Interview with Piero Fiorot

Title

Interview with Piero Fiorot

Description

Piero Fiorot reminisces about his pre-war life in Sacile: schooling; fascist paramilitary training and indoctrination; curfews; rationing; and doing business in a tightly controlled, closed economic system. He contrasts the relatively tranquil life during the first stage of the war, with the chaos following the fall of the Fascist regime and the brutality of the subsequent German occupation. Peiro recalss wartime anecdotes, such as dropping of propaganda flyers; clandestine listening of British broadcasts; evacuee’s life; German mop ups and killings; anti-aircraft fire; and damage caused by jettisoned bombs. He describes the tense atmosphere inside a shelter with people weeping and praying, and contrasts it with his care-free attitude. Peiro stresses the strategic importance of the city, owing to its railway station and the nearby railway bridges. He describes the 1944 Sacile bombings and provides details on the 5 November 1944 attack in which a bomb nearly hit the private shelter of the Balliana family and many children lost their lives. He describes the funerals and the sight of his schoolmates in white coffins. He is critical of the Resistance accused to provoke avoidable reprisal and mentions some victims of German brutality, such as Raimondo Lacchin and Marco Meneghini. He describes Pippo dropping supplies and small antipersonnel mines. He mentions his friendly relationship with Heinrich and Peter Paul, two Luftwaffe pilots based at the nearby Aviano airfield, who supported him in many instances, and describes a fortuitous reunion with the latter. Piero details  the early post-war years and elaborates on the legitimacy of bombing. He recalls how British forces were generally hated and talks of his difficulty to reconcile the bombings with the idea of being liberated.

Date

2018-07-18

Temporal Coverage

Spatial Coverage

Language

Type

Rights

This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.

Contributor

Identifier

AFiorotP180719

Collection

Citation

Alessandro Pesaro, “Interview with Piero Fiorot,” IBCC Digital Archive, accessed December 14, 2024, https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/collections/document/7650.

Item Relations

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