Time Witnesses: A Child Alone
...One day one of those bombs hit the house where my father was living and all the people who lived with him died...
Paola Cecchi tells of the horrors that befell her father when he was six years old.
For more stories of the sufferings of non-combatants in wartime please visit timewitnesses.org/
I'm Paola Cecchi, I'm Italian and I'm writing about my father's experience during the Second World War. My father was only six years old and he lived in a little town near Padua in an old house with some people who took care of him because his mother had to go to work. My father told me in that period everyday he could hear the planes which were flying over their houses and bombing them.
One day one of those bombs hit the house where my father was living and all the people who lived with him died. He saved himself, he was only a child sorrounded by a lot of corpses and he was hurt. So he got out to find someone who could help him and so he reached his relatives' house who helped him but his mother was not there.
He lived there unhappy for some months then one day his mother found him: she was wounded and when her son was in her arms some soldiers broke them up as well as all the other mothers to take the mothers away. My father told me that his mother was breaking down because she had lost her son again. Only after a few days the soldiers allowed mothers and children to be together and then my grandmother decided to leave Padua to go to Milan.
