From Sand and Ash(88)

The German soldier had a blunt nose, a wholesome face, and red-rimmed eyes, and Angelo noticed there were blood spatters—small, red, pin-size dots—all over the soldier’s cheeks, making him appear diseased.

The soldier’s mouth moved around words and Angelo focused on their shape, trying to understand. He heard the words as if he listened through water, and he wondered if his hearing would return, or if it was simply the first part of him to die.

“Go. None of us wants to kill a priest,” the man mouthed.

The soldier shoved Angelo away from the rocky outcropping and motioned with his pistol.

“Go!” he growled, sticking his face in Angelo’s, his eyes frantic. Angelo heard enough to realize he was being told to flee.

He turned and began to put one foot in front of the other. His prosthetic straps were loose, and he staggered and almost fell, but he didn’t dare stop and make the necessary adjustments, expecting a bullet in his back at any moment.

But none came, and he kept walking, limping through the trees toward a road he knew must be there. The terrain was muddy and wet from recent rains, and the trees were just starting to grow leaves again. Some were still completely bare, as if the winter had been harder on them than on others. Angelo wondered, still reeling from shock and horror, if those trees would ever come back to life, or if they would simply stand, skeletal, among the living and wait to be brought down.

He wondered if he would ever come back to life. Then he stopped thinking at all. He just walked in circles, stumbling and slipping, and after what could have been an hour or merely minutes—he wasn’t really certain—he reached the road. A sign next to a fork pointed the way to the old quarries at Fosse Ardeatine. Suddenly, a boom rocked the ground beneath his feet. Angelo fell to the earth once more and lay there, reeling, wondering if bombs were falling. He couldn’t hear the whine and shriek or see the stars and stripes above him in the sky. The ground rumbled again, then again, and the trees above him shook in whispery terror, their new leaves dancing in the tepid March sunlight.

Then he realized what was happening. The Germans were using explosives to bring down the rocks inside the caves. They were trying to hide the bodies and seal the openings, attempting to cover their tracks, as if more than three hundred people would not be missed.

He crawled back into the shelter of the foliage that lined the road, weak with pain and horror, sick with despair, and waited until the trucks rumbled down the road an hour later, the deed done. Darkness descended, and his cane was gone. His cross too. And Eva would be gone. The truth assailed him like a relentless whip, and he moaned audibly, his agony escaping through his clenched teeth.

Save my family, Camillo had said. Become a priest and save my family. But there was no one left to save. He didn’t even know if he had the strength to save himself. Still, he rose on shaking legs and willed himself forward. It was a long way to Rome for a crippled man with a broken heart.



“He is dead. Father Bianco is dead. You realize that, don’t you? You don’t have to die. I will let you walk out of here. I will keep your little secret. But you need to tell me where he was hiding the fugitives,” Captain von Essen said reasonably.

Eva didn’t even bother to look at him. He was an idiot. He’d left himself no real incentive, no bargaining chip. Didn’t he realize that without Angelo, she wanted to die? Didn’t he realize she had absolutely nothing left to live for? With the gold file she kept in her shoe, she’d scratched his name into the wall of her cell, along with the date and a testimony that she’d been there. That he’d been there. But it was tedious, scratching the words into the walls. She wanted to write one last confession, even if no one but the captain ever read her words.

“I would like a piece of paper and a pencil,” she said quietly.

He jumped to his feet and walked to the door. He snapped his fingers and told someone what was needed. A soldier was back within seconds, and Captain von Essen set the paper and pencil down in front of her. He sat down and smiled, nodding his head like he was proud of her, certain she was finally cooperating.

She put the date at the top—24 March, 1944—and she started to write in German.



Confession: My name is Batsheva Rosselli, not Eva Bianco, and I am a Jew. Angelo Bianco is not my brother but a priest who wanted only to protect me from the very place I now find myself.



She wrote for several minutes, filling the page with her final thoughts. When she was done, she slid her paper toward the captain and stared at him dully. He read with growing anger, not having received the confession he sought.

“You are going to die. Do you understand?” he spat.

“We’re all going to die, Captain, eventually. If I were you, I would kill me now. Because if I live, I will tell the world who you are and what you’ve done,” she answered, folding her hands. “I will tell Greta that you are a vicious killer. But then, I think Greta already knows what kind of man you are.”

“Take her away! She’s useless,” Captain von Essen called to the guard. Then he stood and looked down at Eva. “Enjoy your trip, Fr?ulein Bianco.”

Eva flinched at the name. Angelo’s name. She would never be Eva Bianco.

She had almost felt relieved when she was arrested. The thing she had dreaded, feared, run from, had happened. When it came, she was strangely liberated from the fear. She couldn’t dread what had already come to pass. She didn’t have to anticipate the horror when the horror was right there. With her arrest came a certain calm, a quiet comfort. It had come. She had known it would. And she could stop fighting.