Eugenio Gentili Tedeschi - Finding shoes for the winter
Transcript: I participated in this mission to find shoes because at the threshold of winter, the problem of having shoes was very important. Primo Levi clearly remembers in The Truce that ... to have received a lesson from one of the main characters that accompanied him during the first part of his return, who told him, "Look, no matter what, the first thing that you need are shoes." And it's especially important in the high mountains during the winter. So, this mission consisted in the following. Two other partisans and myself, but I was the leader of the mission, let's put it that way, had to go down with the mining train for a stretch until the minerals were unloaded with the hoppers of the cable car wagons which then went directly to the blast furnaces in Aosta. So, it was raining cats and dogs that day. It rained the whole time and we had to keep our feet on the mineral containers, holding on to the wagon car hook, and then, when we were far enough down in the valley, jump on one of the support cables of the cable car. A sort of acrobatic jump. Then we went down through a series of towns along the Dora on foot but on the south side of the Dora. I went to a series of cobbler shops to look for bit of material, finding very little. Maybe a pair of shoes or two, some leather or leather scrap,. At the end of this turn, I went into a cobbler's shop who didn't have anything, said that he didn't have anything. But I saw the floor covered with newspaper clippings. So I picked up the newspaper and I saw that underneath was covered with leather which we immediately requisitioned. We rolled it up and put it over our shoulders. This was a mission that I participated in. As you can see, nothing special but this was important for the band's operations.