ROME - Annunziata Verità, a 93-year-old former partisan who feigned death to survive a firing squad in World War II, has warned Italians to reject renascent fascism and not make the same mistake their forefathers did.

 In an interview with La Repubblica on the eve of Liberation Day, Verità opened up for the first time 65 years after her own fight against fascism to warn that the movement was “rearing its head again” and must be avoided.

 “We have forgotten what fascism was, we never made the youth study it… thus the seeds [of the movement] have remained.”

 Verità is a fierce opponent of recent political trends and told La Repubblica that she always encourages freedom of thought, telling the youth to stand for what they believe in.

 “But not fascism, never, ever again,” she was quick to add.

 Verità’s opposition to fascism began aged 15, when she met a paralyzed man named Achille Pantoli in Faenza.

 Pantoli was an ardent Communist and, having been put in confinement was then beaten so fiercely that he was left disabled.  

 Verità remained deeply disturbed by Pantoli’s story and swore she “would never be a fascist."

 Having joined the Partisan movement at 18, Verità was quickly captured and realised she would be condemned to the firing squad.

 By a stroke of luck, Verità was only grazed by the bullets and was able to survive by playing dead as the corpses were gathered and later escaping before her fallen comrades were buried.

 She spent the next decades of her life trying to forget the ordeal, but warned that she could not keep silent any longer, disillusioned with today’s politics and politicians.

 She would, she vowed, be voting once more in May’s European elections to ensure growing right-wing sympathies were fought against.

 But not before she travelled to Faenza to celebrate Liberation Day, the place where her opposition to the far-right began all those years ago.

ea