think we've
plugged them in a while.
Speaker 1 (46:53):
That it could happen here. Yeah, that's nice. That means
there's several children in that.
Speaker 2 (46:57):
There we go. Yeah, that seems nice, multiple of your
children or your favorite child.
Speaker 1 (47:02):
Yeah, let's go with that. Listen to It Could Happen Here,
a daily podcast that talks about the crumbles of society
and how we can make things better for each other.
Speaker 2 (47:13):
I usually feel better when I listen to it. That's
my big plug for it.
Speaker 3 (47:16):
That sounds like a great sentiment.
Speaker 2 (47:18):
Yeah, we'll try, all right, bye everyone.
Speaker 1 (47:27):
Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is a production of
cool Zone Media. For more podcasts on cool Zone Media,
visit our website Coolzonemedia dot com, or check us out
on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get
your podcasts.
Cool Zone Media.
Speaker 2 (00:04):
Hello, and welcome to Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff,
your weekly reminder that we all have to go to
work even though the world's largest military has been taken
over by fascists, or at least that's what it feels
like to me. I'm your host, Margaret Kiljoy. This is
a show about cool people did cool stuff. It's in
the title. But this week we're gonna try yet another
(00:26):
new format. This week, I have a guest on who's
going to explain stuff to me about a book that
she wrote. My guest is Suzanne Cope. Hi, how are you?
Speaker 3 (00:36):
Hi? Am great? Thank you.
Speaker 2 (00:39):
Suzanne Cope is the author of the upcoming book Women
of War, The Italian Assassin, Spies and Couriers Who Fought
the Nazis, which is out on April twenty ninth from
Dutton and you can pre order it now. And I've
never done the like I'm interviewing the author of a
book on this show, but like, and I usually I'll
be real. Usually when I get like emails that are like, hey,
(01:00):
you should totally have this author on your show, I'm like, no,
I shouldn't, but this book was so perfect for you
all the audience. I think you'll like it. You probably
figured that out because it's called Women of War the
Italian Assassin, Spies and couriers who fought the Nazis. That's
just basically like cool people did cool stuff in a
thick hardcover that looks really good. This book profiles for
(01:24):
women anti fascist partisans, all of whom spoiler alert survived
the war, so we get sort of happy endings this
time too, despite taking enormous risks, and also like really
challenging the idea of what it means to be a
frontlines fighter versus a support person and how everyone kind
of does both in a really interesting way. Is that
(01:44):
a fair summation of your book. I don't know.
Speaker 4 (01:48):
Yeah, that sounds great, and I know I love that
you picked up on that because in the epilogue I
mentioned that I don't want to not honor the people
who are doing the support work, but those stories are
just a little less exciting. So I did try to
cover both sides. That the support work was so important,
but also, you know, killing Nazis is really important work too.
Speaker 2 (02:11):
It is really important work speaking of people who don't
do anything criminal. Sophie is our producer, Hi Sophie Hi allegedly, Yeah,
allegedly our producer and our audio engineers, Rory. Everyone wants
to say hi to Rory.
Speaker 1 (02:26):
Hi.
Speaker 2 (02:27):
Rory Hi, Rory Hi.
Speaker 1 (02:28):
Ri.
Speaker 2 (02:29):
Our theme music was written for us by unwoman. So
I'm like, how do we start? Like where do we start?
Do you want to start by maybe talking a little
bit about Italian fascism and like how that came to
be a problem that people decided to try and solve. Sure, Also,
you should tell us about you and then we will
(02:49):
talk about the contents of your book.
Speaker 3 (02:52):
Sure.
Speaker 4 (02:53):
I am a professor at NYU. I teach writing, and
I am a little bit of a taught journalist because
I used a lot of my skills from my social
science degrees and my MFA and creative nonfiction to figure
out how to do this kind of deep dive research.
Speaker 3 (03:13):
And so it was really exciting.
Speaker 4 (03:14):
This is the second book now where I spent a
lot of time in the archives, I interviewed people.
Speaker 3 (03:19):
I went to places.
Speaker 4 (03:20):
And it's always a thrill when folks for my last book,
Power Hungary and this one call me a historian, because.
Speaker 3 (03:26):
Yeah, I think I legitimately am.
Speaker 2 (03:28):
Right now, people sometimes call me a historian, and that's
not technically true, because I don't do much original research.
Every now and then do but I'm mostly using secondary
and tertiary sources. But yeah, you actually are a historian.
This is a history book. You went and looked at
things that other people hadn't put together yet? Is that
a fair way to put it? Like?
Speaker 4 (03:48):
Yes, And I had to do a deep dive into
this time period. I really you know, you think about
what you learned or didn't learn in high school and
middle school. I have a middle school kid, and I'm
thinking he actually hasn't learned a lot about history, and
we learn even less. I've found speaking to a lot
of people in the United States about World War two
(04:11):
or global history if it doesn't have anything to do
with the United States. And so I really had to
educate myself on what was happening in World War two
in Italy at this time, and then of course backtracking
and figuring out what got them to be on the
side of the axis powers.
Speaker 2 (04:28):
Yeah, you mentioned you had a different book. I think
you should plug that other book too, because I think
people will like it. It's a subject we've covered a
lot on this show.
Speaker 3 (04:36):
Excellent.
Speaker 4 (04:37):
Yeah, it's called power Hungry and it's about the women
of the Black Panther Party and Freedom Summer, and this
is the subtitle, and their fight to feed a movement,
and it, you know, everything feels so resonant for our times.
But it's really about these women in these two kind
of side by side movements, but there are characters that
(04:57):
cross over and really bring them together, about women who
were using food as a means for social and political change,
but also as a way to kind of show their power.
But what I found through that book, so you have
the Black Panther Party. They have these free breakfasts for
children that they're most known for, but that was such
a political act and they were really teaching the kids
(05:21):
and the families that this is the way it should be,
Like socialism should be a thing.
Speaker 3 (05:26):
We should we have the food, we should feed people.
Speaker 4 (05:29):
And likewise you have Ellen Quinn and other folks in Macomb, Mississippi,
where they are she was using food as a means
to bring people together and show people they're welcome, but
also to show that people are loved.
Speaker 3 (05:41):
This community is supported.
Speaker 4 (05:43):
And so this book, as I was turning my eye
towards this time period that I had been interested in
in previously, I realized, well, first of all, it's war.
There's not a lot of food, so those stories would
not be as interesting. But also what was what I
found about the power of food and power hungry was
(06:04):
that it really was about feminized skills, about the way
that women were kind of allowed in these circumstances to
show their power. And it wasn't just food. It ended
up being other kind of feminized.
Speaker 3 (06:15):
Ways of power and leadership.
Speaker 4 (06:17):
And so that's the lens that I took to women
of war is how women were able to do a
lot of the things that they could do, like being couriers,
because they were women and they were underestimated and they
were allowed to move around with a little more security
until it was the Nazis and the fascists were like, oh, women,
(06:38):
they're political too, and then the gig was up a
little bit, but yeah, that they didn't lose their nerve
despite that.
Speaker 2 (06:46):
I think it's funny because, as far as I could tell,
everything I've read about a war has women doing courier work,
especially in an occupied kind of area, like the Irish
Revolution had women riding bicycles around Ireland and stuff, delivering
messages and all this, and I'm like, how have people
not caught on? I guess, like misogyny just runs so
(07:07):
deep and the idea of like women can't do anything useful,
Like I don't know.
Speaker 3 (07:11):
Exactly, No, it's so true.
Speaker 4 (07:13):
And there's this story from later in the book this
is not a spoiler, where one of the women, Anita,
is she has this big prisoner and she told I
got the story from her testimony, and so I love
hearing her tell the story. And she's like chomping through
the forest to take him from one camp to another
with this machine gun in his back, and she said.
Speaker 3 (07:34):
He kept stopping and being like, but you are a woman.
You are made to make love.
Speaker 4 (07:39):
She's like, just keep walking, like you couldn't believe it,
this whole wander through the woods.
Speaker 2 (07:48):
Well, that was one thing that actually struck me that
we'll get to you more when we start talking about
this woman that a lot of them were like, oh,
I'm just a courier, and like the if you read
the cliffs notes versions of these women's story like, oh,
a courier, and then you're like, wait, but you also
led a prisoner with a machine gun through the I mean,
I guess you're courier. In a person at this point,
but like.
Speaker 3 (08:07):
Yeah, it's so much more than that. Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 2 (08:09):
So okay, wait with this book and this is just
my own side interest. Did I read or did you
maybe just also talk about did it start as I'm
going to do a food related thing and then you
moved away from that? Is that?
Speaker 3 (08:22):
Well?
Speaker 4 (08:23):
The origin of this book was, and also of Power Hungry?
Was that eight years ago and change. That number is
not a random number. I was looking around at the
protests that were erupting around me, and I was doing
a lot of work around food studies at the time
and thinking about food and culture. And I saw people
(08:45):
I knew were groups I was connected with. They were
feeding immigrants or refugees, were cooking and teaching about their culture.
They were sending pizzas to people who were protesting. And
I thought, okay, these are all great things, but what
were people doing in the past? And so I thought,
I'm going to do this deep dive kind of for myself,
but also, you know, thinking how to share this of
(09:06):
how food was used during these moments of inflection in history.
And so I had this great book proposal I love
that almost sold, that had these five different stories of
food as I call it now, food is a tool
for social and political change. And the feedback I got was,
these stories are great, but people just want to read
(09:27):
American stories now. And so that ellen Quinn story was
the one that was the American story, and so I
pulled that out and that turned into Power Hungry. And
so as soon as that was done and I could
focus on the next project. And this was also, you know,
pandemic was waning. Maybe we could travel again. I thought,
I need to go to Italy. This is where I
want to go for my next book. I just and
(09:48):
plus that story was very compelling. It changed very much
from what I had researched for the original proposal. And
then it turned in yeah, into finding these four different women.
I wasn't even actually Bianca was was kind of in
that version, but I was really focused on her colleague,
Ada Gobetti, who does make an appearance in the book.
And yeah, and so that's and then it morphed in
(10:09):
many ways since since that proposal to this book.
Speaker 2 (10:13):
Because we've done a couple episodes about we haven't done
a lot of episodes about World War two fascist Italy.
We've done a couple episodes about early resistance to fascism
in Italy, and one of them, I don't remember which one.
We talked at length about this thing that I learned
that Mussolini hated pasta.
Speaker 3 (10:30):
What oh, I didn't come across Massolini.
Speaker 2 (10:33):
Thought that pasta was basically like turning the Italians into
soy boys. Was sort of the equivalent, you know. It
was like, oh, it reduces their masculinity. And I think
it relied on imported wheat, and so he was a
big proponent of rice, whereas Italy is the primary exporter
of rice in Europe. Because then the other, okay, the
other story about food in Italy. I'm just I'm very
excited about telling these things. The song Bella Chow was
(10:57):
originally written by the migrant rice workers in northern Italy,
and it wasn't it actually wasn't a partisan song, or
there's no evidence that it was a partisan song. But
it's I don't know anywhere. I did a told two
parter about Belichow, and then we've done a couple episodes,
and I'm just telling you about because say about food history.
It's another food history, another radical food history, and named
(11:21):
ren AWRAI has done episodes with us about food co
ops and a bunch of other stuff.
Speaker 3 (11:27):
Oh I'm a park Slip food co op member.
Speaker 2 (11:29):
Oh okay, cool, Yeah you should go and talk about it, right, Yeah, okay.
We've talked a little bit on this show about the
rise of fascism, and we talked a little bit about
people trying to kill Mussolini. That was the angle of
one of the episodes, with all the people who tried
to kill Mussolini, including some people eventually succeeded at it.
(11:49):
But could you kind of set the scene for us
anyone who hasn't listened to previous episodes, or as you
pointed out, American history doesn't really talk about this very much.
And I actually think that understanding the rise of fascism
in Italy is maybe more important than understanding the rise
of Nazism in Germany in terms of our own immediate situation.
But maybe I'm no, it's miss.
Speaker 3 (12:11):
It's absolutely true.
Speaker 4 (12:12):
Is so post World War One people and this was
happening around the globe. People had traveled, soldiers had traveled,
There was more awareness of what was happening globally, and people.
Speaker 3 (12:25):
Were getting a little, you know, a little more progressive.
Speaker 4 (12:29):
And women were making art and they were in the workforce,
and this was something that yeah, mostly and well a
lot of right wing folks were not so into in Italy,
and so he actually was a pretty liberal guy, and
he flip flopped during World War One and he was
(12:51):
anti war, and then he changed his tune and he
saw that he could kind of rile up this conservative base.
And he was a media guy. He was a newspaperman,
and so he created this his own newspaper that was
catering to this right wing perspective, and he, yeah, whipped
(13:12):
some people up into a frenzy kind of saying, we
need to get rid of this progressive notion. These women
who are in the workforce, maybe their skirts are getting shorter.
Speaker 3 (13:22):
You know, this woke nonsense exactly.
Speaker 4 (13:25):
And so he got a bunch of you know, Squadristi
as they were would come to be known, these kind
of proud boys of Italy, and he threatened to this
is the whole thing. He threatened to march on Rome
and say if you don't, if you basically don't hand
(13:45):
over Rome, hand over the government to me, then I'm
going to set these like couple hundred I think that's
all it was.
Speaker 3 (13:52):
Guys, loose and we'll make you.
Speaker 4 (13:54):
And the king was just this weak dude, and he
was like okay, and he just kind of let him,
let him take it over, and so he you know,
it took a couple of years to fully kind of
grab control of, you know, all aspects of government.
Speaker 3 (14:06):
But he, you know, he was not dealing with a
lot of pushback, and.
Speaker 4 (14:10):
People immediately started to make deals with him, and they thought, oh,
maybe we could work together, and that quickly was you know,
there didn't seem to be very much resistance, and he
quickly shut down. I mean, he just changed the government,
like he started to change what people learned in school.
He was dictating within a couple of years what the
(14:30):
curriculum should be. He was separating schools by gender in
a lot of places, and women girls would learn certain
things and boys would learn other things. And then there
was a lot of indoctrination where kids from the very
youngest ages were I mean, it was voluntary, but there
there's even a couple of stories in the books of
(14:51):
kids whose parents didn't put them in these fascist kids
groups were sometimes punished in other ways, and it was
definitely looked at as being subversive by not putting your
kids in these groups where they learned girls learn to
sew and boys learned to be soldiers, and they were
also indoctrinated with this fascist ideology. But you know, Muslim
was kind of inventing fascism in a way. I mean,
(15:13):
he had these you know, scholarly guys that were helping
him form an ideology. And it was funny when I
was writing there, when I was going through the is
of the book, and there's some quote that said, I'm
going to roughly remember it was like the inherent inequality
of people. And my editor said, oh, this is a typo.
You mean equality, And I'm like.
Speaker 2 (15:34):
No, they said fascists. Yeah, they said.
Speaker 3 (15:38):
It straight up.
Speaker 4 (15:38):
They said, no, people are unequal. That's the way it is.
And so this is what people were taught. And this
is starting in the early nineteen twenties. So the folks
in this book, the people who were in their twenties
during World War Two, they had been completely brought up
under this system. And even if your parents, like one
woman today's a matte, her parents were the most outspoken
(16:01):
out of these four families. And you know, so she
was taught what was going on as far as like
taught anti fascist ideology. But the other women, it turns
out their families didn't support fascism and did things that
were would be considered anti fascist, but they didn't. They
kind of had to come to their own political understanding
on their own because their parents were so afraid to
(16:23):
tell them. They're afraid they would, you know, say something
at school or or that they would in some way
be found out because they were kids and the whole
family would be punished.
Speaker 2 (16:33):
Because I'd actually several of them did that as kids.
They like said anti fascist stuff and got in trouble, right.
Speaker 3 (16:39):
Well, I mean kind of you know Anita where.
Speaker 4 (16:42):
She was, you know, kind of admitted, you know, she's like,
I'm not in this, in this you know, little fascist program.
Speaker 3 (16:48):
And she came home and she's like, mom, I got
in trouble. I didn't win this.
Speaker 4 (16:52):
Award I was supposed to win because they said I
wasn't a fascist. And her mom just her mom slapped
her and said, now I'll give you something to cry
about it. And she didn't realized for many years later
that it was her mother protecting her. And yeah, and
so she very much she didn't even tell her parents
when she did join the resistance. She didn't tell her
parents until she had to escape into the hills, and
(17:13):
they were they were shocked that she had been doing this.
Speaker 2 (17:17):
So what happened with like what happened to because Italy
immediately before the rise of fascism was full of socialist,
communists and anarchists. It was like one of the hot
beds of the internationalists left right, and then fascism takes over.
I've read about individuals who fucked off and went to
(17:37):
France or you know. I think some people went to
you know, the US and all of these things, right,
but did most people just kind of shut up to
try and stay alive and then come out more when
they when they got to be partisans when the tide
starts turning.
Speaker 4 (17:52):
I mean, I think most people capitulated, you know, and yeah,
they the ways. And I didn't research this greatly, but
of course it came up a lot. But it seems
like when you know, you have someone who people who
maybe were still trying to publish anti fascist publications early
in Mussolini's reign and he had, you know, quickly taken
(18:12):
control of the major publications, and then you have some
folks who are like, well, I'm going to I'm going
to publish what I want to say that I'm against you,
And they would be punished in various ways. Yeah, you know,
they might be maybe if they had another job, they
would be threatened with losing their job, or they would
lose their job.
Speaker 3 (18:32):
A lot of times, he'd liked to send people.
Speaker 4 (18:34):
To confinement in Kiinfino, where they just sent all these
radicals on a kind of a semi deserted island and
they just kind of hung out in this island for
a couple of years, and people could even visit them,
like their families could come visit them for a while,
and they lived in a little house. But his whole
thing was like, oh, I don't kill people. I just
you know, disappear them for a little bit, or lock
(18:56):
them up, or I forced them to Lackey's forced them
to drink castor oil. That was a favorite punishment that
they held you down and made you.
Speaker 3 (19:06):
Chug castor oil.
Speaker 4 (19:07):
So there was a lot of ways where yeah, you
were just intimidated into being quiet, and people they just
shut up for all of these yeah, all of these reasons,
and people like Terisa Matte's father, they also had this
interesting balancing act. And I did ask a couple scholars
about this who knew a lot about it, because I
was so confused. I'm like, well, how come her father,
(19:28):
for example, Mugo Matte, how come he was allowed to
like how was he a known anti fascist? And it
was this balance of allowing people to speak out enough
as long as he wasn't too influential. Because my feeling is,
and you know what other folks have said is that
when maybe people would have revolted if there were too
(19:50):
many people disappearing, right, So it was almost there's a
little balance you could let people, you know, almost seem
like some people could get away with speaking out. Yeah,
but it seemed like it's this very strange balance that
also was not an exact science.
Speaker 3 (20:05):
Yeah, And so there was some anti fascism that still existed.
Speaker 4 (20:10):
And Terrees's family, for example, they were friends with a
lot of intellectuals like in Italian Ginsburg and the Olavetti's
who made the typewriters, and the Rosselli brothers, and they,
you know, they met for a while, they would do
things to kind of meet in secret.
Speaker 3 (20:27):
Some of these people ended up dead.
Speaker 4 (20:29):
So it was like, when, at what point are you
crossing the line where they you kind of don't know
at what point you might cross the line and end
up end up dead.
Speaker 2 (20:38):
Well, do you know what won't leave you dead? It's
the product and services that support this show. They'll all
keep you alive forever. If you use any of these products,
you will live forever. I think it's the thing I
can legally declare about the products. Here's ads and we're back. Okay,
(21:07):
So fascism takes over. The resistance gets real diminished after
some people try some spicy stuff. At the beginning, there's
a bunch of people try and kill Mussolini from various
different political positions.
Speaker 3 (21:21):
See episode number.
Speaker 2 (21:23):
Yeah, yeah, exactly. I never remember the episode numbers, but
I went over a lot of them. There was the
cool religious lady, Irish lady, and then there was the
you know, a whole lot of anarchists, and I think
some communists got in there and tried to kill them too.
Clearly none of them succeeded until later. But when does
partisan resistance start kicking off, or rather does partisan resistance
(21:47):
only start kicking off kind of once the war starts
turning against Italy.
Speaker 4 (21:52):
Oh yeah, so the folks who were part of this resistance.
A lot of them went underground. They stopped, yeah, doing
things publicly. Maybe they were still connected with each other.
You know, probably if I did a deep dive or
even a medium dive, I would you know, could find
a lot of stories of folks like, for example, someone
that today's Mitte worked with. He was active when he
(22:13):
was in his twenties, and since he was in his
thirties during the war. This was, you know, midway during
his reign, Mussolini's reign, so he certainly was doing something.
Speaker 2 (22:22):
And so people were doing stuff, just not to the
same degree.
Speaker 3 (22:25):
Okay, exactly exactly.
Speaker 4 (22:27):
And so what happened was when there was this period
of time where Hitler goes to war. Everyone knows that
Mussolini and Hitler are friends. There's all this rumbling that
Italy is going to side and join the war as well.
And I mean this was everybody, even Mussolini's buddies, told him, like,
this is a bad idea. We do not have the infrastructure,
(22:49):
we don't have the money for this. We're not gonna
be ready to go to war for.
Speaker 3 (22:52):
A couple of years. We need to like kind of
ramp up production.
Speaker 4 (22:54):
And you know, he was pressured by Hitler to become
a member the Axis forces, and so he joins the war.
Italy joins the war, and it was instantly unpopular Italians.
Speaker 3 (23:07):
They didn't believe in what they were fighting for.
Speaker 4 (23:09):
They had been doing all these other military things that
they also didn't really believe in. At one point in
the mid thirties, Mussolani invades Ethiopia because he said, you know,
make Italy great again, bring back the Roman Empire.
Speaker 2 (23:23):
Yeah, wanted to be an empire again.
Speaker 3 (23:25):
Yeah, yeah, bring back the Roman Empire.
Speaker 4 (23:27):
But basically it was all the gist of that, and
so people were just not down with it. They're young
men are dying, they're under you know, under all these rationing,
and they just hate it. And so people were very
he was losing even what little popularity had, you know,
despite people were not big fans of him for a
long time, but they kind of were cowed into being like,
all right, he's our leader, he's keeping us.
Speaker 3 (23:48):
Maybe he'll keep us out of war.
Speaker 4 (23:50):
And then when he couldn't even keep them out of war,
that's really when his popularity started to decline. And then
life got more difficult for people in Italy. And then
there's this one moment that I think is kind of
a key moment. I don't think it's the only key moment,
but I think there's a couple moments like this that
happened that galvanized more and more people. So in March
of nineteen forty three, Italy had been in war for
(24:12):
a while and Bianca Guidetti Serra, she is, you know,
twenty something year old and Turin to Reno, and she
is kind of like a social worker where she was
studying law, but she got a job as a social
worker where she's going to these factories like the Fiat factory,
and she's you know, talking to all of these families
and you know, the husband died the sun.
Speaker 3 (24:33):
You know, they haven't heard from me in forever.
Speaker 4 (24:35):
The women are there working, trying to make money to
feed their kids. They're working these long hours, have horrible rations,
paid less than the man doing the same job, you know,
totally legally in the system. And you know, even the
men there were were just unhappy. And all of the
stuff that they're making, it's all going towards this war.
Speaker 3 (24:53):
That they hate.
Speaker 4 (24:55):
And so a handful of folks organized by the communists,
a very deep underground Communist party. They went on strike,
they went out and did this protest.
Speaker 3 (25:07):
Didn't last very long.
Speaker 2 (25:08):
But this is like the first one in like twenty
years or something.
Speaker 3 (25:10):
Right exactly.
Speaker 4 (25:11):
And so they're standing outside of the Fiat factory and
Bianca hears about it, and she's like, I have to
go see this with my own eyes.
Speaker 3 (25:18):
She's just so shocked. And this was really the moment
that she and I'm going to.
Speaker 4 (25:23):
Project but I think fairly that many other people said, oh,
we can stand up, we could do this, and they
you know, some of them might have gotten arrested. They
I mean, they weren't all killed for doing this. They
weren't all jailed. They were kind of sent back to work.
Nothing major happened. And so this was really the moment
that people saw that they could stand up.
Speaker 3 (25:44):
And they also saw, and this is what I think
is so important.
Speaker 4 (25:47):
About these kind of public actions, they also saw that
other people felt the same way. Yeah, So it was
just this you know, kind of snowball effect of a
lot of it was quiet. But I think from the
testimony I've read and what I've heard that kind of
not directly from that moment, but around this time, these
kind of things were happening where people were starting to
stand up for themselves. They were so fed up, and
(26:09):
it led to Mussolini being deposed. He was kicked out
of leadership by the king, who is pretty weak, and
they put in this other guy who was basically, you know,
a minor fascist, and then he dilly dally's This was
in I think it was July twenty fifth, but I
had to double check that date.
Speaker 3 (26:27):
Nineteen forty three.
Speaker 4 (26:28):
When Mussolini is deposed, and then Badolio, who is now
the leader, he doesn't he want He's negotiating terms of surrender.
I mean, Italy has been on the bad side of
history for decades, right, and now he's like, maybe I
can get a good deal as we surrender. And what
happens while he's dilly deallying is the Germans are pissed,
so they just start sending all of these soldiers into Italy.
(26:54):
They're occupying Italy for forty five days, and people are
kind of raising the alarm, like, hey.
Speaker 3 (27:00):
Should you maybe be stopping this?
Speaker 4 (27:02):
Do you know that there's just train loads of German
soldiers just going by at all times, And Vaduli is like, eh,
you know, it's not my problem. And then the moment
the armistice, the surrender is announced, fighting breaks out and
Germany's like, hey, we have occupied Italy, right, And so
that's the moment. During those forty five days when there
(27:24):
was kind of this vacuum of power, a lot of
the folks came out of the woodwork, people who were
in jail, political prisoners, they came out and started organizing.
They had already been organizing in jail, and now they're
organizing with other folks that people know that they need
to do something like, hey, we've been waiting for the
war to end, but I don't know is the war over.
We don't even know what's going on. So people got
activated in that time period. And then as soon as
(27:45):
the Nazis took over, of course now you get the
sense that being politically active is now suddenly very dangerous.
But people also understood that their their freedom and their
future was at stake, and so a lot of these
grew stayed active. And what happened too was a lot
of the men, particularly young men, They instituted a new
(28:06):
draft of people who are going to be forced to
be in this new new fascist army, and a lot
of people had defected from the previous Italian army, but
if you were still a part of the army, then
you are now officially on basically germany side. And so
if you were escaping this army or also they were
taking people off the street and sending them to Germany
(28:28):
just to basically work as labor. And so these folks
are like, screw you all, I'm not going to just
do what you tell me. Yeah, basically are a punk song
that says that I'm going to make my well. First
they were just hiding out in the you know, in
the mountains, in old barns, and then they're like, we're
going to come together and they're going to form their
(28:48):
own resistance army. And so that's what happened over the
couple months after Germany occupied Italy, starting at the beginning
of September nineteen forty three.
Speaker 2 (29:00):
It's fascinating to me because when I had my little
sort of impression prior to doing more deep dives into
Italian stuff, and I didn't know a quarter of what
you just told me, but you have the sort of
impression that you're like, oh, as soon as there's fascism,
there's partisans, right, Because in France, you can kind of
say that right as soon as the Vshi government takes over,
people are like, well, we don't like this, we don't
(29:20):
like fascism. We're going to take to the hills and
start fighting. And I'd always sort of imagined that in
Italy that as soon as the war had started, people
would take to the mountains and start fighting. But the
thing that you're describing makes so much more sense and
is what actually happened, which is once they're occupied by
(29:40):
another country, than they formed partisans and start fighting. And
that's it's interesting to me. I'm like a little sad
because I wanted to Italy to just be really fighty
and never put up with fascism, you know. But then
it also is interesting because then you're talking about so
some of the partisans were in the Italian Army while
it was an Axis power, so they were acts as
(30:01):
soldiers who then also then fought on the other side,
and that's fascinating.
Speaker 4 (30:07):
Yeah, well, you know, I went through kind of my
own awakening around that where you tend to think, yeah,
that as soon as something unjust is happening, that suddenly
people rise up and they're like, yes, we will fight
this thing.
Speaker 3 (30:23):
But yeah, movements don't come fully formed, right, and especially.
Speaker 4 (30:27):
When you have what was unique about what was happening
in Italy and a lot of historians, you know, call
it a war on two fronts, is that you had
a people who were fighting the Nazis, fighting World War two,
but they were also fighting for their own freedom.
Speaker 3 (30:43):
They were fighting a civil war.
Speaker 4 (30:44):
So you had plenty of Italians who were siding with
the fashions, siding with the Nazis, people who were like,
even if they weren't explicitly political, they thought, well, if
I tell in my neighbor, maybe I won't get looked at,
you know, Or if I can continue, you know, being
a night watchman or whatever and putting up with their agenda,
maybe I'll get better rations. And so you had plenty
(31:06):
of people who it wasn't an ideological choice, it was
just made their life easier to kind of side with
the guys who seemed to have power. And then you
had a lot of people who just most of the
people just tried to, you know, just just lay low
and not you know, even if they felt one way
or the other, they just didn't want to get involved.
And then you really only had a relatively small percentage
of people who were actively fighting who were part of
(31:27):
the movement. And what was so necessary is that as
the occupation went on, as we moved towards the end
of World War two, is you had more and more
people supporting the movement. And it was so necessary because obviously,
if you are fighting an entire army, you're much you know,
you're less resourced than the Nazis, but they were incredibly
(31:50):
scrappy for what they were able to accomplish despite the
fact that they were so under resourced.
Speaker 2 (31:55):
Well, I mean, if there's if you're ever the under
resourced army, you should be on your own territory and
in the mountain. Those are the two things you want.
Maybe swamps inaccessible and your own that's that's the territory
you want, you.
Speaker 3 (32:07):
Know, the paths.
Speaker 4 (32:08):
And then like the old lady up the street, you
know she's gonna hide you under her bails of Hey,
I mean these are ye like real like those are
the real stories.
Speaker 2 (32:15):
Well, let's let's hear some of the real stories. Do
you want to tell me about? Well, I'm going to
say some of them, but eventually I'm going to make
you tell me about all of the women that are
profiled in your book. But as Sophie has pointed out
to me, before we start profiling them, what we should
really profile is the fact that everything's moral compromise. Here's
(32:36):
ads and we're back.
Speaker 1 (32:46):
Uh.
Speaker 2 (32:46):
Do you want to tell me about some of the
some of these folks.
Speaker 3 (32:49):
Sure.
Speaker 4 (32:49):
So the woman on the front of the book of
which all of your listeners are going to go out
and find this book. I'm looking at the book right now.
So the woman with the cigarette. But don't smoke people.
Speaker 2 (33:01):
Unless you're about to die in a war, and then
you're allowed one cigarette exactly.
Speaker 3 (33:05):
I mean, they didn't know how bad cigarettes were, right, Yeah.
Speaker 2 (33:07):
And all these women survived the war, so really they
had no excuse.
Speaker 3 (33:10):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (33:10):
Anyway, I mean, sorry, Carla did get cancer, but I
don't know if it was Lincoln anyway, She this is
Carla Caponi, And I mean I can't well, I can't
play favorites, but she does.
Speaker 3 (33:22):
Have some really great moments.
Speaker 2 (33:25):
She's the fightiest of them, right yeah.
Speaker 4 (33:28):
Yeah, and she's well she's the gorilla fighter. Who is
who's right you know, in front of people like hiding
around buildings and things where you have Anita who will
get to is in the mountains fighting. But Carla, so
she's brought up. Her dad dies when she's in high school,
and she finds out kind of near the end of
his life that he was pretty anti fascist, because this
(33:50):
is the in and you know, a roundabout way that
he died.
Speaker 3 (33:53):
He was in mine. He was a mining executive.
Speaker 4 (33:55):
They had they had a decent amount of money, and
the fascist already wanted him to join the fat at
some party organization, and he refused, and so they got
mad at him and they sent him, i think, to
Albania and he ends up dying in a mining accident.
And so she's like, you know, of course upset about this,
and so she's kind of, you know, she knows that
(34:17):
her family has been kind of priming her to be
anti fascist her whole life.
Speaker 3 (34:21):
But she didn't really know what to do.
Speaker 4 (34:23):
And so in the very beginning, in fact, it's the
first it's in the prologue, the first scene of the book,
the Allies bomb Italy because of course Italy's on the
other side, and they bomb Rome the rally ards that
are right near the Tairmany station, and so she's working
pretty close by and she just is motivated. She's like,
(34:44):
I need to do something, and she's you know, dressed
very nicely, like she'd liked to be a little fancy,
and she just goes to where all this destruction happens
and she starts to you know, help out.
Speaker 3 (34:56):
And so this is kind of the first moment.
Speaker 4 (34:58):
And then this is before Musolini was deposed, and then
a couple of days later, actually about a week a
little over a week later, Mussolini is now kicked out,
and so now she starts to connect in those that
forty five day period, which is known as.
Speaker 3 (35:10):
The forty five days convenient I know exactly.
Speaker 4 (35:14):
So between when Mussolini's deposed and the armistice happens and
the Germans take over, that forty five day period is
when a lot happened. So she connects with a lot
of particularly women in the in the movement, and so
they're teaching her things that she never learned. She didn't
know about, you know, what was happening in the Russian Revolution,
(35:35):
she didn't know it. Have really had very much political
education at all, and so political education was so important
for all of these women.
Speaker 3 (35:41):
They all have their own moments of political.
Speaker 4 (35:43):
Education, and part of it is the actual history and
knowing about these different structures of you know, like what
is the communists and you know, reading these books, like
you know, books by Marx that were just very hard
to come across in Italy. I mean, I don't know
if they were outright banned, but I think they were
just very much suppressed. And so when they you know,
(36:06):
reading these things and like, oh my god, I have
this whole new understanding of this world because for so
many of these women and the Italians more broadly, they
just didn't know very much what life was like outside
of Italy because what do you.
Speaker 3 (36:20):
Do if you're an authoritarian government? You just try to
ignore history or.
Speaker 2 (36:24):
Change it and limit education and exactly.
Speaker 4 (36:29):
And so she gets hooked up with these resistance folks,
and then after the occupation she is kind of employed
to do some of this career ing that people start
publishing a lot of these underground newspapers, and so she
helps to bring those around.
Speaker 3 (36:46):
She's bringing information.
Speaker 4 (36:47):
It's basically an information network, these couriers where they would
you know, they all have these little cells or these
groups all around the city, and so they'd go and
get news and bring news and then bring them back
and she gets hooked up with the Gapesti and these
are the Gorilla fighters. And originally it was just dudes,
of course, but they realize that it's quite handy because
(37:08):
these guys are being snatched off the streets, especially young men.
Speaker 3 (37:11):
They might not have.
Speaker 4 (37:12):
Been they might have been a little old to be drafted,
but certainly they would be under suspicion. You have some
guys just standing in the square, I don't know, watching
Nazis walk by. So they needed the women to kind of,
you know, make kissy face at them on the park
bench and.
Speaker 3 (37:29):
Pretend that they were young lovers. And so that's what
they did.
Speaker 4 (37:33):
The women wear their cover, but she ends up, you know,
being an active member, and they would go into for example,
there might be a bunch of fascist trucks parked outside
of the Opera, which is very close to her house.
This was the fun part about researching this is that,
I mean, Rome has been roughly the same for a
(37:53):
really long time, and so I could.
Speaker 3 (37:55):
Map where she was and where all of.
Speaker 4 (37:58):
These places were, and so I went to this, you know,
I go to these squares where I know, eighty one
two years ago things were bombed, and you could.
Speaker 3 (38:06):
Just in some pieces exactly.
Speaker 4 (38:09):
In some cases you could see the marks still on
the buildings.
Speaker 3 (38:12):
It was really really wild, and so they would place
she and.
Speaker 2 (38:17):
Wait, wait I kind of spoiled it. But what happened?
She goes to the opera house and what oh, and then.
Speaker 3 (38:21):
She and her her this.
Speaker 4 (38:23):
Guy who ends up being her partner in in the
CAPSI do you know, I'd have to look up the
exact I mean they were called like the Yeah, it's
a it's an abbreviation GAP.
Speaker 2 (38:36):
That could be oh, the action probably.
Speaker 3 (38:41):
Yeah, something like that.
Speaker 4 (38:43):
And so she and her partner would put the bombs.
They have these sticky bombs that they would stick on
the trucks and then they'd have to light the fuse
and then basically run away before it blew up.
Speaker 2 (38:56):
So she's stuck smoking. I mean, if you're going to
go I don't smoke, and no one's just smoking. But
if you're stock putting sticky bombs in the fuse, I mean.
Speaker 4 (39:03):
You have to have matches, right, I mean yeah, yeah,
so they would, you know, they did different actions like this,
and there's a couple really dramatic.
Speaker 3 (39:11):
Ones and.
Speaker 4 (39:14):
So yeah, so she's kind of moving around Rome and
things are getting really desperate, and she becomes you know,
full on part of these partisans, and they her her
partisan group. I mean there's a different cells of capzies around,
but you know, a couple of books that she would
work with. I mean she you know, she assassinates someone
at one point, and then they planned this audacious act
(39:36):
where they're going to place this giant bomb. And they've
been watching this German battalion that would go take this
trek every day, and so they place this bomb and
it ends up having very dramatic and it makes them
totally This is they're now marked people. They are now
on the hunt because they've killed so many Germans. And
(39:57):
then someone gives.
Speaker 3 (39:58):
Them away a very I don't even want to spoil
this part of the story. And so they go on
the run.
Speaker 2 (40:04):
Okay, okay, that's fair. You should you should intentionally leave
some things to make sure that the listeners become readers.
Speaker 3 (40:11):
Yeah, story is so crazy.
Speaker 4 (40:13):
And then the amazing part is when they're I mean
this whole it was interesting, this whole part on the run.
You know, I'm getting things from Carla wrote a memoir
and her her partner in partner in crime. He wrote
multiple memoirs.
Speaker 2 (40:27):
And so I called the gap.
Speaker 4 (40:30):
Sorry, and so yeah, so I'm getting these stories from
a lot of different places, but yeah, someone betrays them
and they have to go on the run. But it's
this is still this is the via Rosella attacks that
I'm talking about, and it's still very controversial because the
Nazi retribution was pretty.
Speaker 3 (40:47):
Awful after that.
Speaker 4 (40:49):
But what pisses me off about this is that they're
mad that the Partisans did an action during war that
was against the people who were terrorizing, and they were saying, oh,
you should have known.
Speaker 2 (41:02):
That they would have done a reprisal.
Speaker 4 (41:04):
Yeah, And I'm like, that's victim blaming people. I mean,
this is a time of war. This is what you
need to doe.
Speaker 2 (41:10):
That is one of the most common stories in radical
history and just normal history and going about your life
is the like who are you more mad at? Are
you more mad at the fascists or the anti fascists
who are trying to stop the fascists, and like whether
or not you approve of the specific action, although that
action's that sounds totally normal, Like I just think about
it where you're like, the Allies are dropping bombs on
(41:32):
the city.
Speaker 3 (41:33):
And you're gonna be mad at yeah.
Speaker 2 (41:37):
Like I don't even think bombing civilian centers is ethical,
but I'm not. I'm glad I'm not in charge of
a military you know. Yes, But like I was reading
besides a little bit of your book, I read the
auto translation of the Wikipedia from Italian cup. None of
the good stuff is in the English Wikipedia, and I
was just reading about like, yeah, she would just like
(41:59):
go out at night and shoot random people, not random,
she would go shoot Nazis in the back at night,
but then felt really bad about it. It seems to
be there.
Speaker 4 (42:07):
There was one moment that I do detail in the book.
I don't know if she went around at least she
I don't think she would around.
Speaker 3 (42:13):
Not for my research she did.
Speaker 2 (42:15):
Your research is so much more likely than an auto
translation of an I don't use Wikipedia as a source
in this show. I just was trying to read about
this before I interviewed you.
Speaker 3 (42:23):
This was there was a moment.
Speaker 4 (42:24):
It was her first killing, and and she did feel
very bad, but she realized that this is this is
what you need to do. I mean, here are people
who are you know, killing so many Jewish people who
are killing, targeting her friends, terrorizing the entire city, the
entire you know, much of the world section of the world.
(42:47):
And she realized she made peace with it herself. She's like,
I can't I can't feel bad about this. This is
this is warm and this is what I have to do.
Speaker 2 (42:53):
Yeah, I mean, you're saving lives at that point, exactly.
You know, it is a net gain of human life
in that particular situation. I'm not making great and statements
more broadly, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 4 (43:02):
And so Rome is the first because if you're imagining how,
you know, how Italy is being liberated, you had the Allies.
They they landed in Sicily first, actually before MUSSLINI was deposed,
just southern Italy exactly, and then they started then they
then they made it their way to the mainland south
of Rome, but it took them forever to get to Rome,
(43:23):
and so Rome wasn't liberated until how many eight nine
months after they were originally occupied. And so now you
have the Allies coming up from the south. And you know,
even for people who have visited Italy, and I mean
I had visited a number of times before I was
doing this research, and it wasn't until this research where
(43:43):
I realized.
Speaker 3 (43:44):
Italy is full of mountains. There's many mountain ranges.
Speaker 4 (43:47):
And you know, usually you're going to these cities and
you're just like, oh, maybe I went through a mountain,
but you don't think about it because the trains, you know,
they go through mountains, and so it's really hard to
rain when when the Allies are coming, you know, up
northward from the south.
Speaker 3 (44:02):
And then they also were getting distracted.
Speaker 4 (44:04):
They don't necessarily care that much about liberating Italy because
Italy they were the bad guys anyway, so they didn't
have this great opinion of the Italian folks, and they weren't.
Speaker 2 (44:16):
Everyone was completely anti racist on the Ally side. You
must have misread something somewhere along the way. It wasn't
a segregated US army. I don't know what you're talking about.
Everyone had yeah.
Speaker 3 (44:26):
We're sorry, we're all friends, we work together.
Speaker 4 (44:28):
So it took a while for these for the Italian
Partisans who are now you know, they're they're obviously on
the same side as the Allies, like let's all just
you know, kill these Nazis, and it took a little
while for them to have the trust of the Allies.
And also they really could have used some more guns
and maybe some winter coats and stuff. They didn't have
a lot of supplies, and so you know, it took
(44:50):
a little bit for the Allies to start to give
them more more resources, and they would do drops into,
you know, in fields and stuff in this very you know,
interesting co orinated way that I talk about using secret
code words.
Speaker 2 (45:03):
And so if you need to know how to coordinate
that kind of thing, you're going to have to read.
Speaker 3 (45:07):
The book exactly if you want to do secret jobs.
Speaker 4 (45:10):
And so they but they eventually were making their way northward,
but it took much longer than you would think. So
Italy was the first place to be liberated at the
beginning of June nineteen.
Speaker 3 (45:19):
Forty four, and then it would take a while.
Speaker 4 (45:21):
Florence was next, and maybe we could talk about today's.
Speaker 2 (45:25):
A well, I was thinking that probably we should talk
about today's on Wednesday. That sounds great, But instead we're
going to leave people here in this land of they
don't know what's going to happen. Well they do, they
know that Italy is going to get liberated, but you
don't know what Today's is going to do. And I
would have said, Teresa, so I'm really glad that you
(45:46):
told me how to pronounce her name. So that's our cliffhanger.
We're going to learn about more people. But first, well,
I guess there's at least one thing you probably want
to plug, which is your book. But anything else you
want to plug here at the end.
Speaker 3 (46:00):
No, I would. I would love y'allda to buy the book.
Speaker 4 (46:03):
There's so much in there that that I can't talk
about in two episodes.
Speaker 2 (46:08):
Yeah, okay, well you're you're good at this. You should
be a professor. That was one of the main things
I was thinking while you were talking. So well, thank you,
and yeah, what do I have to plug? I have
a book coming out in June. It's called The Immortal
Choir Holds Every Voice. Yeah, it's a it's a It's
(46:28):
book three in the Danielle Kaine series. And if you
want to hear me read the first two, you can
check out Coolszone Media Book Club. So have you got
anything you want to plug?
Speaker 3 (46:40):
Listen to.
Speaker 1 (46:43):
Like, who do I want to plug today?
Speaker 3 (46:45):
It's like picking.
Speaker 1 (46:45):
It's like picking like your favorite child.
Speaker 3 (46:48):
It's horrible.
Speaker 2 (46:49):
I know it could happen here. I don't think we've
plugged them in a while.
Speaker 1 (46:53):
That it could happen here. Yeah, that's nice. That means
there's several children in that.
Speaker 2 (46:57):
There we go. Yeah, that seems nice, multiple of your
children or your favorite child.
Speaker 1 (47:02):
Yeah, let's go with that. Listen to It Could Happen Here,
a daily podcast that talks about the crumbles of society
and how we can make things better for each other.
Speaker 2 (47:13):
I usually feel better when I listen to it. That's
my big plug for it.
Speaker 3 (47:16):
That sounds like a great sentiment.
Speaker 2 (47:18):
Yeah, we'll try, all right, bye everyone.
Speaker 1 (47:27):
Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is a production of
cool Zone Media. For more podcasts on cool Zone Media,
visit our website Coolzonemedia dot com, or check us out
on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get
your podcasts.
Host
Margaret Killjoy
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