From Sand and Ash(41)

I went to Vespers as instructed and watched the nuns sing and an old priest conduct the service. There were more nuns behind a little opening on the other side of the apse. They never come out, apparently. I wonder if that’s what Angelo wants for me. Maybe he thinks I can just hide in this little convent until the war is over, and then he’ll pat himself on the back because he saved me.

What am I being saved for? I look ahead at my life, even a life where there is no fear or worry that the Gestapo will swoop me up and send me away, and I can’t find the will to be hopeful.

Eva Rosselli





CHAPTER 10


THE JEWISH GHETTO


The “pilgrim” who had passed was an old Jewish woman who had been left behind when her son and his family fled to Genoa. The nuns of the Holy Sisters of Adoration had taken her in, and she’d passed peacefully in her sleep, sitting in front of a window in a white wimple and a borrowed black veil looking like one of the nuns who hid her.

Angelo promised the abbess to pay a visit to the rabbi at the main synagogue first thing in the morning to see if clandestine funeral arrangements could be made. Otherwise, they would be burying her among nuns with a cross on her grave. It was all they could do. She’d died among them; she would be buried among them too. Maybe when the war was over they could remove the cross and put a Star of David in its place. And maybe they could restore her name. Maybe someday her family would return and lay stones on her grave, the way Eva used to do for ancestors she never even knew. But the odds were that Regina Ravenna would be hidden in the ground under a false name and a meaningless cross, and no one but the Holy Sisters of Adoration and Angelo would ever be the wiser.

The knowledge and responsibility weighed on Angelo. He wanted to keep records but didn’t dare. He wanted to keep ledgers and lists of names and family members so that he could account for every person he felt responsible for. But records and lists were incriminating. So he’d devised a method to keep it as straight as he could, kept any necessary papers in the Vatican, and prayed that God would preserve his memory so no one would be lost to forgetfulness.

He made his way home long after the curfew, but was not stopped, fortunately. He had a pass that allowed him to be out when his duties demanded it, but if he were challenged, he would have to lie about the old woman he’d attended to. And the old woman was a paperless Jew.

The last year or two had been one lie after another. Sometimes he missed the simple little village where he’d spent the first six months of his life as a priest. Eat, pray, sleep, serve. That was all he did. Plus, the streets were so narrow and the road to the village so winding and steep, it was unlikely the Germans could send in their tanks without getting them lodged between buildings. Then he was called to Rome, and he’d gotten a crash course in service and survival on the streets of the Eternal City.

Then Monsignor Luciano, his sponsor of sorts, the man who had kept an eye on him for so many years, brought him in to assist him at the Curia. A totally different kind of experience. At the Curia he’d met Monsignor O’Flaherty, an Irish priest at the Vatican who was deeply involved in refugee work. And Angelo’s double life had begun. He’d begun traveling from one end of the city to the next, every church, every monastery, every convent, and every college. And he’d made note of numbers, rooms, availability, and access.

And the people had started to come. A Jewish mother needed to hide her sons. A rabbi, fearing he was a target but unwilling to leave his congregation, still wanted to protect his family. The word had spread, and people came. The church was now in the business of hide-and-seek, and Angelo was the eyes and ears, a young priest with a limp and an affinity for languages, with a special understanding of the Jewish people. He understood their dietary needs and their worship practices, and he was just another cog in the wheel of clergy who had begun the enormous task of trying to hide the hunted.

They’d started with foreign Jews who had been ordered to leave Italy in 1940 but had nowhere to go, just like Felix. But since July, the tide had turned, and with the fall of bombs and dictators, the church was hiding Italians.

The monsignor instructed him to find alternative methods of hiding refugees, and Angelo remembered Aldo Finzi. He made a trip to Florence and asked the little man to help him. Together they’d distributed over two hundred passes to Jews who could hide in plain sight if they had the right paperwork. This made room for the Jews who couldn’t blend in due to language or physical appearance. It was harder to hide the Jewish men. They couldn’t just pretend to be non-Jewish Italians and be absorbed into the populace. Young Italian men of a fighting age were expected to be doing just that . . . fighting. Soldiers had to hide from the Germans too. And there were so many children. They had three convents throughout the city that were full of Jewish orphans. Some of them could be placed with families, but children presented a specific danger. All it would take was one wrong word, a forgetful comment, and the child, along with the family that sheltered him, would be exposed. They’d branched out into the countryside, but transporting them was difficult too. The whole operation was difficult and made more challenging every day.

Angelo wasn’t working alone—there were hundreds of fathers and sisters, monks and nuns—opening their doors and closing their eyes to the danger all around them. But sometimes Angelo felt incredibly alone. It was safer not to share, safer not to confide, safer to handle as much as he could without involving anyone else. And he was tired.