From Sand and Ash(106)

Mario just stared, dumbstruck. “How?” he finally uttered, his voice cracking on the word.

“When two people love each other very much,” she said teasingly, “sometimes they have children.”

“How?” he said again, looking up at Angelo, who just shook his head as if words failed him too. Angelo pressed the exhausted doctor into the chair he’d vacated and brought a clean cloth, a bar of soap, and a bucket of water to his side.

“Wash, Mario. And Eva can tell us the story.”

She told them about Pierre, the boy from Bastogne, whose mother had convinced him to jump from the train bound for Bergen-Belsen. She told them how it felt to fly through the air with bullets whizzing around her, and how it felt when she realized she had done it—she had jumped and lived. She recounted finding the sign and realizing they were in Germany. And then she told them how she and Pierre had hid in a church for two days and drank water from the outdoor pump and ate sacrament wafers until the pastor had found them and fed them a real meal before sending them to the next town, clean and more appropriately clothed, with instructions to “find Father Hirsch.”

Father Hirsch sent them to Father Gunther in Gustavsburg. Father Gunther sent them to Father Ackermann in Bingen. Father Ackermann sent them to Father Kuntz in Bengel. They walked or were smuggled toward Belgium, town after small town, relying on the integrity of the Catholic Church, which wasn’t always reliable. One priest had warned them to avoid the priest in the next town, who was a Nazi sympathizer with a brother who served in a high position with the Reich.

When they had reached the border, they were loaded into the back of a cart, covered loosely in a plastic tarp, and manure was spread over them, piled high to disguise their hiding place. A German farmer hitched the cart to his mule and walked sedately across the boundary between Germany and Belgium with nobody saying a word. He took them to the outskirts of St. Vith, and from there they’d gone south, sleeping in the forest one night because they were too tired to walk the final stretch to Bastogne. It took them three weeks to go one hundred and fifty miles, and when they’d arrived, Eva had been sick for two months. After she missed her second period, she realized that her exhaustion and nausea weren’t due to extreme stress and overexertion, but to pregnancy.

“And I have been here ever since,” Eva finished, “hiding. There were still Germans in the area for a while, though not in large numbers.”

“Where is Pierre now?” Angelo asked.

“Bettina and I made him leave when the town was evacuated. He’s among friends.”

“It’s better that he did. I didn’t know what I’d find when I came through those doors,” Mario said. “Bombs were falling like rain. The aid station took a direct hit too. I was in the kitchen in the back. We keep the plasma in the fridge. It was little more than a glassed-in greenhouse. I was blown outward, through the glass. I landed in a snowbank. I have a few scratches. That’s all. But the station caught fire. We pulled a few of the wounded out. The rest were buried by the rubble.”

“You lost your glasses,” Angelo observed.

“But that was all. That was all I lost. One of the nurses—Renee—is dead. She kept going back inside for the wounded. The last time she didn’t come out.”

“Another hero, created by war,” Eva whispered. “Thank you, Mario.”

Mario met her gaze.

“Thank you for finding me. Thank you for your friendship.”

“Angelo never gave up hope, Eva. He was determined to find you,” Mario said.

“He is a man of great faith,” she murmured, and smiled at Angelo, whose eyes hadn’t left her face through the whole long retelling of her journey to Bastogne.

“A man of great faith,” Mario agreed.



The day after Christmas, Patton’s 3rd Army rolled into town, relieving the beleaguered 101st Airborne, who claimed with considerable braggadocio that they hadn’t really needed the help. And maybe they hadn’t. They’d been surrounded on all sides—those poor German bastards—and given easily as good as they got. But whether it was needed or just welcome, the battle in Bastogne ended, and in the following days, the front moved out and away as the bulge the Germans had created in the Allied line righted itself and the smoke cleared, allowing wounded GIs to be moved, supplies to be dropped, and the remains of the dead to be uncovered.

Mario reassured Angelo, after giving Eva and baby Angelo a rudimentary checkup, that he’d done just fine. Better than fine.

“You are a doctor in the making, Angelo,” he said seriously, wrapping the squalling infant, who hadn’t much liked the inspection. Eva took him, cooing and laughing at his outrage, and left the room to feed him. Angelo watched them go. He still hadn’t lost the wonder. He still couldn’t believe what had transpired. He turned to Mario and addressed the compliment.

“I actually considered it. But I don’t want to be a doctor. I don’t want anything more to do with death, my friend. Camillo always said we are on earth to learn. I think I want to teach. I want to teach history so that the world doesn’t have to repeat her mistakes. Eva’s journey across Germany has me convinced that there are many good German people too. They are just as afraid and damaged as the rest of us. Italians have no room to judge. Italians fought for Hitler too. Maybe people had no choice, but I wonder sometimes what would have happened if everyone without a choice had made a choice anyway. If we all chose not to participate. Not to be bullied. Not to take up arms. Not to persecute. What would happen then?”