The boys stormed through the front doors and made a beeline to the room where the nuns brought them together for meals. Lunch this day was the same thing they had eaten at lunch every day since Giorgio arrived: a bowl of watery soup and a serving of peas. Dinner, a slice of stale bread and a warm glass of barley coffee, would just be a repeat of breakfast. “For an eleven-year-old child, this was not enough,” explained Giorgio.
With such limited rations, food emerged as a constant obsession. Some of the boys became very enterprising. One turned the chore of potato peeling into a chance to gather the discarded skins (covertly pared as thickly as possible) that he later roasted secretly over a small fire built with friends and enjoyed with a pinch of salt. Others turned brazen, strong-arming younger students out of their food, or filling their pockets with bread stolen from the pantry. No scheme, however inventive, offered a permanent remedy; the satisfaction of any morsel, no matter how ill-gotten, inevitably yielded to the gnawing pain of hunger and a renewed struggle to find more.
The nuns did what they could to pacify these little battles, and tried to overcome the inevitable tension wrought by shortages by showering the boys with abounding love. One nun, known affectionately as “Mamma Cornelia,” emerged as a figure of particular kindness for the group of about ten Jewish boys who were hidden at Santa Marta’s—none of whom knew the others’ true religious identity at the time. She helped them avoid any uncomfortable questions when they didn’t take communion during mass, by suggesting that their parents were military combatants who would decide about the timing of their children’s participation in the sacrament when they returned from the battle front. Attuned to their spiritual needs, she memorized and privately delivered a traditional Hebrew blessing given by Jewish parents to their children. In the evenings, when she visited each boy as prayers were being said in the dormitory, she quietly encouraged them to say the prayers of their own faith in silence. Through all of these acts, her boarding house became a small island of refuge in a country beset by murderous persecution.
Try as she might, however, it was impossible to keep the outside world entirely at bay. The children saw it when truckloads of German soldiers trundled past them as they walked from their boarding house to the school nearby. They heard it in the noisy drone of Allied bombers flying overhead. And they felt it in the loneliness of a visiting day spent waiting fruitlessly at the window, when a boy was forced to accept the reality of his parents’ arrest and deportation. At times like that, “hunger was almost a blessing because food was all you could think about,” said one Jewish refugee who spent the war hiding in a nearby orphanage.
At dawn, Gino awoke in the Perugian church where he had spent the night. He did his morning calisthenics, as he had done nearly every day since 1936, and checked his bike. The distances between his seat, handlebars, and pedals always had to be the same; if the settings were off by even a fraction of an inch, that could cause muscle strain or pain midway through a ride. When he was satisfied with his bike, he wheeled it out of the church. He put his cycling cap on and set off again for Assisi. In the distance, the sun was just beginning to rise. The world was asleep, but there was a quiet hopefulness to this time of day that Gino had always cherished. It was the time that long races started, when a cyclist waited with nervous excitement to see whether the hundreds of miles of training he had accumulated in his legs would be enough.
Riding out of Perugia, Gino moved slowly at first, “warming up the engine” as he called it, getting a sense of how his body felt. It had been nearly six months since he last competed in what was admittedly just a middling wartime race, yet his legs remained remarkably strong. The ribbon of road spooled out in front of him, beckoning with a gentle descent through dormant wheatfields and silvery green olive trees, whose ripe globes were still being pressed into liquid gold by a bold few. Gino started to push harder. His heart sped up and he started to feel warm enough that he took his sweater off and rode just with his undershirt. The road leveled out, opening up as an alluring temptation. Gino pushed a little harder, sailing through the Umbrian countryside, slightly wilder and more rugged than his home region of Tuscany. Finally he could begin to feel the foothills of the Appenine mountain range under his wheels. Still he was holding something back; a real climb could only be won when every last ounce of strength was in play. Gino looked around and tried to estimate how far he was from his destination—and then he checked his watch and attacked.
Ahead, the town of Assisi rose out of the landscape, a cluster of pinkish white monasteries, convents, and churches perched on the side of Mount Subasio. Imposing and austere, Assisi traced much of its history back to its most important inhabitant, the thirteenth-century Catholic monk and saint, Francis of Assisi, who was revered for his teachings on charity and simplicity. Francis’s monastic order had spread around the world and transformed the sleepy outpost of Assisi into a major center of religious activity. Gino knew the town and had visited its churches before the war, receiving a chalice from the local bishop as a gift for the chapel in his home. But he had not come to Assisi today as a pilgrim. He had come to see Father Rufino Niccacci.
He found him at the San Damiano monastery, an expansive oatmeal-colored stone building just outside the town walls in a grove of olive and cypress trees. Gino made his way to the thick wooden side door and knocked on it. Niccacci heard him from his room and rushed down and let him in.
“You’ll catch a cold, Bartali!” he said, looking with surprise at the cyclist in his shorts and undershirt, before inviting him in.
“Thirteen kilometers from Perugia in a quarter of an hour is not bad, is it?” Gino replied with a touch of swagger, as he removed his cycling cap. Niccacci led the cyclist to a private room in the monastery.
When he was sure they were alone, Gino began to take apart his bike, and Niccacci watched as he unloaded its precious cargo. Gino loosened the screw attaching his seat to the bike, removed the seat, and pulled out the cache of photographs and documents, rolled up like a scroll and hidden in the hollow frame of his bicycle. Niccacci took the papers, unrolled them delicately, and hid them in a cupboard that held sacred relics in the monastery’s oratory.
Turning back to Gino, he said, “Come and have some coffee.” The two men walked to the refectory, the catacomb-shaped room of maroon wood and cream stone where the monks took their meals. They sat at one of the long, well-worn wooden tables beneath a nearly life-size painting of the crucifixion as Niccacci served up the monastery’s roasted barley coffee. It was simple fare, but Gino was happy to have it. As he sipped his drink, he relayed the news that the cardinal had instructed him to go even farther south. He was to speak with a priest who had contacts with smugglers who might be willing to be paid to run Jewish refugees across the battle lines into Allied-controlled territory. He would stop through Assisi again on his return.
When they finished, Niccacci walked his guest to the side door. The conversation turned to cycling as Gino put his cap back on. “I’ll be champion again one day. I’ll show them who Il Vecchio is,” he promised boldly. With that, he mounted his bike and sped off.
Niccacci would keep this meeting and the others that followed it as secret as possible. Still, on at least one occasion, a monk who was uninvolved with the network found out. It happened soon after Gino arrived for one of his deliveries. As chance would have it, Pier Damiano, a twenty-two-year-old member of the order, was coming out of his room when he saw the cyclist standing by the side door. Confused, Damiano stopped and looked at the stranger intently. In a moment, he recognized the face and sinewy figure that he had seen in countless newspapers.
Niccacci swore Damiano to secrecy about Gino’s visit. It was essential that the network they had set up continue to function without interruption, because the arrival of Gino delivering photographs could mean only one thing: Cardinal Dalla Costa in Florence needed more false identity documents.
Few things were more important in German-occupied Italy than identity documents. Often
little larger than a small folded pamphlet, an identity document typically consisted of a stamped photo and lines of information that detailed everything from the holder’s name and address to racial background and skin type (possible entries included “healthy” and “pink”). An ID was used constantly. Renting an apartment, getting food ration books, keeping a job, even just passing an everyday police document check on the streets—everything required an identity document. “A man without identity documents,” Giorgio Goldenberg later explained, “did not exist.” For Jews in Italy, now enemies of the state who could be arrested on sight, this meant the possibility of detection loomed around every corner of daily life. False identity documents, which hid their Jewish heritage, therefore became integral for survival.
Possession of false identity documents was, however, a grave offense in occupied Europe. A Jewish refugee captured with them would be arrested and probably deported to one of the death camps. A counterfeiter caught making the documents was liable to be executed for his crime. Given such severe punishments, forgers skilled and brave enough to do the work were difficult to find. Good false documents that could pass the near-constant inspections became more precious than gold.
In such a climate of desperation in the early fall of 1943, Father Niccacci had found himself the guardian of an improbable alchemist’s secret. On a side street in Assisi he had found a skilled printer named Luigi Brizi. Now he just had to persuade him to risk everything and become a counterfeiter.
Short and portly, Brizi often sported overalls and an Italian beret in his comings and goings about town. At seventy-one years old, he was the aging patriarch of a family that traced its roots far back into Assisi’s history. One ancestor, Eugenio Brizi, had been the town’s mayor and a noted local ally of Giuseppe Mazzini, a key player in Italy’s nineteenth-century battle for independence. Other members of his family had been wealthy landowners, amassing significant holdings of buildings in a nearby town. By Brizi’s time, however, the family had slipped inexplicably into a state of genteel poverty. The family’s buildings had all been sold off, and the profits spent. Only a street named after Eugenio remained in Assisi, an obscure memorial to the prominence they once enjoyed in the town.
As a young man, Brizi had settled upon the idea of starting a store in Assisi. He chose a small retail space across the piazza from St. Clare’s, the basilica dedicated to the thirteenth-century nun who was Assisi’s second most important religious figure after Saint Francis. Like many of the stores in Assisi, the space was small, narrow, and, at full width, measured but fifteen feet across. It was poorly lit, and its cold stone walls surrounded a rudimentary wooden floor that looked ready to collapse at any moment.
In the beginning, Brizi had intended to focus on stationery. Over the years, however, he added a small assortment of tourist bric-a-brac—religious figures, medallions, carvings, and the like. The income generated from all this would probably have been minimal, and it certainly wouldn’t have gone far in supporting his wife and five children. So he also began offering printing services. Sitting behind a refurbished Felix printer that he set up in a corner of his small store, he coaxed the press like a virtuoso behind a piano and began printing menus, rate cards, and circulars for the town’s restaurants, hotels, and churches.
Brizi likely first met Niccacci in this context, although it’s not certain. What is certain is that the two men did not meet because of a common affinity for the Catholic Church. Brizi was an atheist, despite living in one of Italy’s most religious towns. He had little patience for proselytizers and, like his ancestors, identified closely with the strain of Italian politics that viewed the Church’s influence in the nation with skepticism.
It must have been unusual in the Assisi of the 1930s for the head of a monastery to befriend a man who avoided church at all costs, and the fact that it happened revealed something about each man’s respective capacity for tolerance. In time their friendship grew stronger, nurtured over its own weekly ritual—a game of checkers each Wednesday, played with a shared carafe of Umbrian wine at a small café in the town’s main piazza.
In the fall of 1943, a single conversation would transform their relationship. It happened after Bishop Nicolini charged Niccacci with helping a group of newly arrived Jewish refugees. Each of these individuals needed counterfeit identity documents. One day, after their weekly checkers game, Niccacci reached out to Brizi to help him. As they walked through the narrow, cobblestoned streets of Assisi, the late-afternoon bells began tolling for evening vespers. Niccacci introduced the idea by reminding Brizi of the Jewish contribution to the cause of Italian liberation, aware of the Brizi family’s support of Italian nationalism. Niccacci kept speaking, leading Brizi through a brief history of Jews in Italy until finally he reached the end of his meandering monologue.
“Luigi Brizi, ares you going to help them?”
“Jews? Here, in Assisi?” Brizi asked incredulously and with good reason. There was no history of a Jewish community ever existing in Assisi.
“Yes.”
“How?” Brizi demanded.
“By printing false identity cards in your printing shop. By contributing to the cause you preach yourself—freedom and democracy. By repaying the debts Mazzini, Garibaldi, Cavour, and Brizi owed them. By saving their lives.”
Brizi was stunned into silence. But slowly Niccacci’s words began to take effect as the old printer bristled with the realization that the descendants of Italian patriots were now being betrayed by the very country they had helped establish. Finally he responded.
“I will do it—on one condition. I don’t want my son, Trento, to know, to be involved at all. In case something happens to me, I do not want him to be incriminated.” The twenty-eight-year-old Trento had just returned to Assisi in early September after fighting for Italy on the Yugoslavian front. Having almost lost him to the war, Brizi wasn’t willing to risk his son’s life again.
Just days later, Brizi was working on the false identity documents in his store when his son walked in. He tried to hide what he was doing, but Trento demanded that his father tell him what was going on. Brizi resisted at first, but then buckled under the weight of his son’s questioning. He swore him to secrecy, and then explained what Niccacci had asked of him. When his father had finished, Trento responded, “I fought for three years on the front, I heard the bullets whistling around me, and at this point I am no longer afraid of anything. If you are doing something, I will do it too. I will help you.” The old man reluctantly agreed.
Over the next several hours, father and son labored intently on their creation in the back of the store. Brizi continued to experiment with the movable type and printed samples on different types of card stock. Working on a suggestion that Niccacci had given his father, Trento began crafting the first of several false rubber seals from different communities like Lecce and Caserta that were below the Allied front and therefore unverifiable by the Fascist authorities. Together they made several copies, testament to Brizi’s long-held belief that “making prints was like making fritters—the more one made, the nicer they turned out.” Finally they managed to craft a workable blank identity document. They filled it out with personal information Niccacci had provided them. When they finished, their first counterfeit identity card was complete: Enrico Maionica, a Jewish refugee who had arrived in Assisi from Trieste in the north, became Enrico Martorana, a bachelor from the southern city of Caserta.
As they were wrapping up, they heard a noise outside the print shop. Brizi signaled to Trento to be silent, and turned off the light. They held their breath and went to the front of the shop. Trento looked outside through a crack in the shutter. They heard a pair of men’s voices, the snap of a match lighting a cigarette, and then one man said, “Danke schön,” or “thank you” in German. Though there was little light with which to see, Trento recognized the uniforms of the German SS and the Italian Fascist police. The pair had paused for a smoke outside. They moved on after a few minutes.
“What a scare. I wanted to throw everything away,” remembered Trento later. Then he reconsidered. Niccacci was risking his life to protect the Jews, and Trento decided that he didn’t want to surrender, either. So while it was after curfew, and there were Fascists and German soldiers patrolling the streets, Trento hid the new ID in his pants, and rushed out of the printer’s shop. He walked across the piazza, out the archway at the corner, down the steps, and along the descending path lined with cypresses and olive trees to the San Damiano monastery.
When he arrived, Trento pulled the document out of his pants. Niccacci inspected it closely and started speaking excitedly: “My God, you are very good. It’s perfect. Tell your father that there are dozens of Jews hidden here, and I will need several identity cards like this one. But please—change the city often. Identical identity cards will arouse the suspicions of the Nazis.”
And then, as if sensing the enormity of his request, Niccacci offered a small measure of help. Going forward, he would see to it that the identity documents were filled out with the appropriate personal information such as one’s birthplace and parents’ names.
As fate would have it, Enrico Maionica, the recipient of the first forged document, would emerge as the last link in the counterfeiting chain. An athletic chemical engineering student, he arrived in Assisi in the fall of 1943 carrying with him a story of persecution that would have been familiar to any Jew hiding in the small town. His trip to Assisi had been a nightmare, hiding from German and Fascist officers swarming the trains, which were overflowing with people and belongings. Some desperate souls rode in the couplings between carriages; others rode atop the cars, clinging to the roofs, only to be killed when the trains passed through narrow tunnels. Once in Assisi, Maionica hid for a period in a boardinghouse run by an order of nuns. Recognizing the risk of being identified as a Jew, he asked Niccacci to help him get false identity documents, and was soon drawn into the monk’s counterfeiting ring.
Road to Valour Page 14
