Hello and thank you for downloading witness from the BBC World Service.

Today we're going back to September 1943, the height of World War II and the beginning

of the Partisans' Struggle against fascist role in Italy.

I'm Elita Joya and I've been talking to an Italian brother and sister

who fought with the partisans right up to the moment Benito Mussolini was killed. We were fed up with the fascists.

We were fed up with the fascists.

We were fed up with the fascists and everything they stood for,

so we had to take up arms I can recall every single

horrible moment of those days.

This is a former Italian partisan who was always known as partisan arturo.

He's well into his 90s, but when I met him in his hilltop village in Northern Italy,

he told me he'd still prefer not to use his real name.

In some part of the country, hatred from this period in Italian history still runs deep. steam.

It was cold up there in the mountains.

It was cold up there in the mountains. We were hiding in holes underneath the ground.

We would stay there for days, even weeks. A friend of mine used to snore.

We had to keep him awake during the night because we were afraid the

fascist patrolling the area would hear him and find us. We could hear them walking up and

down over our heads. We had to stay silent.

Musilini's fascists had been in power for more than 20 years

when Italy surrendered to the Allies in September 1943.

But the fight for Italy was far from over. The Allies launched a land invasion from the

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