Behind Enemy Lines: The Untold Stories of Italy’s Female Warriors Who Sabotaged the Nazis
HMM: There’s some point where Carla kills a Nazi at gunpoint, and you show her having this internal moment of reflection where she wonders “who has the war turned her into, and who would she be afterward should she make it out alive?” I could see that internal reflection in all four of the women. Can you talk more about that, the motivation to take part in resistance to begin with and how that motivation changed over time?
SC: For these four women, and I think this was very typical for almost everyone across Italy, particularly women, they really had very little political education, political knowledge. Teresa was the outlier because her parents were so explicitly anti-Fascist. For the most part, for the other three women, their parents didn’t teach them that in any way because it was so dangerous. All of them, except for Teresa who was already there, had to come to this political education and resistance in their own way. Anita was probably the least sophisticated of them, growing up first in the country and then in a much smaller city, but she still had this very clear sense of right and wrong, and it wasn’t until the this women’s group was created, that she realized that there was this larger philosophy and theory that she was apart of.
