I dug some holes near home and buried two chests of drawers and two demijohns of oil. Mastro Donato had made the chests for me when I got married. I still have them and they’re still in good condition. After they blew up the houses, all the farmhouses in Pastini were packed with refugees, perhaps a hundred people or so. They came from the village and asked us if we could put them up: "We’ve got nothing left", they told us. Between me and my brother, we put up two extra families. We all slept together in a single room - some sleeping on benches. I put up Ereti and his family; my brother had Firmino and his relatives.

Firmino never used to go out of the house. He was scared of the Germans, more than the rest of us. One evening I went to dig up one of the demijohns of oil, taking Vincenzo di Ereti with me, who was just a kid. We were carrying it back up to the house when Firmino looked out of the door and mistook us for two German soldiers dragging a cannon, and he started to scream. Everybody was terrified, but later we had a good laugh about it.

My wife, Luisa Innaurato, cooked for everybody in the evenings: pasta, salami and sausages. We butchered a pig.

One day the Germans tried to come down and burn the farmhouses, but along the way - just by the wooden cross near the cemetery - their armoured car rolled down an embankment. So we were saved. However, they left a couple of mines along that stretch of road and two people were killed. They were driving a cart loaded with stones. And just think, a couple of days before I’d been along that road with my harrow.

When winter was over, some people went back to the village. Ereti and his family couldn’t go back to their house so they went off to a farmhouse down by the lake. We were sorry they didn’t come back to us.