by Amy Harmon
They walked into the nave, looking for the abbess, and found it as empty and silent as the courtyard. The nave was rather gray and depressing, the arch of the ceiling too low for transcendence, but the statue of a woman beneath the altar made up for it. The sculpture was unlike any Eva had ever seen before. It was lifelike and lovely, yet so forlorn. The woman appeared as if she were sleeping, but her face was turned into the ground, strands of hair obscuring her profile, and the gash on her neck told a different story.
“Is this Saint Cecilia? What happened to her?” Eva asked, her eyes clinging to the slim white column of the woman’s throat.
“After failing to kill her in the bathhouse, they attempted again. They tried to behead her.”
“Tried?”
“The legend is that three blows with an ax did not accomplish the task. She died slowly, converting many in the process,” Angelo answered.
“What was her crime?” Eva asked, unable to look away from the statue.
“It was politics. She was an outspoken woman,” Angelo said wryly, as if he thought Eva could relate. There was a smile in his voice, but Eva couldn’t smile. She could only stare at the martyred saint.
“Oh, Father Bianco! We expected you much sooner,” a woman called out in surprise, distracting Angelo from his response. Eva turned toward the voice and watched as a diminutive woman with sagging jowls and sharp eyes approached them at a speed that belied her age. She’d entered the nave through a door to the left of the apse.
“Mother Francesca, this is Eva,” Angelo said simply, as if he’d already told the ancient nun all about her.
“You’d best be off, Father,” the abbess directed. “There is trouble with the Holy Sisters of Adoration. A pilgrim has died, and there is some disagreement about what should be done.”
“I will check on you tomorrow, Eva,” Angelo said, and with a quick bow toward the abbess, he was striding back toward the entrance, cane tapping, his small suitcase swinging. Eva could only stare after him, wondering again why she’d agreed to come to Rome.
“Come,” Mother Francesca commanded, and without waiting to see if Eva was coming, followed Angelo out of the nave and through the courtyard. Eva grabbed the large suitcase Angelo had carried all day, and juggling her valise and violin in her other hand, struggled to catch up. The nun led her through a small door to the left of the entrance wall. As they ascended a narrow staircase, the nun offered some information.
“The convent is shared between the Benedictine nuns and the Franciscan Missionary Sisters of the Immaculate Heart of Mary. But we are smaller in numbers than we once were, and the convent is past its prime.”
Eva wondered how long it had been past its prime. Two hundred years? Three?
“These rooms were used for lay staff, but we have no use for a large staff anymore. We have both a cloistered community as well as nuns who serve in an active apostolate beyond these walls. We use these rooms for boarders. The little bit of income is much needed. Especially now.”
Eva nodded, wondering how long the stack of banknotes she’d brought with her would last. The value kept falling. Before long, they would be more useful as toilet paper. The jewelry she brought would get her a little further.
The abbess opened a door and stepped aside. The room contained a narrow mattress on a metal frame, a wooden cross nailed to the wall above it. A simple chair, a chest of drawers, and a small closet lined the opposite wall. Mother Francesca flipped on the desk lamp, indicating this was home.
“This is your room. Washroom at the end of the hall. It is for shared use, but you are the only boarder here at the moment. A luxury. Vespers at six. You are expected to attend.”
“But . . . I am not Catholic,” Eva protested.
“You are now.”
18 September, 1943
Confession: I don’t like nuns.
I am tired, but sleep is as elusive as Angelo has always been. The convent is too quiet and it smells old. Why is it that all of Rome smells so old? Or maybe it is just me, and I can’t get the scent of loss from my skin. I feel as ancient and crumbling as the walls of the old temple the bus trundled past today. But at least the temple doesn’t have to hide. I’ve been here less than twelve hours, and I miss Florence so desperately I want to start walking. Florence smells like flowers. It smells like jasmine and Fabia and my father’s pipe. After all these years, I can still smell him in the rooms of the villa, and I am both comforted and tortured by the scent.
I’m lying in a little bed in a strange room, listening to the walls say nothing. I tried to play my violin, but the echo in the room made my skin crawl, like I was the Pied Piper of dead nuns. I didn’t want to summon ghosts or rats, so I put my violin away.
I went to Vespers as instructed and watched the nuns sing and an old priest conduct the service. There were more nuns behind a little opening on the other side of the apse. They never come out, apparently. I wonder if that’s what Angelo wants for me. Maybe he thinks I can just hide in this little convent until the war is over, and then he’ll pat himself on the back because he saved me.
What am I being saved for? I look ahead at my life, even a life where there is no fear or worry that the Gestapo will swoop me up and send me away, and I can’t find the will to be hopeful.
Eva Rosselli
CHAPTER 10
THE JEWISH GHETTO
The “pilgrim” who had passed was an old Jewish woman who had been left behind when her son and his family fled to Genoa. The nuns of the Holy Sisters of Adoration had taken her in, and she’d passed peacefully in her sleep, sitting in front of a window in a white wimple and a borrowed black veil looking like one of the nuns who hid her.
Angelo promised the abbess to pay a visit to the rabbi at the main synagogue first thing in the morning to see if clandestine funeral arrangements could be made. Otherwise, they would be burying her among nuns with a cross on her grave. It was all they could do. She’d died among them; she would be buried among them too. Maybe when the war was over they could remove the cross and put a Star of David in its place. And maybe they could restore her name. Maybe someday her family would return and lay stones on her grave, the way Eva used to do for ancestors she never even knew. But the odds were that Regina Ravenna would be hidden in the ground under a false name and a meaningless cross, and no one but the Holy Sisters of Adoration and Angelo would ever be the wiser.
The knowledge and responsibility weighed on Angelo. He wanted to keep records but didn’t dare. He wanted to keep ledgers and lists of names and family members so that he could account for every person he felt responsible for. But records and lists were incriminating. So he’d devised a method to keep it as straight as he could, kept any necessary papers in the Vatican, and prayed that God would preserve his memory so no one would be lost to forgetfulness.
He made his way home long after the curfew, but was not stopped, fortunately. He had a pass that allowed him to be out when his duties demanded it, but if he were challenged, he would have to lie about the old woman he’d attended to. And the old woman was a paperless Jew.
The last year or two had been one lie after another. Sometimes he missed the simple little village where he’d spent the first six months of his life as a priest. Eat, pray, sleep, serve. That was all he did. Plus, the streets were so narrow and the road to the village so winding and steep, it was unlikely the Germans could send in their tanks without getting them lodged between buildings. Then he was called to Rome, and he’d gotten a crash course in service and survival on the streets of the Eternal City.
Then Monsignor Luciano, his sponsor of sorts, the man who had kept an eye on him for so many years, brought him in to assist him at the Curia. A totally different kind of experience. At the Curia he’d met Monsignor O’Flaherty, an Irish priest at the Vatican who was deeply involved in refugee work. And Angelo’s double life had begun. He’d begun traveling from one end of the city to the next, every church, every monastery, every convent, and every college. And he’d made note
of numbers, rooms, availability, and access.
And the people had started to come. A Jewish mother needed to hide her sons. A rabbi, fearing he was a target but unwilling to leave his congregation, still wanted to protect his family. The word had spread, and people came. The church was now in the business of hide-and-seek, and Angelo was the eyes and ears, a young priest with a limp and an affinity for languages, with a special understanding of the Jewish people. He understood their dietary needs and their worship practices, and he was just another cog in the wheel of clergy who had begun the enormous task of trying to hide the hunted.
They’d started with foreign Jews who had been ordered to leave Italy in 1940 but had nowhere to go, just like Felix. But since July, the tide had turned, and with the fall of bombs and dictators, the church was hiding Italians.
The monsignor instructed him to find alternative methods of hiding refugees, and Angelo remembered Aldo Finzi. He made a trip to Florence and asked the little man to help him. Together they’d distributed over two hundred passes to Jews who could hide in plain sight if they had the right paperwork. This made room for the Jews who couldn’t blend in due to language or physical appearance. It was harder to hide the Jewish men. They couldn’t just pretend to be non-Jewish Italians and be absorbed into the populace. Young Italian men of a fighting age were expected to be doing just that . . . fighting. Soldiers had to hide from the Germans too. And there were so many children. They had three convents throughout the city that were full of Jewish orphans. Some of them could be placed with families, but children presented a specific danger. All it would take was one wrong word, a forgetful comment, and the child, along with the family that sheltered him, would be exposed. They’d branched out into the countryside, but transporting them was difficult too. The whole operation was difficult and made more challenging every day.
Angelo wasn’t working alone—there were hundreds of fathers and sisters, monks and nuns—opening their doors and closing their eyes to the danger all around them. But sometimes Angelo felt incredibly alone. It was safer not to share, safer not to confide, safer to handle as much as he could without involving anyone else. And he was tired.
That night, he fell into bed after hasty prayers, his leg aching, feeling wearier than he’d ever felt, but his mind kept returning to Eva. She’d watched him leave the chapel without protest, her face blank, gripping her violin like it was all she cared about in the world, and he’d walked away without looking back. He’d had to. She was safe and he was needed elsewhere. But it reminded him too much of August of 1939 when he’d walked away and left her in the Pazzi Chapel.
They’d come back from Maremma, back to reality, with a new knowledge of each other and of the world they found themselves in. Angelo had known what he had to do, and he’d done it. But the memory haunted him still.
On September 26, less than ten days after Eva moved in with the sisters at Santa Cecilia, Lieutenant Colonel Kappler, the head of the German SS in Rome, demanded fifty kilograms of gold be delivered to German headquarters on Via Tasso. If the Jewish community failed to do so within thirty-six hours, two hundred of Rome’s Jews would be rounded up and deported.
Lines of Jews formed outside the main synagogue on Lungotevere de’ Cenci, desperate people donating all they had to keep the dragon at bay. Angelo forbade Eva from going anywhere near the synagogue, but she ignored him, taking every piece of gold jewelry she’d brought to Rome and waiting in line to add her offering to the pile. Uncle Augusto was among the elders assisting with the weighing and the counting, and when he saw Eva, he reassured her once more that the extortion was a “good sign.”
“The Germans are logical men. Taking our gold makes much more sense than taking our people,” he said. Eva could only shake her head. Nothing about the Jewish persecution was logical or rational. But she gave her gold with a glimmer of hope that it was exactly as her uncle said.
Eva was leaving the synagogue when she saw Mario and Giulia Sonnino standing in line with their two children. Giulia was so hugely pregnant that Eva convinced those waiting in front of her in the line to let her move ahead, so she wouldn’t have to stand for hours. The Sonninos donated their wedding rings and a Swiss pocket watch that had been in Mario’s family for three generations. Giulia joked that the thin white line on her finger was proof enough that she wasn’t a loose woman, but there were tears in her eyes when she left her thick gold band on the pile. Eva waited with their children until they were finished and walked with them back to their ghetto apartment, merely a block from the huge synagogue.
“We need pictures, and they need to be official quality,” Eva murmured. Mario nodded once, understanding immediately what she was referring to.
“We will get them to the printer. He will add them to the passes so he can stamp the picture when he stamps the pass. It makes it more complicated. But it is the only way to keep them authentic. We can add your fingerprints and signatures when we have the passes, but we need the pictures as soon as possible.”
Angelo was being impossibly close-lipped about his maneuverings, refusing Eva’s help at every turn. He was determined to keep her tucked in the convent and out of harm’s way, but she was slowly going crazy. She knew the Sonninos were on the bottom of a very long list of those in need of false identity cards, so she decided to make them her responsibility.
“I have them,” Mario said softly. “And I have pictures for ten other people in the community who will need passes as well.” He looked at her apologetically. “I don’t mean to take advantage. But these people have nowhere else to turn.”
Eva left Mario and Giulia’s apartment with the twelve pictures tucked into her brassiere and a promise to be back with the passes as soon as she could arrange for their completion. She simply had to get past Angelo and get back to Florence to see Aldo. She would buy a round-trip ticket, work all night, and return to Rome the next day. If Angelo would let her, she would deliver pictures and obtain more passes for his refugees as well.
She found him at the synagogue, standing in line with several other priests from parishes across the city. Angelo had managed to gather a significant amount of gold from non-Jewish Romans who wanted to contribute but thought they might be turned away by the “rich Jews.” Old stereotypes persisted, apparently.
No one was turned away. The average contribution was an eighth of an ounce, and the fear of failure was palpable. The lieutenant major of the SS “graciously” extended the deadline by four hours and then four hours more. Then rumors started to circulate that the Pope would step in and donate Catholic gold if the Jews failed to gather the required amount. Uncle Augusto relayed the rumor to Angelo, grinning like a Cheshire cat. “What did I tell you, Padre? We have nothing to worry about in the shadow of the Vatican.”
Miraculously, the number was reached without a donation from the Vatican, and more than one hundred and ten pounds—fifty kilograms—of gold, consisting of every last precious thing sacrificed by an already impoverished people, was delivered to German headquarters before the deadline on September 28. The Jews of Rome congratulated themselves, Augusto opened a bottle of wine, and a collective sigh of relief echoed down the cobblestone streets.
But the very next day, trucks pulled up in front of the synagogue and emptied out the rabbinical library—every book, every sacred scroll, and every precious document. Then they cleared out all the offices, carrying out filing cabinets full of records, contributor lists, and community members. Jewish leaders watched helplessly as every last piece of paper was confiscated by the very Germans who had promised to leave them alone only the day before.
The city held its breath once more, but the week passed uneventfully. Then another. Eva bought a ticket for Florence and informed Angelo she was going. Regardless of the lull, time was running out for the Sonninos. He argued heatedly, but when she wouldn’t relent, he arranged to go with her, and they set out for Florence again, less than a month after Eva had arrived.
The trip went without incident. No one
stopped them. No one questioned them. No one looked twice at the two of them. They saw no one they knew and no one they knew saw them, except Aldo, who welcomed them to his little workshop at dusk. He reported the same thing. All was peaceful in the City of Flowers—but his expression echoed the nagging feeling none of them could shake.
They spent all night setting type, tightening the string and screwing down the plates, adjusting the ink, refilling the feedboard, and churning out card after precious card. Then they attached pictures and stamped the seals, printed emblems, and assigned names of southern places that the Germans would have no way to verify. They dried, cut, trimmed, stacked, and started all over again with different samples from different places guiding their efforts. Eva and Angelo took quick turns napping on a corner cot, and they finished the long night with a stack of hope and blackened fingers. Aldo’s fingers were perpetually stained, but Angelo and Eva spent twenty minutes scrubbing their hands raw to remove the evidence of the night’s activities.
They boarded the six a.m. Rapido for Rome with fresh clothes and red hands without ever seeing Fabia and Santino. It couldn’t be helped, but Eva realized Angelo had probably been in Florence dozens of times over the last two years without ever seeing her.
“I forgive you,” Eva murmured, closing her eyes as the gong sounded and the train pulled away from the station, right on time.
“You do?” he answered just as softly. He sounded as tired as she felt.
“Yes. I do. But maybe I shouldn’t. How many times have you come to Florence since the war broke out?”
“Many times,” he confessed.
“And I never saw you. Not once.”
“No.”
“Why?”
He opened one of his eyes and looked at her. She’d already opened hers.
“You know why, Eva.”
Something hot and needy sliced in her belly, and she closed her eyes once more, unable to continue the conversation without revealing her longing for the forbidden. Her lips tingled and her palms grew damp and she had a hard time drawing breath. It took her a long time to drift off and nothing more was said on the subject of knowledge and forgiveness.
