In December, the Germans had killed two old farmers at Santa Giusta near Torricella. The men, Giuseppe Campana and Casimiro Di Pomponio, had complained about their animals being stolen, and they just shot them, there and then, outside their farmhouses. They used to amuse themselves by shooting people from a long way away, using rifles with telescopic sights. That’s how they shot Giuseppe Taraborelli, just for fun. We put him on a stretcher and carried him across the fields to Casoli. He survived. He died a few years later. They also shot another of the refugees, a man called Tilli.

Some men in the village decided to organise themselves. Every day a patrol consisting of two German soldiers passed through Santa Giusta on their way from the Madonna delle Rose to the farmhouse belonging to Vincenzo D’Ulisse in the village of Di Contre near Lama dei Peligni, and then back to the village. Nicola Di Luzio and three or four of his friends positioned themselves near a farmhouse, armed with two shotguns and a rifle that Di Luzio must have stolen from the carabinieri barracks at Torricella, and waited for the two to come by. The Germans, one an officer, the other an ordinary soldier, had stopped at the Campana farm and had taken some chickens. They put them in a sack and tied it to the saddle of their donkey. The soldier went ahead, leading the donkey, and the officer followed behind, carrying a machine gun. I was on a hill above and could see everything. Di Luzio took aim with the rifle and fired: the officer leapt backwards, hit in the face. The soldier let the donkey go and jumped into a ditch. But Di Luzio knew the area well and he went round the back of the ditch and shot the soldier too. They buried the bodies there. My father took their identity tags to the British in Casoli.

The next day, a man from Torricella, who was a fascist, went to Santa Giusta and said: "What have you done! Just wait and see what they do to you!". The Germans began shooting from the hill above Santa Giusta. They shot at the houses and everything but they didn’t hit anybody. Everybody ran off, down to the valley. I went to round up the cows below mount Sant’Agata and I took them to San Pasino, to Mascetta’s barn. I took them in and stayed there myself too, with my donkey and the donkey the Germans had taken. All this happened on December 27. The next day, we all fled to Sant’Agata and Picianesi.

My family had taken shelter at Colle Carbone, which today is called Arcamona. The farmhouse was owned by Domenico Lannutti, my future father-in-law. There was me, my mother, my father, my sister Maria, my brother Silvio and his wife Angela Di Paolo, aunt Rosa, our cousin Emilia Pellicciotta and her daughter Adriana Coladonato. Mario and Antonio, two other brothers, had joined the patriots. Di Luzio became a patriot too.

On January 19 the patriots sent a patrol to Santa Giusta to intercept a German patrol that passed each day from Madonna delle Rose to the D’Ulisse farmhouse. The British told the patriots to shoot the Germans, which they did. At Sant’Agata, which is directly opposite Santa Giusta, there were lots of refugees from Torricella, and the Germans shelled them. A cousin of mine, Anna Pellicciotta, took her young daughter to the Lalli Persiani’s farmhouse (where Giovanni delle Fischie was tenant), and so she was saved from what happened later. My aunt came to see us on the evening of January 20. She said she was going to Sant’Agata to make bread at Anna’s, though she wasn’t there any more, but she didn’t know that. That evening, my brothers Mario and Antonio arrived too, to stay for a few days. Nicola Santarielle, from Torricella, was with them. The Germans burned our farmhouses at Santa Giusta on January 19 and 20. Silvio said: "Tomorrow morning we’ll go back to the house to get some food, before the Germans take everything". In fact, we had already been back several times: we came and went before dawn because there was snow lying and you could see the tracks from a distance. Nicola Santarielle wanted to come with us too. We set off about 4 in the morning on January 21. I went ahead on the track through the snow. Silvio followed, then Maria, Angela and Nicola. Just before we got to Sant’Agata I heard a noise in the bushes, between the mule track and the path we were to take. It’s probably an animal, I said, and I stopped. Silvio went ahead. Nicola stopped there: he had a sort of premonition and he stayed behind. Out of the bushes came about twenty soldiers armed with machine guns and rifles, and hand grenades hanging from their belts. They searched us and left two soldiers to keep us under guard and the rest went on towards the farmhouses at Sant’Agata. We said: "Let us go: we’ve got to go and get food!". They replied: "We have to wait for the sergeant to give us the order". Then we heard the bombs and the shooting at Sant’Agata. They made us lie down, and they lay down themselves. Bullets whistled overhead. After half an hour, two soldiers came back and spoke to the two who had stayed with us. They made us move off. I heard the word: "Kaputt!". We had our backs to them. They pointed their guns at us. I threw myself into the bushes, hid behind an olive tree, then fled. They started shooting and as I ran I heard my brother cry. They had shot him in the head, together with his wife Angela and our sister Maria. Then they took their bodies and threw them over a precipice. I took a long way back to the farmhouse and told my parents what had happened. We got as far away as we could.

As soon as it was light, you could see the smoke from Sant’Agata: they had burned everything. Later that day we went to find our dead. My father had three coffins made by Peppe di Mastr’Annibale, and we buried them in Gessopalena.

At Sant’Agata, the majority of the dead had been burned and were unrecognisable. They had burned like candles, because the Germans had thrown some incendiary liquid over them.

After everything that happened, Nicola Santarielle got a sort of cold fever, and he died the following year.