by Vic Shayne
With the help of some Italian and U.S. state officials, I filled out the paperwork for a visa. I was told that this process might take a long time, so until then I would hang around Rome with my new friends.
With the Onofre home as my base throughout the summer, and making friends among a small group of DPs from the UNRRA organization, I learned that there was a strong and active camp close by at the site of Cinecittá, a former movie studio compound founded by Mussolini in the late 1930s. The name literally means “cinema city.” During the war, when the Germans occupied Italy, they looted and destroyed Cinecittá with all of its equipment and novelties used in the motion picture business. The movie industry was forced to move to temporary facilities in Venice. Now that the war was over, Cinecittá was taken over by the occupying Allied forces and converted into a displaced persons camp. I was immediately given a home in Cinecittá and moved into a makeshift apartment right away. There was no reason to continue to impose on the Onofre family and wear out my welcome. Housing and meals in this DP camp were free, and I enjoyed a private bedroom. Mingling with thousands of other Holocaust survivors, I began to make friends, a few who were fellow survivors of Mauthausen.
It was in Cinecittá that Dr. Yakobovich found me. He was working at a nearby hospital where many of the DPs were being treated for maladies that required medical attention after years of neglect. And so, I too became a patient. Dr. Yakobovich now was able to take a look at my injured arm in a proper medical environment. Still sincere, soft-spoken, and likable, the doctor scheduled me for surgery. In a procedure that took several hours, Dr. Yakobovich surgically straightened my damaged right arm then sent me off to a British sanitarium called Villa Sansoni, on Via Cassia, to recuperate. I spent the next several months there until my arm had healed from the delicate surgery. For the first time since I was shot while escaping the labor camp at Koldichevo, I was able to fully straighten my arm. Before leaving Villa Sansoni, I once again bade farewell to Dr. Yakobovich and returned to Cinecittá.
I came to realize that Cinecittá’s Jewish organization was one of the best-organized DP groups in Europe, under the auspices of UNRRA. Care packages came from America filled with sardines, chocolate, soap, and all kinds of other supplies—from shaving kits to clothing. The main purpose of our organization was to inventory and process these goods and to distribute them fairly to all the refugees in the camp as soon as possible. In those days, there was a tremendous black market and we had to make sure that none of the care packages ended up in the wrong hands. When I was elected secretary of our distribution organization for refugees, I took my position quite seriously. I realized how important it was to keep an eye on our inventory and make sure it made its way to the people who needed it the most. But there was more to our DP organization than meeting the day-to-day needs of Jewish refugees in Rome. We had long-term goals as well. We knew we couldn’t live in Italy forever and that there was no returning to our homes that no longer existed. So, naturally, a strong Zionist movement arose among the camp’s homeless who were itching to start a new life without further delay. Night after night, for hours and hours, we had lively discussions on how to emigrate to Palestine, how we would live, and what our lives would be like. All of this talk rekindled a bevy of ideas that I hadn’t thought about since I was a young man listening to Zev Jabotinsky in Maitchet. Most of us agreed that Palestine was not just a logical solution but the only solution to our lost state of affairs.
Not only the Jews but the entire world, like it or not, would soon discover that there was no returning to our former homes in Poland or anywhere else in Eastern Europe. This became painfully obvious when, only a year after the war ended—as Jews were trying to reclaim their homes and property—they were met, beaten, and murdered by local Poles, Ukrainians, and White Russians. The most notable of these instances happened in Kielce, Poland, where, in July 1946, close to forty Jews—Holocaust survivors—were killed when they tried to re-establish themselves in their old neighborhoods. The Kielce massacre proved to all of us that the world of the shtetl was gone forever. There was no going back. The death of Hitler, the end of the war, the discovery by the American and Russian troops of the concentration camps, and the destruction in Europe would not put an end to the killing of Jews in Poland by their former neighbors. We did not survive the Holocaust just to return home and be murdered by the same anti-Semites who butchered our families. The remaining Jews of Europe needed somewhere to go.
What place would be safe for us after all that we had been through? So many countries closed their doors to refugees. Other nations were indifferent or obstinate, playing political games and making up quotas on immigration in emergency sessions. How long could the remaining Jews of Europe sit around, day after day, living in tents and abandoned concentration camps waiting for some government or the military to find us a new, safe home?
Even with a few family members living in America, I could do nothing but sit and wait for my emigration papers to be processed, while news of Jewish persecution made all of us survivors uneasy. Anti-Semitism, Nazism, and barbarism continued to be a very real threat. The war may have been declared over, but the hate continued to flourish. There were even Nazis in Rome at this time. There were former SS officers and German officials trying to hide from their crimes by blending in with the population. Polish, Ukrainian, Lithuanian, Hungarian, Romanian, and Yugoslavian murderers hid among Holocaust survivors, receiving welfare and medical care and hoping to emigrate to America along with the rest of us. Once in a while, one of these persons would be discovered or recognized by a concentration camp survivor then taken away by military police for questioning. Most were just set free on the other side of town.
One of the pastimes—maybe you could even call it an obsession—of the DPs was to go to bulletin boards and check the notices. We used to stand for hours pouring over thousands of notes. Husbands looked for wives, children for parents, brothers for sisters, aunts for nephews, mothers for daughters. We read the boards for friends, neighbors, and any recognizable name or place. We searched in vain even for what we knew was lost. There were so many names, you couldn’t possibly read them all. They were in all different handwritings and languages—Russian, Yiddish, Hebrew, Hungarian, Polish, German, Italian. We returned to the messages day after day, month after month, looking for a link to our past. To search the notice board, I frequented a Jewish-owned, popular café off the main street, Via Nazionale. People came to the establishment from all over to meet friends over a cup of coffee or a dish of ice cream. But most of us came to search.
One Saturday afternoon I walked to the café and ordered an espresso. As I waited for my order, I started scanning the pages hanging up on the wall. There were so many familiar names—Shmulek, Motel, Yossel, Esther, Itzhak, Abraham, Faigel, Rifka, Chaim, Sarah, Jakov, Leb—but no one I knew.
I picked up my espresso and sipped it while still standing at the wall. I slowly moved along, studying the letters from floor to ceiling. There were others around me doing the same thing. I must have been completely lost in thought because I didn’t take notice of a young woman beside me in the café. The restaurant was busy and noisy with people always coming and going. By now, I was accustomed to the clatter of different voices in different accents and languages filling the air. There were so many conversations that they all just blended into one vibrant hum. Then I heard a voice speaking in German. I took little notice and just kept reading the notes. Then the voice became a little more insistent. I felt a small but firm hand on my shoulder gently turning me around. There was a pretty, well-dressed woman speaking to me in German.
With a warm, glowing face, she asked, “Do you remember me?”
I didn’t know who she was. Why would I know a German? I stared at her blankly, but she pressed me, “You don’t remember me?”
“No, I don’t know who you are,” I answered. I thought maybe the young woman had me mixed up with somebody else. Maybe she was hoping I was somebody else.
“Remember
the train station?” she said. Train station?
Her face was kind and sweet and her blue eyes were searching mine, trying to help me remember her. I was at a loss.
“The train station,” she repeated. “Remember the train station with me, my daughter, and my mother?”
That’s when I remembered.
The lady said, “I’ve been coming here for an entire year looking for you. I’ve been here every day hoping you would come through the door. I would never give up looking for you.”
At last there must have been a sign of recognition in my eyes, because a broad smile came to the young woman’s face and her eyes began to tear. “You saved our lives. I’ve been looking for you. I’ve been trying to find you to thank you for what you did.” Then she hugged me as if I were her own son. When she released me, she looked me over and seemed pleased that I was getting along.
“Please,” she said, “you must come to dinner with us.”
She invited me to her house to reunite with her mother and daughter. It was a bit awkward for me, but I felt I needed to do this for her, and I accepted. The next week I found myself sitting with these three women, a guest of the wife, daughter, and mother of an SS officer. They couldn’t do enough for me, feeding me ham, cheese, bread, and vodka. They wouldn’t let my plate go empty. For dessert they put an assortment of homemade baked dishes in front of me. We talked and drank for hours. To this day I think to myself, what kind of crazy world can this be where such a thing can happen? I was both a rescuer and a victim, sharing an evening with these strangers who once represented the worst of my nightmares.
When the evening ended, I was invited over again.
“We must see you again,” said the lady. Her daughter and mother grasped my hands and pleaded with me to come back. “Please.”
I accepted and returned a couple of weeks later. The three women were just as excited and accommodating on that visit as my first. They never stopped talking. At one point the woman said to me, “My God, here I am, a wife of an SS concentration camp officer—and a Jew saved my life.” She couldn’t get over it. She shook her head, put her hands over her face, and wept. She was so overcome with a mixture of guilt, shame, happiness, and gratitude that her mother had to console her. I found this impossible to understand myself. But eventually our conversation ran its course and we amicably parted ways. That evening was the last time I saw her and her mother and daughter, and a brief chapter of both of our lives came to an end.
Although this story seems a bit strange, it really isn’t in context. I cannot begin to describe the state of affairs in Italy at this time. The country, like most others in Europe, was in a state of extreme flux. Homeless people were wandering the cities, occupying military forces were patrolling the neighborhoods, bureaucracy was worse than ever, refugees from all sides of the war were looking for government assistance, schools had been turned into offices and boarding houses, communists re-emerged on the political scene, the military was always shipping out its soldiers, streets were clogged with people and trucks carrying supplies, political parties were rising up to represent all extremes, money was scarce, black marketers were prospering, and we, the Holocaust survivors, were getting restless. We all wanted to move ahead with our lives. We weren’t drifters and we needed desperately to settle down.
I was anxious about the progress on my visa to America, but every time I checked with the consulate I got the runaround. “It’s in process!” I was told. “Move out of the way; there’s somebody else in line.” Sometimes you had to wait in line for hours just to ask a question. Tempers were wearing thin on both sides of the desk, but it seemed that nobody was getting what they wanted.
For the time being, I wasn’t going anywhere. Aunt Frieda in America would have to wait; I wrote to her and said I couldn’t get my visa. There was no getting past the red tape. Rome has always been a busy city, so at least I was never in want of something to do and people to be with. Every Italian I met seemed to have a sister or a cousin to introduce me to. In this respect, I was very busy. I started seeing one girl in particular, Maria DiTota, a beautiful blonde beauty queen. The only problem was that she lived about eight miles away and I had to be resourceful to get to her house. Petrol was at a premium and nobody I knew had a car. Even the off-duty American servicemen had to get around on foot. But I was determined to visit Maria and eight miles wasn’t really that far. Besides, what else did I have to do with my time?
I found a bicycle and decided I would make a day of it. It would take me quite a while to ride to Maria’s house, given the poor state of the roads and the hilly terrain. I called her on the telephone and told her I was coming, but Maria warned me to cancel my plans. She said she wanted to see me as much as I wanted to see her, but there was a big sciopero—a strike—by communist workers and I shouldn’t be on the road.
“Nobody should be on the roads,” Maria told me. “The police put up roadblocks everywhere. You’ll get yourself killed. Stay where you are; we’ll see each other next week.”
The Italian police were trying to avoid a clash between the communists and their opposition. These were volatile times and people had strong feelings about politics after the war. Strikes usually culminated in violent outbursts. Just before I was to head out for her house, Maria warned me again that it wasn’t safe to be riding into the communist stronghold all by myself, let alone on a bicycle and during a curfew.
“Maybe come here next week,” Maria repeated.
“Next week? No. Today,” I said. I was very confident. The war had removed my fear of anything trivial. And to me this was no big deal. “Let them kill me,” I said, “but I’m coming to your house to see you.” What could anyone do to me at this point in my life?
I didn’t give the threat a further thought and hopped on my borrowed bicycle. For the first couple of miles everything was fine, like any other day, some hills, some weeds, bumps in the road, and a Cyprus tree here and there. The sky was a bit cloudy and a late afternoon breeze cooled me off as I rode along. The bicycle rattled and clanged as my tires bounced over rocks and into little pits, but not a soul was on the road. The curfew actually made the ride easy. Over the next couple of miles, I rolled through two villages of farmhouses and little cottages and wide-open spaces. At the second village, I stopped and found a telephone and placed a call. Maria answered and I told her I was on my way to visit her. She was excited—not because I was four miles closer but because it was too dangerous.
“Have you gone crazy?” she said, “Don’t you listen to the news on the radio? The communists have guns and knives and are going to start a riot,” she told me. “Michele,”—my Italian friends called me Michele—“don’t come. Turn around and go back. Do you hear me, Michele? The police said the communists are beating people up and killing them. I’ll see you next weekend.”
I laughed, told Maria not to worry, and then said I was on my way. She didn’t want to hear another word from me on this matter.
“Ciao, Michele. Next week.”
I jumped back on my bicycle and started peddling. Being a big smoker in the postwar years, a half a mile later I started to crave a cigarette and reached into my pocket with one hand holding tight to the handlebar. I was now going downhill at a fast speed when a pile of rocks rose up to meet me. Quickly steering the bike around the obstacle, I ran off the road and almost took a nasty spill. If the communists didn’t kill me, the road might. I switched hands and checked my other pocket. No cigarettes. Where were my cigarettes? It occurred to me that I smoked my last one before I ever got on the bike. I was all out, so I decided to stop at the next place I came to. Maybe there was a store nearby where I could buy a pack. My trip to Maria’s was slower going than I predicted. The terrain was now going uphill and peddling was exhausting. Also, I took a slight detour, knowing that there would be a police barricade up ahead in keeping with the curfew. It was now just before dusk as I wheeled around a bend and spotted an inn in the distance. As I got closer I could hear quite a commotion comin
g from inside. I pulled up to the building and brought my bicycle around the side near some bushes and hid it there before entering the bar. When I opened the door, the place was packed with big, tough laborers. The drinks never stopped flowing, and half of the patrons were drunk off their feet. They didn’t even notice me walk in. But the other half did.None of them stopped singing their Russian songs even as they stared at me. Russian singing? In the middle of Italy? That’s when it dawned on me: I had walked right into a bar full of communists—striking laborers singing songs that I hadn’t heard since long before the war. I listened intently as they got more and more riled up. I stood by the door and stared at the men and listened to the words. Their pronunciation was pretty good. They probably learned these songs as POWs in Russia during the war.
That’s when a burly man stood up and took notice of me. “Oh! You like communist songs?” he asked me.
His large fists were holding two glasses of vodka and he was yelling to me from across the room. These were the characters Maria warned me about. This was the group that the police were looking for and telling people to steer clear of—communist agitators looking for a fight.
I couldn’t pass up a good Russian song; it had been years since I had last heard one. I walked across the room to where the men were singing and drinking, put my hands on their shoulders, and climbed up onto a table. It got quiet for a second. I was the center of attention, dressed in a suit and tie and standing in shiny black dress shoes. You could hear a pin drop as all eyes looked me up and down. Then somebody shoved a glass into my hand and another guy poured vodka into it until it ran over the sides. I took a swig of the drink, wiped my mouth with my sleeve, and started singing in Russian. The place went wild. Everybody began to clap with the music. They were overjoyed and wouldn’t let me go. They sang with me one song after another. I even taught them some songs they had never heard before. They thought I was the second Stalin. One song led to another, and all the while my vodka glass was kept full to the brim. In no time, especially since I hadn’t had anything to eat since breakfast, I was so drunk I could hardly see straight. The walls were spinning and the scores of faces around me were melding into a collage of scraggly black beards, drenched mustaches, red eyeballs, sweaty bandanas, and shiny noses. They lifted me up on their shoulders and paraded me around the room as we sang at the top of our lungs.
