From Sand and Ash(60)

Not all grape growers want to make their own wine. Many sell their grapes to wineries, and the wineries then produce the wine under their own label. My father made a fortune providing bottles to wineries—bottles they got to hand select. He had molds for bottles of all shapes and sizes, so the bottle was as unique as the wine. It was a great selling point, and Babbo always insisted that wine tasted better in Ostrica bottles. “The shape is important,” he would say. “Many do not know this. But trust me. Shape is everything.”

Each day that I go to work, I am reminded of my father’s glass molds at Ostrica. It’s been two weeks since I started working at Via Tasso, and I have been careful to mold myself into the perfect secretary, to do all that is required of me quietly and efficiently, so I don’t bring attention to myself. Angelo worried that like Ostrica’s bottles, I was hand selected for my shape and my beauty, but so far, it seems as if my German language skills are all Captain von Essen truly wanted. Angelo stops by the convent almost every night before going home to make sure I’ve survived the day.

The Romans won’t even refer to Via Tasso as German headquarters. It is regarded with such loathing and fear that it is simply called laggiù—down there. They whisper, “So and so was taken down there.”

I rarely venture beyond my little desk outside the captain’s office and the small kitchen and lavatory down the hall. I run errands, relay messages, type endless reports, make coffee, and do whatever the captain asks. But I hear things, and I feel them. It is a grim place to be, though the offices are separated from the prison that haunts my dreams. I’ve seen the cells of the prison, I’ve been inside one, and though I was never tortured, I am sure many are. So I listen and I watch and I pay attention, hoping something I learn will be of use.

Eva Rosselli





CHAPTER 14


FLORENCE


Angelo stepped off the train in Florence and was met by a frantic Aldo Finzi wearing the robes of a priest, robes that Angelo had made sure he had, just in case. It was November 27, 1943, and the time had come for disguises in Florence.

Ostrica had been raided, Aldo’s home had been ransacked, his printing press destroyed. They were looking for him, but not just him. The SS, Italian and German, were looking for all of Florence’s Jews, and they weren’t doing it quietly. “Rabbi Cassuto has been arrested,” Aldo cried, his eyes wild as they walked from the train station, unsure of where to go now that hell had descended on the city. “He was arrested with a priest and several other members of the underground. I was afraid it was you, Angelo. That’s why I’m here. I thought it was you.”

Angelo had come to Florence for that very purpose—to meet with Rabbi Cassuto and deliver the last of Camillo’s money. He had been delayed at a checkpoint and missed his train that morning, and that delay may have saved his life. Angelo put his arm around Aldo’s shoulders, reassuring him, but he was leveled by the news. He had come to know Nathan Cassuto through DELASEM. Camillo Rosselli had introduced them after Felix’s death and made sure that the young rabbi knew how to contact Angelo when he needed funds.

The rabbi was a tall, handsome man with kind eyes and a gentle demeanor. He’d been a doctor before the Racial Laws had made it impossible for him to practice. Fate, opportunity, and a rare, second rabbinical degree made him a candidate for a different vocation, and what a terrible, tragic time to be a rabbi. Yet he hadn’t wilted under the pressure or succumbed to the temptation of the “wait and see” attitude that so many Jewish leaders and their congregations couldn’t resist. He’d warned his people tirelessly, telling them to hide, to get out, and he’d stayed behind with those who couldn’t. Now he’d been taken.

The streets were absolute chaos. Germans with bullhorns rode up and down the neighborhoods demanding that residents—all residents—come out of their homes. They were to bring no possessions, no weapons—guns were illegal to all but the police—and they had three minutes to be outside. If the Germans found them hiding in their homes, they were shot.

It was the Roman razzia all over again, but there was nothing stealthy about this raid. It took place on the streets in broad daylight, in full, garish colors and surreal pageantry.

Three blocks from the train station a family was being lined up against the wall, their hands in the air. The father was trying to reason with the soldiers, talking wildly with his hands, pointing and gesturing. A soldier knocked him in the side of the head with the butt of his rifle and the man dropped, his animated hands coming to final rest at his sides. His hysterical family was executed against the wall, and the man was left in the street, lying in a growing pool of blood. A soldier put a bullet in his head to make sure the family wouldn’t be separated in death.

Angelo and Aldo saw Jewish children being torn from their mother’s arms and loaded into trucks while their sobbing parents were loaded into another. On the corner, mere feet from the seminary where Angelo had obtained his degree, a teenaged boy was shot in the back as he tried to flee from a member of the Italian SS. Angelo had to walk around his body to escort Aldo inside the gates. Father Sebastiano and several other monks had gathered the seminarians together, and their heads were bowed in prayer. The Germans had been and gone, and no one had been harmed or discovered, though Angelo knew for certain there were a few Jewish boys hidden among the seminarians.

“Wait for me here,” Angelo instructed Aldo. “You will come back with me to Rome. But I have to make sure my grandparents are safe, and I need you off the streets.”