Italian children are a special race. It is difficult to destroy their natural quality, which is bright-eyed, not rowdy, liveliness. They seem very sure of themselves, and this gives them a charming, comic dignity—they are a constant pleasure to look at. You have to shave their heads, as is done to boys in many institutions, and put the girls in hideous shapeless grayish uniforms, and regiment and discipline them to death before you can ruin them. Whereas Italians have a superb talent for making their own homes happy places to grow in, their institutions are too often factories to break the great spirit of the children. The worst of these asylums where children must live are sickening echoes out of Dickens and the darkest, heartless past. The average are dismal and chilling, under the gray shadow of poverty. The best are the best because kindness and sun have entered them—not because they are rich enough to provide plentifully for a child's needs. None can afford that. You are reading only of the best.
On the hills outside Rome, surrounded by terraced vineyards, is a handsome modern building, with sun decks and balconies, wide windows and big airy rooms, that Mussolini ordered some years ago as a hospital for unmarried mothers. Monte Rotondo is now an orphanage for the children of Partisans, the men and women who died fighting Fascism. Three hundred little boys and girls, the boys wearing blue-and-white-checked pinafores, the girls in red-and-white ones, were playing on separate sides of the long cement roof. They sounded like a congress of birds and looked like a flower garden, and they were inventing their own games because they had only two rubber balls for toys. They seemed healthy and gay and as children should be.
Without warning, the illusion of happiness cracked. A nun led up a small brown-haired boy with beautiful but frightened eyes. He would look at no one and kept turning away his head, and you could see the cords standing out in his neck. He was mumbling or whispering something. Then I realized that this child was telling how the Germans came to arrest his father, a Partisan, but his father was not home and the Germans were angry, so they took his mother and his aunts and his grandmother into the streets and shot them. He was with his mother, but she fell on top of him and he was hidden by her skirt and the Germans thought he was dead, so they went away.
Now, on the other side of the low railing which divided the boys’ playground from the girls’, a very small boy started to wail in high screaming sobs. This was the brother of the child who was speaking; he imagined that his older brother, the only family he had left in the world, was being taken away from him. Grownups came and asked questions and then surely they would put his brother in an automobile, and he would disappear and there would be no family anywhere. The little one sat on the cement floor, his face buried in his hands, and cried his heart out.
It was impossible to stop this needless torture. Among other things, Italy needs a loan of experienced child psychiatrists to instruct the men and women who have charge of these children. Now a nun, with perfect kindness and perfect insensitivity, presented a ten-year-old girl, blond-haired, slim and straight, with a fine, clever face. Quite clearly, as if she were talking of someone else, she told how her father came down from the hills, where he lived with a band of Partisans, to visit his family; and that day the Germans stopped in the village and rounded up many men and took them into the woods and stood them in a row and shot them. She was hiding behind the trees and she watched her father being killed. The sunny roof took on the aspect of a nightmare; one imagined child after child, in a blue or red pinafore, being led forward to recite the memory of horror. The only way to prevent this was to flee.
As we left, the nun said all the children had seen very terrible things, so they were “more nervous” than ordinary children. For the least little reason, she said sadly, they were frightened and they cried.
The Villa Savoia is the former home of former King Umberto of Italy. Now the front part of the building is the Egyptian Legation, and the back part houses thirty-five mutilated children. The garden is wonderful, large and overgrown and full of secret places, and the rooms are bright and shining with sun. The children here are a living roll call of the battles of the war; they come from Cassino, blind; from Pescara, legless; from Frosinone without an arm; from Sicily, another blind. One of them found a curious round object on the beach, and he rolled it along like a hoop. It proved to be a mine and when he woke up in the hospital he had two stumps for arms and no eyes. A two-year-old boy was romping with his sister in a field. Under the grass something exploded, and she is dead and he is burned, with lidless eyes and twisted fingers.
And there is Giovanna, all softness like a deer, with brown hair and brown eyes. Her mother was running through the streets, pulling the child with her, during a bombing, and when she was killed she still held in her hand the right arm of her daughter. Giovanna spends her spare time knitting, with great effort, scarves for the stray cat that lives in the garden.
The blind children are very quiet. The little maimed ones guide the blind and tell them what they see. They all love the zoo and the movies, and the blind have marvelous notions of what the animals look like and what happens in the movies. They listen to the dialogue and make up the stories. In these stories there are always fine houses and lots to eat and beautiful parents and many happy children, and no one is blind.
But in cold weather they are all miserable, and a little boy will say his hand hurts, although he has no hand; and a little girl will complain of pain in a missing foot; and the blind are depressed by dampness and rain. Then, too, since they are growing, the bones push through the stumps of their arms and legs, and they must undergo more and more operations.
There are children with mutilated minds, too, who were so brutally shocked by the war that their minds can no longer direct their bodies. Some of them are in institutions; most of them are not. There is no room. You could learn about these children by walking through any bombed area and asking casual questions. In this way, by chance, near a Rome railway station I found a family which had been buried under their collapsing house during an air raid in 1944. There were four of them and they were dug out alive. The youngest boy was wounded in the head, but he was sewed together and he lives, hideously scarred, goes to school and seems fine. The government pays him $1.80 a month pension, which is the only fixed money coming in to the family. They moved back to the patched remnants of their house—where else could they go? The older brother, a boy of twelve, sits in their scabby room, year after year, doing nothing. He has never spoken since the night he was pulled from under the bricks of his home.
There are a few institutions for such children, of which the oldest must be the Gaetano Giardino Home, as it was founded as a shelter for mentally deranged children after World War I, and is naturally full up again after World War II. It is a beautiful old fort, on the rim of Rome, whitewashed and thickwalled, and a pitiful and alarming group of children live here behind the ancient moat and drawbridge. If, in this tragic crowd, you see what looks like a normal child, you ask: Why should she be here, that little one over there with long brown hair? Only because she has convulsions, as a result of the bombing of Velletri. But why that kid, doing carpenter work, the one wearing the lopsided glasses, the one with the nice grin—why is he here? Only because every so often he gets an unbearable headache, and then, for three and four days at a time, he loses his mind and lapses into a still blankness. But he is better than when he came, because then he was badly burned and his left arm was paralyzed too.
The estimated number of physically mutilated children is 15,000, but this is certainly an incomplete figure. About 15,000 men is a full-strength infantry division, so you can picture how many children this is when you remember the victory parade on Fifth Avenue, and how long it took one division to pass the reviewing stand. Only 3,000 of these wounded children can be taken care of. One does not know how the others live. There are approximately as many mentally deranged children as all American forces landed in Normandy on D Day, 45,000. But only 5.5 per cent of them can be helped in suitable institutions. The coun
ted war orphans would fill twelve infantry divisions, 180,000 children, and twelve infantry divisions was the maximum size of the United States fighting army in Italy. As for the school children who are also often orphans and wounded and incipient TB cases, a government report states that 2,000,000 of these are needy and undernourished. Some 900,000 whose hunger endangers their immediate health receive food each day through the combined contribution of the United Nations Children's Emergency Fund and the Italian Government. They are given about 900 calories. What 900 calories look like is a small plate of rice with tomato sauce, a small piece of bread with some corned beef on it and a tin cup of powdered milk.
It goes on and on; it is a whole world of children who will never, as long as they live, stop paying for our grownups’ war. Their eyes are hard to meet. They could so easily be full of laughter, but instead they are bewildered, wary, frightened, sad.
Many people in Italy are fiercely aware of the tragedy of these children. There are countless women of real good will who devote their time to volunteer work, and trained social workers who do an admirable job, especially in the Organization for Maternity and Infancy and the Red Cross; priests and doctors and nuns and teachers; the staff of the United Nations Children's Emergency Fund, who cannot be praised too highly; a young American social worker, Edna Weber, who runs, on almost no money, the happiest, most hopeful small orphanage I have seen; an inspired judge of the juvenile courts, Doctor Colucci, and others too numerous to list and name. They deserve unlimited respect because it takes a steady, faithful mind not to give up in despair before so overwhelming a task when you have so little means for handling it. No Italians can be happy that the state of our world forces them to spend one third of their national budget on military expenditures—including the care of cemeteries from two wars—while the children, the richness and future of their race, must be neglected for lack of funds.
It would be impossible to explain the last war to these children, let alone preparations for another. They really know about war and what it does to life. They must be the most convinced pacifists on earth. And not just these children, but all the others like them, throughout Europe, who know of war only that it comes into your street and onto your farm, and when it has gone you are left behind and have nothing you want, nothing you can count on, nothing a child has a right to. Adults could not persuade these small survivors that it is always necessary to make the world safe for democracy, but never safe for children.
Meantime, the fields of Italy are neat and lovely as gardens. The cities are bursting with people and bustling with buying and selling. The Italians, undaunted, struggle hard along the road to recovery and have strength left over to love life as they go. The foreigners, unanimously, admire a people who can make such a good thing of peace, and, unanimously, love Italy. It is one of the most beautiful countries in the world and, all things considered, one of the happiest. The sorrow and hardship of a few million children scarcely show.
The Forties
This book is not about war and I have written, in fact and fiction, all I want to write about the Second World War. I remember in hard detail the day and night of May 7, 1945, the end of the war in Europe. After that, for two drifting years, I have snapshot memories. It is time to make a statement about my memory. The chronology of public events can be verified. My personal chronology cannot, being based on scant, usually undated letters and a few of those page-a-day diaries evidently scrawled as a sort of penance: self-discipline. I have never before tried to figure out when I was where (why I was where is another question) and I am finding it hard to do, and mortifying. I search my memory and discover black holes, depthless chasms, vast reaches of impenetrable fog. A good for nothing memory. Dates are correct as near as I know, the best I can manage.
When peace broke out, the general notion was to settle down. London was the only place I could imagine as possible to settle in. London had been undesirable real estate for six years and was strewn with empty neglected houses, going at cut-rate prices. I bought a pretty little house in South Eaton Place more carelessly than I would buy a book. It was a charming invalid; it ailed everywhere, from the roof to terminal dry rot. Though I owned it for two years, after it was patched up I lived in it no more than six months at most, between travels.
My restlessness was out of control. I made an unenthusiastic effort to report the final stage of the war in the Pacific; the war and my effort ended with the A-bombs while I was visiting my mother in St. Louis. I spent time in Berlin with the American army of occupation, time in Portugal working badly on a war novel, time in France doing the same, time in Java reporting that dismal little colonial war. Sometime in London, Virginia Cowles and I wrote a frivolous play about war correspondents which made audiences laugh in the West End and folded overnight in New York. If I felt at home anywhere in this strange struggling peace, it was in London.
London looked sad. Weeds and wild flowers grew on bomb-sites everywhere, and great beams shored up the sides of half-destroyed buildings. There was no paint to freshen the face of the city. Rationing stayed strict. People were tired. Winter felt colder. My friends were as aimless as I was. We no longer had the imposed occupations of war, and nothing anyone specially wanted to do; or so it seemed. Limbo time.
One day I saw a pre-war English friend, a survivor from the early-thirties group of handsome young men-about-town, sitting alone in a big velvet chair in the Dorchester hotel foyer. He had been a prisoner of war since the Battle of Britain. With a strained smile and anxious eyes, he was watching strangers, listening to the babble of talk. I did not speak to him. I knew he was trying to get used to how people behaved who had not spent nearly six years behind barbed wire.
There were many parties; we made merry; no one talked about the war nor about those who were missing. The Chelsea Arts Ball at the Albert Hall, the rowdiest annual masquerade jamboree had been suspended during the war and now, on New Year's Eve 1946, people could again romp around the huge floor, light-hearted, amorous and silly. Another English friend, whom I had met in Brussels wearing khaki, turned out to be a kind rich man when wearing mufti; he took a box for the great ball which I filled with Poles, former officers in the Carpathian Lancers, met in Italy. Costumes were put together from scraps. The Poles wore rented chef's hats and aprons; I was a gypsy based on brass hoop earrings and a red sash. Food remained scarce but not drink, I don't know why. Tight as ticks, hundreds of us danced until morning. I remember it happily as the best dance ever; it convinced me that the war was over.
My favorite Polish ex-officer, a funny glamorous absent-minded nobleman, soon to begin his career as a door-to-door salesman of brushes in the north, brought his cousin to my little house where we huddled around an electric fire. She was the last living member of his family, a lovely girl, with shy demure manners, dark blond hair and grey eyes. She had a tattoo'd number on her arm, having returned from Ravensbruck via a displaced persons camp. He told me later that she was fine, very cheerful; of course she had a few little problems. My housekeeper, who actually could not cook or clean any more than I could, was a somber German Jewish refugee with diabetes. Everyone seemed to understand and accept everyone else; in all our different ways we had shared a common experience. I wondered what I would do with the rest of my life.
In this bustling jokey void, a letter arrived from my mother. She observed without emphasis that if I did not come home soon I would be an expatriate. The word appalled me, proving the power of language. Apart from a few visits and my year as a Federal employee and the following months in Connecticut, I had not lived in my homeland since 1930. I took myself for granted as a writer and an American, something that never changed. I lived where I liked or where it was convenient. Expatriate had a seedy decayed sort of sound. I sold my little house and returned to America in the spring of 1947.
The beginning was a treat. In a second-hand car, which by pure luck worked, my mother and I drove across America and Mexico to Acapulco. Part of this long happy trip is “Journey Th
rough a Peaceful Land.” As I wanted to sit still for a bit and grind on my war novel, we rented a house in Cuernavaca, a gentle village with dirt roads and flowers and superb trees and few foreigners, which enchanted us both. However, the object was to become a patriate and I chose Washington, remembered as a city of bearable size and besides, where better to become a patriate than in the nation's capital.
A war-time friend had found a house for me in Georgetown. It was available to rent that September because it belonged to a beautiful former actress, a liberal Congresswoman from California who had lost her seat after a smear campaign—pink leaflets branding her as a “pinko” etcetera—to a new man named Richard Nixon. I did not know this and it presents a fascinating question: can an omen be an omen if it is invisible? Georgetown was quiet and pretty with its brick dolls’ houses and, as I was working on my novel, it made little difference where I lived my mole existence. On the other hand, I ought to take note of the nation's business, at least once in a while. I was favorably impressed on learning that anyone could walk into Congressional hearings and share the process of government as a spectator. Three cheers for American democracy.
I walked into a hearing of the House Committee on Un-American Activities, and wrote “Cry Shame” in a greater passion of anger and disgust than shows in the article. Eisler was either deported or chose to leave, it hardly mattered which; he would never again find work in America. Though I had not seen or heard of him before the awful day of the hearing, I have a confused memory of going to wherever he departed (but when?) with a bunch of yellow roses for his wife, and imploring the baffled little man not to believe that all Americans were as loathesome as those Congressmen in Washington.
I could not accept the goings-on in that caucus room; they stewed in my mind. Why weren't the great American newspapers filled with condemnation? Why had the other Congressmen and Senators allowed this outrage? Why didn't everyone protest against the sinister wrongness of these horrible Congressional oafs? They denied the meaning of the war; they were practicing the same kind of ugliness that flourished in Germany. No one I knew shared my fury and my prophetic fears; I seemed to be exaggerating.
The View from the Ground Page 12
