From Sand and Ash(89)

But then they arrested Angelo, and they tortured him. When they dragged Angelo away, the comfort left, and the fear came back. Fear is strange. It settles on chests and seeps through skin, through layers of tissue, muscle, and bone, and collects in a soul-size black hole, sucking the joy out of life, the pleasure, the beauty. But not the hope. Somehow, the hope is the only thing resistant to the fear, and it is that hope that makes the next breath possible, the next step, the next tiny act of rebellion, even if that rebellion is simply staying alive.

When they told her Angelo was dead, she lost her hope.



“Help me, Saint George,” Angelo prayed, beseeching the statue overlooking the church fountain. It wasn’t Saint George, but it could have been. Maybe it was Saint Jude, the patron saint of lost causes, the apostle of the impossible. If so, Angelo had a task for him.

“Help me face what is to come,” he murmured through lips that wouldn’t cooperate. “Help me get to Rome, and most of all, watch over Eva. Take care of Eva, until I can do it myself.”

He’d filled his belly with brackish water from the fountain and washed himself as best he could, trying not to think of the blood and death he carried on his skin and in his clothes. Then he turned and stumbled away from the fountain of the unknown saint and continued his painful slog toward Rome. He needed to reach Santa Cecilia before dawn. He had to find Eva.

Hours later, when he limped the final steps and collapsed against the gates of the convent, the church bells began to ring, but Angelo was too far gone to notice.



Eva was still wearing the gray dress she’d worn to work on Wednesday, still wearing her low-heeled black shoes and her little black belt. She was stylishly filthy. Her hair was matted. It hadn’t been brushed in—she thought back—days? How many days? Wednesday she had been arrested. Friday they had dragged Angelo away, Saturday morning she was loaded on a train. It was still Saturday, and she still sat in the stinking darkness of the cattle car, the press of bodies keeping her warm but making her want to climb up to the little window that sat high on the side, just so she could breathe air that hadn’t been breathed a hundred times and see a stretch of sky. There were only women and children in this car. The Jewish men detained in the prisons had been taken to help satisfy the numbers required for the reprisal killing. Just like Angelo.

Four days. It had been four days since she’d brushed her hair. Or her teeth. Or looked in a mirror. She had a strange feeling that if she saw herself, she wouldn’t recognize her face. Seven days ago, she’d lain in Angelo’s arms, the happiest she’d ever been in her entire life. Now she sat shivah over her old life in a train that would take her to her death.

She managed to find a place against the wall. They’d designated a corner for waste, and though no one wanted to use it, they all eventually had. The humiliation of the older women especially, crouched in that corner, trying to maintain their modesty while not stepping in the waste of others, tears of mortification streaming down their faces, was something she didn’t think she could ever forgive. It is one thing to kill someone. It is another to degrade and humiliate, to strip away a person’s dignity like stripping away flesh. One made a man a murderer. The other made him a monster. Eva was sure many of the women aboard that train would prefer death, clean and quick, to the slow loss of their humanity.

They were on the train for hours. It stopped once and they could hear dogs and commands, the sounds of more people being loaded into the cattle cars, but the doors were never reopened. Eva thought they were in Florence. It smelled like Florence, like home, and she pressed her palms to her eyes, trying not to weep and call out for Nonna and Nonno like a child. She couldn’t afford to cry. She was too thirsty.

It was the end of March, and the temperatures were moderate. It could have been so much worse, but it was hard to tell yourself how much more terrible a situation could be, when you were already on the outskirts of hell. The hungry children suffered the most, or maybe that wasn’t true. When children suffer, the ones who love them suffer even more, helpless to alleviate their agony.

When the train started to move for the second time, the occupants almost wept in relief, just to be leaving one torture for another, and Eva sank down, pulling her knees to her chest so she wouldn’t take up too much space, and rested her head against the side of the car. She had slept deeply that first night of confinement, waiting for the train that would take her away from her life. From the struggle. From everything that had become so impossibly hard. Now she slept deeply again, an ability she’d always had, and in sleep she escaped for a while.

She recognized the dream immediately. It was the dream she’d had a hundred times before. But confusion welled up inside her chest. Was she dreaming? The press of bodies in the darkness felt real. She remembered being loaded into the car, a German with a submachine gun pushing at her back. This wasn’t a dream. But she’d been here before.

They didn’t veer northeast toward the Brenner Pass, with Austria lying on the other side, but instead hugged the west coast and approached France. They spent a week at a transit camp called Borgo San Dalmazzo in the Piedmont region of Italy, twenty miles from the French border, where they were fed—thin soup and hard bread—and given enough water to wash and quench their thirst. The knowledge that they’d been heading west instead of east was a great relief, though they would be heading due north from that point on, if the reports were true.