From Sand and Ash(99)

“Tell Father Bartolo. He will tell me.”





10 May, 1944


Confession: I don’t know what to do.



Eva’s been sent to Bergen-Belsen. I felt immediate relief that it wasn’t Auschwitz, and then I realized I didn’t even know where Bergen-Belsen was. Greta von Essen came through with the information. Father Bartolo said she was sure, that she’d seen the transport records. I don’t know how she accomplished that, but I couldn’t ask. A few days ago, Greta von Essen left Rome in the company of a group of nuns returning to Germany from an Easter pilgrimage to the Vatican. Monsignor O’Flaherty arranged it.

Northern Germany. Bergen-Belsen. I have a destination. But it might as well be the moon.

The German police in Rome are growing more vicious and desperate as the days go by. A surprise raid on a monastery in the San Lorenzo district of Rome has resulted in the arrest and seizure of three monks and a dozen foreign Jews. One boy tried to escape and was gunned down in front of his parents, who at that point threw themselves on his inert form and were shot as well. The monks were imprisoned, along with the rest of the captured refugees.

We were tipped off by a local Fascist official that a raid would be carried out at an abandoned villa south of Rome where fifty Jewish orphans had been hidden and watched over by an order of Capuchin monks. We beat the raid by an hour, scattering the children among village homes until the Germans left. When they did, we returned the children to the villa and to the care of the monks. We are all praying the Germans don’t go back.

It is a game of cat and mouse, priest and prey, and it’s a wonder more aren’t breaking under the stress. But we have a purpose and none of us thinks beyond the moment, beyond the day. We scramble and pray and sleep when we can.

Temperatures are warming and people in the southernmost parts of the city, near the catacombs and the caves of Ardeatine, are starting to complain about a smell. The dead are making themselves known. The anger and fear in the city, the desperation of the occupying forces, and the ticktock of the end seem to permeate the air with the same stench of death. None of us will be able to hold on much longer. But for Eva’s sake I will. And wherever she is, she just has to hold on too.

Angelo Bianco





CHAPTER 24


THE AMERICANS


When members of America’s 5th Army finally captured Rome on June 4, 1944, there was very little fanfare. The Germans simply left. The long red banners and the Nazi flags were removed from the headquarters on Via Tasso. The homes they’d requisitioned were vacated. The political prisoners were abandoned. They simply retreated. Some said it was the Pope’s influence, some said it was a strategic regrouping. A few said it was respect for Rome’s considerable historic and artistic significance, but whatever the reason, when the time came, they left.

Then the people waited with breaths held, ears peeled. The American planes had dropped leaflets the day before, urging civilians to stay indoors, to stay out of the way in case the conflict grew heated. But there was no fighting. No bombing. Just the quiet fall of leaflets and the dawn of a clear June morning.

When the first American trucks and tanks rolled into town, people didn’t stay inside. They danced in the streets. It was a strange sight, really. Italians, who had allied themselves with a ruthless dictator and fought and died beside Germany’s sons, were welcoming the Americans into their capital city. When German tanks and troops had descended on Rome a mere nine months before, people had died trying to keep them out. It said a great deal about the feelings of the Italian people, about their resentment for being drafted into a war very few of them wanted, made to fight and die for preposterous goals and ridiculous men.

Angelo could only watch with bittersweet relief as the parade of military vehicles clattered along cobblestone roads and people wept with jubilation. Mario and his little family, the nuns of Santa Cecilia, and even Monsignor Luciano and his sister stood and greeted the American troops, who were smiling and waving like movie stars, as they rolled into the city. For Rome, the war was over. For the clergy, for the resistance, and for the Jews in hiding, this day was a staggering victory. They had survived.

Most of them.

But some had not. Some still would not. The war was not over for those who’d been taken. It was not over for Eva and for the numberless Jews still imprisoned in camps in the north and in the east. It was not over for the Allied soldiers who would fight on, pushing the Germans into further retreat.

Two days later, on June 6, Angelo and a small group of priests at the Vatican gathered around a radio as the BBC declared that “D-Day had come.”

“Early this morning, the Allies began the assault on the northwestern face of Hitler’s European Fortress,” the announcer reported. “Under the command of General Eisenhower, Allied Naval Forces, supported by strong air forces, began landing Allied armies on the northern coast of France.”

Throughout the following days, countries aligned against Hitler waited with nervous hearts and shaking hands, listening for updates and reports. The Germans only suffered a thousand casualties that first day. The Allies suffered ten times that, but by June 12, all five of the beachheads of Normandy were linked and in Allied control, giving them the foothold they needed to run Germany out of France.

From Normandy, Paris was a straight shot east, and when Paris was liberated in late August, Angelo implemented the only plan he’d been able to devise. A soldier with the 5th Army, a major who’d spent the last year in Italy, had given him some advice.