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They took anything they could find in any house, especially sausages, hams, live pigs, which they shot and cooked, wine, and occasionally even flour and fruit. When they wanted to enter a locked house they would kick the door open. We hid some of our food supply in a small room in zia Bambina's house and we walled this room with bricks, and some food we buried in a large pit we dug in the garden where we kept the bees.

I was afraid of loosing the library I had and so I buried most of the books in a steel grain bin in this same pit. We did this because most of the villages around us were being burned by the Germans as they left. Fallo was lucky indeed to escape this fate. Some of the books we buried got mildew on them and my old Campanile and Carbone Latin-Italian dictionary was
and still has green-brown spots from this adventure.

During this period the Germans also placed mines in several fields, especially in the valley near the River Sangro. Later a few people of

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Fallo who tried to go back to the field lost their lives in mine accidents. I still remember when their mangled bodies were brought back to Fallo on short ladders used as stretchers.

Occasionally we could hear artillery explosions in the distance. Sometimes we could hear the hissing of artillery shells flying over us and then exploding somewhere across the river. At night we sometimes saw over the horizon the faded light of artillery fire.

As the German troops began to retreat in the fall of 1943 they blew up anything of strategic importance: railroad tracks, railroad and highway bridges, and viaducts. Some of the bridges, especially the stone highway bridge over the River Sangro, were beautiful and solid stone structures that would have lasted for centuries. They were all destroyed. The Germans used so much explosives, which they did not want to leave behind, that these explosions were spectacular as huge blocks of stone were hurled a great distance. The bridge near the "Serienza's Mountain" was blown up during the daytime, we clearly saw the explosion which hurled stone blocks as far as the out-skirt of Colle Rosso. A shed in Colle Rosso which the Germans had used as an ammunition depot was blown up and hundreds of Italian 45 caliber mortar shells were strewn unexploded in the surrounding fields. Four young boys one day found one of these shells and as they were playing with it, it exploded killing them. I remember this day. We were playing