Sizzi promised his friend he would make some inquiries on his behalf. After arranging to meet again in the coming days, he watched Goldenberg hurry back down the street.
Then Sizzi went back to Florence and asked his cousin Gino for help.
Cardinal Dalla Costa and the Goldenberg family—the weight of it all nearly suffocated Gino. There was no question that he wanted to help them both, but the danger involved was overwhelming. It ate at him, making him more taciturn among friends and downright flighty when Adriana spoke with him. At night, as they lay in bed together, he grew ever more restless and agitated, consumed by the fear of what might happen if he was caught.
The only place that could offer any peace in a moment like this was the Ponte a Ema cemetery. As he sat by his brother’s grave, Gino could begin to contemplate the choice that stood before him. He had every reason to help. Dalla Costa was his spiritual mentor—the human face of the faith that Gino had built his life around—and the man who had officiated at his marriage and baptized his son. Goldenberg was a friend, looking to protect his family. It was impossible not to empathize with his situation, and it resonated deeply with Gino’s own childhood experience of political tumult. Certainly the scale of the Jewish persecution had been amplified exponentially, but the parallels to what had happened to the Socialists when he was a boy were uncanny. A minority group was being demonized by government-backed voices in the press and scapegoated by government officials. Few men could have better understood the cruelty of such pressures than Torello Bartali’s son.
And yet he had two reasons more powerful than any other not to risk himself: Adriana and his son, Andrea. If he was caught helping Jews or even sheltering them, he could be imprisoned and killed by the German authorities, leaving his wife alone to fend for their two-year-old son.
It was an impossible choice. The siren call of self-preservation was deafening, but a nobler impulse beckoned. Other Italians facing the same quandary in other parts of the country would liken it to a battle in which there was no middle ground. Few of them had any illusions about the repercussions if their activities were discovered. But to stand by and do nothing while civilians were being captured and murdered was a choice that many viewed as tacit support of the deportations. And so each individual was left to decide on which side he would stand. “It was something that we all had to do,” explained one participant in the broader resistance. “One made the choice to be on the side of the Fascists or one had to defend the people.”
Gino wrestled with the dilemma about what course to take. As a man of fervent faith, he turned to prayer for solace as he contemplated his options. He poured out his thoughts to his brother’s tomb. Finally, without speaking to his wife, he made his decision.
Cardinal Dalla Costa and the other members of the resistance effort in Florence quickly understood the scope of what they were up against. On November 6, 1943, without warning, German SS and Italian Fascists arrested Jews around the city, many of them foreign-born. At the end of the month, as part of a larger series of arrests, German and Fascist soldiers stormed into one of the buildings of Florence’s archdiocese and arrested key members of the Jewish refugee assistance committee, including one of Dalla Costa’s most trusted priests and the chief rabbi of Florence.
Rufino Niccacci, a monk and priest from Assisi, happened to come into Florence to meet with Cardinal Dalla Costa at the time of these November raids. As he left the train station and walked toward the archbishop’s residence, he was startled by what he saw. German soldiers and Fascists with rifles swarmed the city in trucks and on motorcycles. As he neared the archbishop’s palace in the center of town, Niccacci could hear loudspeakers blaring “Achtung! Attenzione! All inhabitants outside! No packing, take nothing. You have three minutes.” Jews were being rounded up in different parts of the city. On one street, Niccacci came across groups of Jewish families huddled together as Nazi soldiers grabbed parents by the shoulders to load them into one vehicle while they pushed the children with rifle butts, to shuffle them into separate vehicles. A few women clutched their babies to hide them, but the soldiers ripped them from their arms. Some young Jewish men sized up the situation and decided to make a break for it. They didn’t get far, crumpling as the bullets hit them. Niccacci hurried along through the city, and the violence only got worse. “I saw a whole family lined up against a wall and machine-gunned because a revolver had been found on one of them,” he said. By the time he reached the archbishop’s palace, he was distraught and soaked in a panicked sweat.
In his everyday life, Niccacci was the father superior of the monastery of San Damiano in Assisi. With a square jaw and prominent dark eyebrows, he was the picture of youth. He was energetic and strong, a trait he inherited from his father, the operator of a small grain mill. Even the formless brown sackcloth of his Franciscan cassock, tied at the waist with a cord, could not hide his muscular frame. To many people who knew him, however, he seemed an unlikely candidate for the monastic life. As he himself readily admitted, he was rather inclined toward certain earthly pleasures. He relished a good bottle of wine and was the only one in the monastery’s community who smoked. At thirty-two years of age, he seemed too young to be the head of a monastery filled with older men.
But when a group of Jewish refugees had arrived in Assisi in September 1943, and the local bishop asked him and another priest, Don Aldo Brunacci, to help them, Niccacci discovered within himself an uncommon reservoir of courage and wisdom. He arranged safe accommodation for them in the guesthouses that the different monasteries and convents in Assisi maintained. He organized the production of false identity documents so that they could evade detection during arrests. And when stopped by the German army or the Fascists, Niccacci proved adept at telling bold lies in order to protect these people who now relied on him for their personal safety.
He had come to Florence to seek the cardinal’s assistance in coordinating safe passage out of the country for some of the Jews he had been hiding. When he entered Dalla Costa’s study, the cardinal was sitting at his desk with his head resting in his bony hands. The cardinal looked up and composed himself. Niccacci listened as he shared an alarming piece of news: there was no longer a practical way for the refugees in Assisi to leave Italy. The Swiss were turning away many Jewish refugees at their borders; the Germans were keeping a watchful eye on the Port of Genoa, closing off the possibility of escape by sea. Dalla Costa could do little to help those who had taken refuge in Assisi. Niccacci sat gloomily as he contemplated how his trip to Florence appeared to have ended in failure. Then the cardinal slowly outlined an alternate plan.
“You came here to ask my help in establishing a route out of Assisi. I would like to reverse the process—and establish a route to Assisi,” he said.
“Your Eminence doesn’t mean to suggest that all Jewish refugees come to Assisi?” replied Niccacci anxiously.
“Calm down, Padre. No, I don’t mean to turn your city into the hiding center for Jews. But I would like to turn it into a counterfeiting center—where you could produce identity cards for the people who need them. First of all for those who are hiding in private houses and are in constant danger. Those people need your help, Padre.”
Niccacci balked for a moment, worried about all the new responsibilities he was being asked to shoulder. Slowly he composed himself and agreed to help.
Weighing the task ahead, he asked the cardinal one final question before beginning his trip home to Assisi. “How do you propose, Your Eminence, to forward the photographs to us and pick up the identity cards when they are ready?”
“I have my couriers,” the cardinal replied. “The photographs will reach you in a week.”
As the afternoon sun sank in the sky, Gino left his home on the outskirts of Florence with some bread and vegetables he had procured from several farmers near Ponte a Ema. The Bartalis didn’t really have extra food to spare, but Gino knew the Goldenberg family would have nothing. He walked down Via del Bandino toward an apartment he co-ow
ned on the same street as his home. He let himself in and put the meager supplies in the small kitchen. It wasn’t much, but it would have to do. After one final look around, Gino left the way he had come and locked the door behind him.
He then hurried north toward Florence. Having made his decision, he knew there could be no looking back. It was time to bring the Goldenbergs to their new home.
8
The Counterfeiters’ Ring
The Brizi printing press.
(photo credit 8.1)
ONE EARLY MORNING NOT long after Dalla Costa’s meeting with Niccacci, Adriana Bartali awoke to see Gino putting on his cycling shorts, jersey, and sweater in the corner of the room. Where is he going? she wondered as she sat up in bed. Startled, Gino stopped changing and turned to her.
“Don’t wait for me this evening. I’m leaving for a few days of training,” he said.
She stared back at him.
“If someone should come looking for me, especially at night, say that I left the house for an emergency.”
“Who would be looking for you—at nighttime?” she asked, anxiety creeping into her voice.
“No one,” he replied. “But if someone does, just tell them that I’m out finding medicine for little Andrea, who is sick.”
Adriana watched as Gino finished dressing himself, adding a pair of long johns over his shorts because the mornings were already getting cold as winter approached. That he would be gone for a few days wasn’t what bothered her. She was long familiar with the demands of her husband’s training commitments and a racing schedule that took him all over Europe from early spring to late fall. But in these last weeks he had been disappearing more frequently, and the nervous way he had answered her questions alarmed her.
“What are you training for if there are no races scheduled?” she asked.
Gino stopped getting ready and walked over to his wife. “I’m just training,” he said, and leaned over to kiss her firmly on the forehead. Adriana’s breathing slowed as her husband communicated reassurance in the unspoken language they shared. Gino wanted to be ready when the races started again.
Gino carried his bicycle out of the house and left. Soon he was gliding across Florence’s city streets to meet one of the cardinal’s trusted assistants. The rendezvous spot changed frequently, but the objective was always the same: Gino was picking up a few documents and a cache of photographs. All would be used to create counterfeit identification papers for Jews in hiding. Although barely larger than four postage stamps placed together, each photo told a story about its provenance. Some had been taken recently, with the black and white tones still crisp but artfully weathered to look older. Others betrayed their true age in their creases, and in the corners still curling from where they had been pulled off genuine identity documents. Gino recognized none of the faces. From old men wearing youthfully stylish suits, hinting at their vanity, to young women staring blankly with world-weary eyes, they were all strangers.
After hiding the photos away in the safest place he knew, Gino began the journey south. It was still early morning, but Florence was already humming with activity. Pedestrians streamed across sidewalks, drawn like magnets to lines outside the neighborhood dry-goods stores, where each hoped to pick over the nearly empty shelves and find something that could tide them over for a few more days. Here and there, soldiers mingled among them, some chatting among themselves while others stood still, watching. The most menacing were the German SS, who wore caps bearing a skull-and-crossbones badge. Gino had seen these men in the city time and time again, but the sight of them always filled him with a mixture of fear and anger. It was just another unwanted reminder that he lived in a police state, where his every move could be followed and questioned. Relief came only when he rode over the bridge above his beloved Arno River. In a few minutes he would leave the city behind and be alone again on the open road.
The trip to Assisi was a lengthy one, some 110 miles along the most direct route, and so Gino had several hours to reflect. If Alfredo Martini or one of his other training partners had been out riding with him, he would think out loud in an unbroken stream of chatter. “He liked to say everything that passed through his head,” said Martini when describing these rides. Martini, like Gino’s other training partners, loved to train with Gino because Gino would happily let Martini draft on his wheel for almost the entire ride; he was just delighted to have company. “He never stopped talking to me,” said Martini, who could barely understand Gino at times because of the wind and his own fatigue, though he never failed to respond “Yes” whenever he could to encourage his friend.
Gino talked about everything except the war. He could spend hours analyzing a strategy he had used in a race years earlier, or share his latest thoughts on the best food to eat before training. But his favorite topics were his rivals, and in 1943 that meant Fausto Coppi, the young upstart who had become a credible competitor in those last races before the war turned more serious in Italy. Coppi seemed to be among the very few who could methodically parry Gino’s staccato attacks with an unyielding fluidity that refused to be baited. Inevitably on those training rides, Gino would also vow to win the Tour de France again. He would silence those critics in the cycling community who he believed were quietly starting to whisper that he was past his prime, calling him Il Vecchio, “the Old Man,” a “grandfather [who had to be] taken for walks from time to time.”
But Coppi had been gone from Italy for more than six months, dispatched as a soldier to Africa as part of one of Mussolini’s failed military campaigns. Nor could the Tour have felt more remote. Five years after Gino’s win, it was nothing more than a dream from a distant, prewar world. And so, in the rare moments of silence when Gino was riding alone instead of with his cycling partners, he wrestled with a growing sense of hopelessness. He was losing his “most fertile years,” as he put it, for winning cycling’s top honors and earning the prize money that would be critical to support his family. Whatever plans he held for the future were diminishing with every passing month without races.
When he had ridden some seventy miles, Gino came close to Terontola, where he had a little job to complete. Terontola was a typical small Tuscan town with a cluster of ocher-and-tawny buildings, but it held one unusual distinction: it was the transfer point between the main north-south rail line in Italy and one of the regional lines that ran southeast to Perugia, Assisi, and Foligno.
Some five hundred yards from the train station, Gino stopped on a nearby bridge. He was early, and so he busied himself by pretending to inspect his bicycle. As he fiddled with it, however, he watched the train tracks. He was waiting for a train coming in to Terontola from the north, which was thought to be carrying either Jewish refugees or other anti-Fascists fleeing to the countryside and southern Italy. This station was particularly dangerous for them because they often had to switch trains and therefore risked detection and capture when moving across the platforms.
Jewish refugees dreaded train stations because they were exposed to so many possible captors. As one Italian Jew explained, “That’s where one was most likely to get cornered. Nazi and Fascist uniforms were everywhere, and God only knows how many secret service trench coats. Most evident were the German military police. They were tall devils, walking in pairs in impeccably fitted and pressed gray uniforms, gloved hands joined behind their backs and simonized boots clicking in slow, synchronized rhythm. A polished metal plate with the engraved word Feldgendarmerie hung from their necks by a chain like a wine steward’s emblem, and it swung on their chests as they watchfully zigzagged through the crowd.”
Gino knew these dangers, and so when the train finally appeared in the distance, he got back on his bike and rode into town to the bar in the Terontola train station. Word of his arrival spread quickly through the station and even the small village itself. The appearance of one of Italy’s most famous sports stars in Terontola was an exciting event unlike any other. In the bar, the owner, a friend of Gino’s, greeted him; the town
tailor, another friend who worked nearby, appeared and offered Gino a prosciutto sandwich for lunch. Around them, people from the train station pushed to get closer to Gino. Many hoped to embrace him or give him a friendly slap on the back. Others wanted to buy their idol an espresso or get his autograph.
In no time at all, the little bar filled up, and Gino was called to address the noisy throng. He offered a few words of friendly greeting, and was answered with loud cheering. All this extra commotion attracted the attention of several of the soldiers in the train station, some of whom likely hoped to get autographs of their own. And for those refugees and dissidents hoping to avoid the Germans and Fascists as they switched trains, it is believed that this planned distraction bought them a few precious minutes of cover.
When it was all over, Gino got back on his bike and headed to the city of Perugia, where he planned to stay the night in a local church.
Meanwhile, in Settignano, the hillside Tuscan town northeast of Florence, eleven-year-old Giorgio Goldenberg rushed out of a local elementary school. His stomach growling for food, he joined a group of his classmates heading back to the Santa Marta boardinghouse for lunch. It was a short walk past a few small farms and a German military post. Within a few minutes they turned the corner past the estate’s stone wall and walked through the front gate, a soaring manorial entrance that would have made any giant feel small. Scurrying up a long stone driveway, they came to the ivory-colored four-story building that Giorgio and his housemates called home.
Road to Valour Page 13
