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