Marguerite d’Erasmo was the twenty-four-year-old daughter of a French mother and an Italian father. He had been the director general of the Croce Rossa. He had died before the war broke out, but he was still revered here, and it had been the most natural thing in the world for his daughter to don the blue uniform, and she’d been wearing it since the war began. By 1943, last year, she was head of the Women’s and Children’s Committee for all of Italy.
But only weeks ago, everything changed. When Mussolini was overthrown and the king announced Italy’s withdrawal from the war, the Germans had swiftly moved south and the Wehrmacht stormed Rome. Not so fast, Berlin was saying. The Red Cross offices were promptly taken over by rough-mannered German soldiers.
In the beginning, they hovered in the corners of the faded palazzo with their weapons holstered, leaving Marguerite and her colleagues to do their work. But soon enough the soldiers were replaced by newly arrived functionaries of the German Red Cross, although they, too, wore the familiar field-gray uniform. They ordered the Italian workers to get out. Marguerite had been one of those to protest, but the German in authority had pulled a pistol from inside his tunic and leveled it at her.
Even in the darkness, Marguerite efficiently made her way up the familiar grand stairway to the second-floor room, which was quartered by four large desks—one had been hers. The room, with its window, was brighter than the corridor, and she stood at its threshold for a moment, taking in its shapes. There was her typewriter, still on her desk—just what she needed. Good. But first, something else. She pulled the door closed behind her, shutting it without a sound.
In shadow, the room seemed like a chamber in a mausoleum. Along one wall, evoking burial vaults, stood five metal file cabinets, each with four drawers. Still there, apparently unchanged. Good.
She crossed to the armoire in the corner, opened it, and found—sure enough—the pair of large canvas satchels that had long been stored there. She picked up the bags, went to the center file cabinet, and quietly pulled open its top drawer. The well-ordered look of the folders told her they’d been untouched—thank God. She began to stuff the first canvas sack with files and papers, the census records of certain Red Cross internment camps, located in the environs of Rome and to the north.
After Mussolini had mistaken the fall of Paris in 1940 for a sign of Hitler’s imminent triumph and thrown in with him, a mass of refugees poured into Italy from beyond the Alps, fleeing Italy’s new ally. They came by the thousands: fugitive conscripts, able-bodied men avoiding work camps, Communists, anti-Vichy Frenchmen, opponents of the Nazi-friendly regimes in Slovenia and Croatia, and—notwithstanding Italy’s own racial laws—Jews.
Throughout that year and the next, Marguerite knew, Jews came from the Balkans, Greece, Romania, Austria, Poland, and France. They came through mountain passes and by boat, landing in any number of the dozens of harbor towns along the peninsula’s pair of long coastlines. Mussolini’s government turned a near-blind eye to such fugitives, allowing them to be helped by the Red Cross, as well as by churches, convents, and schools. Marguerite and her colleagues had grown frantic when, soon enough, those foreign refugees were outnumbered by native Italians, displaced as the Allies began bombing industrial centers like Milan, Turin, Naples, and Bologna. Many thousands were made homeless by the air raids, with ever larger numbers of terrified city dwellers fleeing into the countryside. The Red Cross was overwhelmed.
Those in the camps were desperate, but Marguerite’s focus had narrowed. Red Cross officials throughout Italy, fully aware of German policy, had long since stopped recording Jewish identities in their census lists, but names and places of origin were still registered. Italian relief workers had taken to referring to the foreigners who’d been first to seek haven as “old refugees,” a euphemism for Jews, but the Gestapo, once unleashed, would not be fooled. Family names and birthplaces would be tip-offs. The particular file drawers containing “old refugee” records were what had brought Marguerite here tonight. It had been one of her jobs to keep these files collated and updated. She realized what a danger they posed.
Days before, Rome had been jolted by news passed from mouth to mouth that more than a thousand of the city’s Jews had been hauled into trucks in the old ghetto by the Tiber. Urgent word spread for surviving Jews to hide, and doors in every neighborhood had opened to them. Meanwhile, outside Rome, hundreds more Jews were being dragged away from Red Cross camps, and Marguerite had no doubt that the Gestapo elsewhere was making use of the organization’s census lists. But they would not use these!
She quickly emptied the contents of four drawers, filling both satchels—the records of several thousand people. Stuffed, the sacks were heavy, but the padded leather handles enabled her to lug them across to her desk. She placed them carefully to the side, then took her chair. After looking back at the door to be sure she had firmly closed it, she snapped on the gooseneck lamp, found the Geneva-stamped International Red Cross forms, fed a page into the typewriter, and made the keys dance. She drafted orders under her own name for a mother-child survey of Italian-run displaced persons camps in the regions from Tuscany to Veneto. Next to the Geneva seal, she embossed the page with her certification die. It was time to get out of Rome, and this credential—together with her blue uniform and more than a little luck—would make it possible. She would move from town to town collecting official data on children—and filing everything else in her mind. These orders would justify her steady northward progress, aiming at her eventual transport across the frontier into Switzerland. At Red Cross headquarters in Geneva, all that she had learned in Nazi-controlled Italy would matter to someone. It was the only thing she could imagine doing.
No sooner had she sealed and pocketed the self-created visa than she heard it—the big door downstairs, the sound for which she’d had one ear steadily cocked. She switched off the gooseneck lamp. Darkness. She listened. Again she heard it, a second banging of the door. Someone entering the building. She heard a man’s voice, then laughter. Then “Sehr gut!”
Instinctively, she plunged down into the small space under the desk, curling herself tightly. Her exceptional height notwithstanding, she was lithe. Calm, she told herself. If she remained in this black hole, she would be all right. She clutched her knees and froze. That she could hear them jostling in the entrance foyer below meant they were not attempting to be quiet, therefore not sentries, not searching. Soon the noises grew muffled. Then fell to silence.
Marguerite remained where she was, not moving. The odor of the desk’s underside hit her—raw, unfinished walnut—and suddenly she was taken back to another place, the cavern of another desk. She had often crouched like this under her father’s roll-top desk, which was a feature of his study in the family villa in Parioli, the patrician Roman neighborhood where Marguerite had grown up. She loved to hide under her father’s desk right before he returned home each evening, knowing he would stop there first to check the day’s mail. She would pop out and squeal, then collapse into giggles. He would always fall back, feigning surprise, then relief. “La mia principessa!” At that he would sweep her up into his arms, making her feel, simultaneously, that she was flying and that she was safe.
Marguerite’s father had lost his position as Red Cross director upon the publication of his 1935 report documenting the use of mustard gas by Italian forces in Ethiopia. Both he and Marguerite’s mother were widely denounced as traitors. Even Marguerite’s schoolmates had used the word: Traditore!
Later that year, she was told that her mother and father had been killed in an automobile accident. Though only a girl of fifteen, she knew that her parents were murdered by black-shirted thugs. After the “accident,” the Grand Council of Fascism expropriated the d’Erasmo villa in Parioli and seized the family assets. Marguerite, orphaned and disinherited, moved in with the Cistercian sisters at her school. An exuberant, expressive youngster until then, she became shy, withholding. She came of age as if she were a nun.
So silence like t
his came naturally. And since this was the abject posture of prayer, her most familiar entreaty took form from her unthinking lips: Remember, O most gracious Virgin Mary, that never was it known that anyone who fled to thy protection. . .
Suddenly sounds burst from below again, only now what Marguerite heard was the laughing voice of a woman. Then she heard the pop of a bottle being opened, champagne. The Germans had entered the room directly beneath her, the public reception chamber, furnished with tattered fainting sofas and Turkish divans. The voices of at least two men. More laughter. “Glück,” one cried, “und lange Leben!” Revelry. New arrivals. More women. Germans and their local Liebchens having found a love nest.
The sounds rose and fell, squeals of delight and feigned resistance, drunken snorts, a pathetic bacchanal. Marguerite uncurled herself to leave the cavern of her desk, hefted the two canvas satchels, one in each hand, crossed through the darkness to the door, opened it an inch, and listened. The men were singing now, Ein Prosit, ein Prosit—a toast, a toast! And Marguerite took the cue.
She went out into the corridor, away from the elaborate central staircase, toward the innocuous-looking door that opened onto the back stairs, originally for servants. The bags slowed her going, but she went down deliberately and quietly. In short order she was through the first-floor utility room, out into the cluttered service alley that ran behind the building, then onto the broad Via di Santa Prisca. The wartime blackout meant no streetlights, so at this time of night the street was a desolate vacancy. It ran downhill, a winding channel to the nearby Tiber. Marguerite moved as quickly as she could, was soon at the river, down onto the unseen quayside. There she emptied first one sack of files, then the other, into the rushing water that only moments before, a short way upstream, had run past the now Judenrein Jewish ghetto.
PART ONE
WAR
One
A Mighty Endeavor
DAVID WARBURG WAS alone—alone with his thoughts. In the shadowy tin tube he tried to picture the armada far below and well to the north—something like a thousand warships and merchantmen, if the rumors were to be believed. Legions more of landing craft swarming shoreward like water beetles, the tides breaking into waves of men hurling themselves against fire-spewing bunkers. Fortress Europe stormed at last, the great drama unfolding since dawn today.
During the fuel stop at an outcropping of rock in the Azores only hours ago, Warburg and the dozen others had clustered around the shortwave at Base Ops—a thrown-together canvas shanty on the edge of the steel-mats airstrip that stretched pretty much across the entire island. “The President, the President!” a gas jockey had yelled at concert pitch, and sure enough. Men huddled and hushed. Once the radio static cleared, the unmistakable patrician vowels floated in upon the crackling air, America’s most familiar voice, with its most reassuring cadence. “Last night,” FDR began, “when I spoke with you about the fall of Rome . . .”
The fall of Rome had been everything to those particular listeners, until then the essence of their concentration, anticipation, dread, and hope. Now they were being told that Rome was mere prelude, an overture to the music that mattered. “. . . I knew at that moment that troops of the United States and our Allies were crossing the Channel in another and greater operation.” Greater than Mark Clark’s liberation of the Eternal City, the first Axis capital to fall to the Allies? When Fifth Army tanks had rolled onto the tarmac of Ciampino Airport, Warburg’s plane had taken off from Fort Dix field, the wheels-up he and presumably everyone else on board had awaited for weeks. In the Azores, they had still been two thousand miles shy of Rome, yet—so the President implied—the pages of history were turning already. The real operation was far to the north. Bloody Italy had always been a feint.
“It has come to pass with success thus far. And so, in this poignant hour, I ask you to join with me in prayer.” Ahems and shuffling, even in the radio shack. Hats came off. The President’s tone slipped into a chute of the properly lugubrious. “Almighty God: our sons, pride of our Nation, this day have set upon a mighty endeavor . . .” Warburg’s gaze went involuntarily to the next man, a bald sergeant whose freshly bared head was bowed, his eyes closed, lips moving. To Warburg, the President’s pieties rolled on in packages, hardly registering.
But then a phrase leapt out of the sanctimony as Roosevelt said, “Help us to conquer the apostles of greed and racial arrogancies . . .” Arrogancies? Was that a word? Racial arrogancies? Warburg squeezed closer to hear what this could be, but Roosevelt had slid smoothly into the slot of his most solemn petition. “Some will never return. Embrace these, Father, and receive them, Thy heroic servants, into Thy kingdom.”
Arrogancies. Racial arrogancies. These hours later, the phrase was still hovering in Warburg’s mind. Wrapped in a blanket against the freezing altitude, he now sat on the narrow metal bench that ran along one wall of the stripped-down fuselage. The C-54 Skymaster, once reconfigured for cargo, was carrying passengers again, but apparently as ballast, the men distributed so as to keep the craft in balance. No matter who they were—brass, civilian VIPs, seat-of-government functionaries—the cargo was what mattered. In addition to the twelve or fifteen figures harnessed, like Warburg, on the twin benches, the plane held pallets of sacks and boxes stacked to the ceiling, running fore to aft and stamped USA QM. Cartons of C rations, evaporated milk, flour—thirty thousand pounds of Quartermaster supply, a first gesture of relief for starving Rome. The plane’s windows were blacked out, with the only light coming from three yellow-hued naked bulbs hung at intervals and filling the cramped space with eerie shadows that, early on, had made Warburg think of Plato’s cave.
The starboard passengers were entirely cut off by the wall of cargo from those on the larboard bench. On Warburg’s left, a man had been steadily hunched over a book, as if there were light enough to read. On Warburg’s other side, an eternal sleeper was pressed into the corner, hugging himself against the cold. Under his own blanket, Warburg wore the heavy olive parka that had been supplied as they boarded the plane in New Jersey, and under the parka, the gray suit and tie of his kind. Most of Warburg’s fellow passengers had spent the long transatlantic hours as intent on their stoic hunching as he was. Only bursts of steamy breath made clear that the otherwise impassive hulks were even alive.
Before taking off from the Azores on this last leg of the flight, the laconic pilot had craned in from the cockpit to apologize for the temperature that was soon to plummet again, but saying, “Cargo’s what counts. This man’s army don’t give a shit for men,” he’d drawled, adding, “God help those bastards up in Cherbourg.”
Warburg reached into the thickness of his clothing for a pack of cigarettes, but when he brought it out, he found that it was empty. He crushed the foil and cellophane, thought better of dropping it, and stuffed it back in his pocket. At that, the man on his left rose from his apparent stupor, leaning over with a pack in his fist, a magic trick. He shook it once, expertly producing a pair of cigarettes. They each took a light from Warburg’s match. “Thank you,” Warburg said.
“Forget that cargo, the canned food,” the man said through the smoke-marbled steam of his breath. “The tins pop their seals when they freeze—salmonella here we come.” He snorted gruffly, a bear in his GI blanket coming out of hibernation. Warburg too, in his blanket, must have seemed oafish, when in fact he was as thin as he was tall. His neighbor was not a bear, Warburg thought, but a defensive tackle on the bench. For a man who had sat silently for so long, he was suddenly animated, as if he himself had popped a seal. “Think about those beaches,” he said. “Those Kraut pillboxes.”
“Yes,” Warburg said. “Good luck to our guys.”
“Amen,” the man said, and he patted the book in his lap, an odd act of punctuation. He took a drag on the cigarette, studied it while exhaling, then brought his eyes directly to Warburg’s. “What brings you across?”
Warburg dropped his glance to the glowing ember of his cigarette. This was the first time he’d be
en asked to explain himself. “I’m with the Treasury Department,” he said, aiming to let it go at that.
But the man pressed. “To Rome for the Allied occupation? Let me guess. ‘Eye Sea,’ isn’t that what they call it? Invasion currency. Legal tender to be used by civilian and/or military personnel in areas occupied by Allied forces. You giving out the funny money?” Such jovial gruffness seemed forced, but that may have been a function of the man’s having to speak above the roar of the engines. The image of a football player, however, no longer seemed apt. Warburg recognized the deliberate display of insider lingo, a standard bureaucratic gambit. Tag, you’re it.
“Not exactly.” Warburg smiled, doing a bit of forcing himself, but staying with his cigarette. It was true that Treasury was tasked with providing specially printed military currency, and the black-and-blue banknotes had been rolling out of the Bureau of Engraving’s presses for weeks. But Warburg’s mission was far from that. Since the late-winter meeting in Morgenthau’s office, he’d counted the days until this one—while steadily moving the pins on his map and memorizing dispatches from Geneva, Lisbon, Budapest, and Istanbul. At night he’d slavishly bent over Berlitz manuals in Italian and Yiddish, ahead of quizzing by tutors early each morning.
Janet Windsor had lost patience with his obsessive unavailability. He’d tried to describe what he was learning from the Riegner cables, occasionally reading them to her. One telegram began, “It is the eleventh hour of the reign of death,” but Janet interrupted him and left the room. For the first time, they quarreled, and before long stopped seeing each other. There would be no wedding. After that, when he pictured Janet, readily conjuring her alluring figure, her moist lips with the sly hint of her tongue, he felt sad. But his fierce desire for her, once thwarted, had become tangled as much in relief as in grief. He regretted that his thoughts had turned back to her now.
Warburg in Rome Page 2
