by Amy Harmon
“How?” he said again, looking up at Angelo, who just shook his head as if words failed him too. Angelo pressed the exhausted doctor into the chair he’d vacated and brought a clean cloth, a bar of soap, and a bucket of water to his side.
“Wash, Mario. And Eva can tell us the story.”
She told them about Pierre, the boy from Bastogne, whose mother had convinced him to jump from the train bound for Bergen-Belsen. She told them how it felt to fly through the air with bullets whizzing around her, and how it felt when she realized she had done it—she had jumped and lived. She recounted finding the sign and realizing they were in Germany. And then she told them how she and Pierre had hid in a church for two days and drank water from the outdoor pump and ate sacrament wafers until the pastor had found them and fed them a real meal before sending them to the next town, clean and more appropriately clothed, with instructions to “find Father Hirsch.”
Father Hirsch sent them to Father Gunther in Gustavsburg. Father Gunther sent them to Father Ackermann in Bingen. Father Ackermann sent them to Father Kuntz in Bengel. They walked or were smuggled toward Belgium, town after small town, relying on the integrity of the Catholic Church, which wasn’t always reliable. One priest had warned them to avoid the priest in the next town, who was a Nazi sympathizer with a brother who served in a high position with the Reich.
When they had reached the border, they were loaded into the back of a cart, covered loosely in a plastic tarp, and manure was spread over them, piled high to disguise their hiding place. A German farmer hitched the cart to his mule and walked sedately across the boundary between Germany and Belgium with nobody saying a word. He took them to the outskirts of St. Vith, and from there they’d gone south, sleeping in the forest one night because they were too tired to walk the final stretch to Bastogne. It took them three weeks to go one hundred and fifty miles, and when they’d arrived, Eva had been sick for two months. After she missed her second period, she realized that her exhaustion and nausea weren’t due to extreme stress and overexertion, but to pregnancy.
“And I have been here ever since,” Eva finished, “hiding. There were still Germans in the area for a while, though not in large numbers.”
“Where is Pierre now?” Angelo asked.
“Bettina and I made him leave when the town was evacuated. He’s among friends.”
“It’s better that he did. I didn’t know what I’d find when I came through those doors,” Mario said. “Bombs were falling like rain. The aid station took a direct hit too. I was in the kitchen in the back. We keep the plasma in the fridge. It was little more than a glassed-in greenhouse. I was blown outward, through the glass. I landed in a snowbank. I have a few scratches. That’s all. But the station caught fire. We pulled a few of the wounded out. The rest were buried by the rubble.”
“You lost your glasses,” Angelo observed.
“But that was all. That was all I lost. One of the nurses—Renee—is dead. She kept going back inside for the wounded. The last time she didn’t come out.”
“Another hero, created by war,” Eva whispered. “Thank you, Mario.”
Mario met her gaze.
“Thank you for finding me. Thank you for your friendship.”
“Angelo never gave up hope, Eva. He was determined to find you,” Mario said.
“He is a man of great faith,” she murmured, and smiled at Angelo, whose eyes hadn’t left her face through the whole long retelling of her journey to Bastogne.
“A man of great faith,” Mario agreed.
The day after Christmas, Patton’s 3rd Army rolled into town, relieving the beleaguered 101st Airborne, who claimed with considerable braggadocio that they hadn’t really needed the help. And maybe they hadn’t. They’d been surrounded on all sides—those poor German bastards—and given easily as good as they got. But whether it was needed or just welcome, the battle in Bastogne ended, and in the following days, the front moved out and away as the bulge the Germans had created in the Allied line righted itself and the smoke cleared, allowing wounded GIs to be moved, supplies to be dropped, and the remains of the dead to be uncovered.
Mario reassured Angelo, after giving Eva and baby Angelo a rudimentary checkup, that he’d done just fine. Better than fine.
“You are a doctor in the making, Angelo,” he said seriously, wrapping the squalling infant, who hadn’t much liked the inspection. Eva took him, cooing and laughing at his outrage, and left the room to feed him. Angelo watched them go. He still hadn’t lost the wonder. He still couldn’t believe what had transpired. He turned to Mario and addressed the compliment.
“I actually considered it. But I don’t want to be a doctor. I don’t want anything more to do with death, my friend. Camillo always said we are on earth to learn. I think I want to teach. I want to teach history so that the world doesn’t have to repeat her mistakes. Eva’s journey across Germany has me convinced that there are many good German people too. They are just as afraid and damaged as the rest of us. Italians have no room to judge. Italians fought for Hitler too. Maybe people had no choice, but I wonder sometimes what would have happened if everyone without a choice had made a choice anyway. If we all chose not to participate. Not to be bullied. Not to take up arms. Not to persecute. What would happen then?”
Mario nodded. “We’ve all been at Hitler’s mercy. I’m sure it’s the same for many of the Germans. He and his minions have lied to the world, and no one will know the whole truth, no one will even be able to believe the truth, until the conflict is truly over.”
“Hopefully, it won’t be much longer,” Angelo mused. He didn’t know if he could bear leaving Eva again, but his division was pulling out, and he was obligated to go with them.
“Dr. Prior told General McAuliffe your story, Angelo. You and Eva will be going back to Rome just as soon as she and the baby are fit to travel,” Mario said, smiling. Angelo sagged in relief and brought his face to his hands.
“Thank God. Will you be coming too?”
“I hope it won’t be long until I can join you, but they won’t let me leave yet. They need doctors too badly, and I volunteered. When I signed up, I committed to seeing this through to the end. This war is going to end sooner than later,” Mario said. “And I want to see the truth for myself. I have to.”
As the rubble and debris were cleared away from the collapsed aid station, one of the soldiers found a violin case—horribly scratched, dented, and white with ash—and looked it over, trying for a moment to figure out what he’d discovered. He managed to open the bent clasp and found that the violin inside was completely unscathed.
“Hey, doesn’t that belong to Father Angelo?” someone shouted from below. The soldier shrugged and shut the clasp before passing it down to the man who’d spoken up. The soldier loped off to the reassembled aid station, knowing exactly where to find the priest who had carried a violin on his back for the last five months.
The day waned and the fires were lit, and as the 20th Armored Division and the 101st Airborne prepared to roll out on the morrow, sweet music lilted through the destroyed thoroughfare and soldiers stopped, cocking their heads to listen. A melody, haunting and pure, was coaxed into existence by a woman who hadn’t held a violin in nine months, not since she’d played for a room full of German police and been exposed as a Jew.
Eva stood in the middle of the street, bundled against the cold, and played unceasingly, one piece after another, and the war-torn town was liberated again, freed by music, soothed by her song. It was her gift to the men who’d brought Angelo to her, to the everyday heroes of a never-ending war. Christmas hymns and lullabies, sonatas and symphonies, warmed the frigid air. The whispers began as some of the men realized who she was and started gathering around, making a loose circle in the town square.
“She’s the girl Father Angelo was looking for.”
“She escaped the Germans.”
“He found her, here in Bastogne.”
“It was her violin he was carrying!”
“It’s a miracle.”
With one awed whisper after another, the story of Eva and her violin spread through the crowd and down the streets. It trickled into the fields and among the soldiers who were halted, listening to the sweet tendril of music that filtered through the icy mist, and the Ghost Front became a little piece of paradise, if only for a little while.
Angelo watched Eva playing from an upstairs window in the apartment that overlooked the street, his son in his arms, his ears peeled, not wanting to miss a note. It was a miracle. There had been many, and before the war was over, there would be more. He lit a candle and watched it flicker, its light reflected in the cross that hung on the wall. And he listened to Eva play.
EPILOGUE
3 August, 1955
Confession: August makes me think of Maremma.
We’ve never been back to Grosseto or the beaches of Maremma. Maybe someday we will take our children there and show them the tide pools and let them watch the pink flamingos. We will swim in the clear waters and gather pinecones from the maritime pines that line the white beaches and climb the craggy cliffs. But I don’t know if I can.
Now we go to Cape Cod every August, joking that it is just a smaller boot. We stay in a cabin, and we eat pasta and lobster, and I play my violin. Angelo’s skin turns black and his eyes look bluer than the ocean, while I do my best not to burn or dwell on faraway places that linger in my mind like endless long notes in the wind.
We look for pearls and steal kisses and sneak away to make love as if we’re teenagers in the abandoned fish shack all over again. August at the seashore hurts me a little, but it is a sweet kind of pain, a necessary agony. It is the anguish of existing, of feeling joy, when so many cannot. Sometimes I smell Babbo’s pipe, and I hear Chopin from somewhere in the distance, as if Felix is reminding me of who I am.
I still dream of the train, as if my subconscious knows I never arrived. I jumped, cheating death, and still I’m forced to keep jumping. I hate those dreams and always wake with the stench of blood, urine, and gunpowder in my nostrils. Angelo never asks about the details. He knows. He just gathers me in his arms, and I bury my nose in the hollow of his throat, breathing him in and breathing fear out, because August makes me think of Auschwitz too.
Babbo left me in August. According to records, which the Germans kept with meticulous care, he was gassed the day he arrived at the camp. Most men over forty were, and Babbo was fifty-two. Uncle Augusto and Aunt Bianca were gassed shortly after their arrival at Auschwitz too. Levi and Claudia made it through the initial selection but were given the option of riding in a truck to the camp, which they were told was ten kilometers away. This was a lie told to further weed out the “lazy.” They were gassed alongside their parents. Of the roughly twelve hundred Jews deported from Rome in the October roundup that the Sonninos and I narrowly escaped, over eight hundred were immediately gassed. Of those who were admitted into the camp, one woman and forty-seven men survived. Forty-eight people out of twelve hundred.
Pierre’s mother, Gabriele LaMont, didn’t survive that final winter in Bergen-Belsen, though she held on for eight months, which was almost unheard of. My son and I would not have survived that long. I doubt my baby would have survived my womb. Sixty thousand prisoners were interned there by the end of the war, and typhus was rampant. Bergen-Belsen was liberated by the British in April 1945, giving the world its first real glimpse of the horrors that no one had believed possible. I made myself look at the photographs. I owed it to those who didn’t have a white angel to hide them, those who hadn’t found the strength or opportunity to jump, and those who hadn’t been able to hold on.
Angelo and I didn’t stay in Italy, though we went back to Florence for a time after the war. We were married in a small ceremony—non-denominational, though we added our own defiant touches. I am still a Jew and Angelo is still a priest. Those are things that cannot be undone, nor would we want them to be. But he is laicized—unable to perform holy ordinations—and our marriage is not recognized by the Catholic Church. But I think it is recognized by God, and that’s good enough for me. No one calls him Father anymore . . . except our four children, and they usually call him Babbo. It is Italian for “Daddy,” and we are italiani after all. We always will be.
Santino and Fabia wanted us to stay with them in Florence. They wanted to love our children and love us. They wanted to be a family again. After all, the villa was our home, a home they returned to me after the war. But there are some hurts and some memories that are better laid to rest, better left to the mellow patina of photographs and selective remembrance. We needed to make a life together beyond the shadow of war, beyond the dictates of our pasts, and beyond the whispers and speculation of those who thought they knew us.
We stayed in Florence until little Angelo was two and Felix Otto—our second son—was six months old. The twins were born in America, two little boys we named Fabio and Santino, a nod to their great-grandparents, who had decided if they couldn’t convince us to stay in Italy, they would join us in America.
The years have been kind, and I am teaching my children to play the violin, insisting on long notes and scales, making them read the dots and count the lines, reminding them that music is something no one can take from them. They are undisciplined, much like I was, but when they play, I hear my life and the life of my family lifting off the strings, just like Uncle Felix said it would.
Angelo teaches history and theology at a small college in upstate New York. He is Professor Bianco now, and the title suits him. He knows more about religion than any man I know, yet he still has a million questions. I just smile and shake my head when he gets tangled in dogma and disillusioned by doctrine.
“There are two things I know for sure, Angelo Bianco,” I tell him, just like I’ve told him a dozen times before, and he always pretends not to know what I’m going to say.
“Tell me,” he says. “What do you know?”
“No one knows the nature of God,” I insist, holding up a finger.
“What else?” he asks, with a twinkle in his eyes. I point my finger toward him and shake it, as if I’m scolding him like a good Italian wife should. But my voice is tender.
“I love you. I have always loved you, and I will always love you.”
“That is enough for me, my wise and devious wife,” he whispers, and he wraps his arms around me so fiercely that I can barely breathe.
It is enough for me too.
Batsheva Rosselli-Bianco
AUTHOR’S NOTE
I have long been fascinated with World War II, but I never thought I would be able to write a book set in the time period, simply because of the vastness of the topic and the enormity of the task. When I stumbled upon an article about Italy’s Jews being hidden by members of the Catholic clergy, I was intrigued and dug deeper. And deeper. And I started to believe that there was a special story for me to tell. My prayer is that the people of today will know the past so they won’t repeat it.
The historical setting and the events that Eva and Angelo find themselves immersed in are all factual. The gold that was extorted from the Jews in Rome—and then simply left at the Via Tasso when the Germans left Rome—the massacre at the Ardeatine Caves, the roundups in cities throughout Italy, as well as the experiences of those hiding in convents and monasteries, were based on actual events. Many priests, monks, nuns, and so many regular Italian citizens risked everything for the sake of others, and I was truly awed and touched by the sacrifice and courage of so many. It was a terrible time, but the silver lining was the revelation of such goodness and heroism. For me, the horror was eclipsed by the stories of bravery and valor. Eighty percent of Italy’s Jews survived the war, a marked contrast to the eighty percent of Europe’s Jews who did not.
As with most historical fiction, Eva and Angelo were not real, but they interact with people who were. Jake Prior was an actual American doctor who worked the aid station in Bastogne during the Battle of the Bulge. I thought about changing his n
ame, but then thought how lovely it is to give credit, even through the use of a name, when I can. Pietro Caruso, Rome’s Chief of Police; Peter Koch, head of a violent Fascist squad in Rome; as well as Lieutenant Colonel Herbert Kappler, head of the Gestapo in Rome, were actual people. The Irish priest, Monsignor Hugh O’Flaherty, was a true hero, working from the Vatican to rescue and aid up to sixty-five hundred people in and around Rome during the war. Rabbi Nathan Cassuto was the spiritual leader of the Jews in Florence in 1943, when the Germans occupied Italy. His story both inspired and haunted me. He showed incredible leadership and courage and survived Auschwitz only to die in February of 1945 in a forced death march at the hands of his captors. He was thirty-six years old when he died, and showed more fortitude, grace, and strength in his young life than most will ever exhibit. I dedicated the book to him.
The world owes a debt of gratitude to people like Monsignor O’Flaherty and Rabbi Cassuto, but I owe them too, for inspiring me and guiding me through the telling of From Sand and Ash. I did my best to represent the Jewish and Catholic religions and people with love and respect. Any mistakes I’ve made or inaccuracies in practices or positions are my own and were done inadvertently.
In addition, I know history can be murky and accounts can be muddied. My wish was not to condemn or to vilify, nor was it to exaggerate, but I did not invent the atrocities in this book. Sadly, every atrocity cited and used was based on true events and actual accounts.
I want to extend special thanks to Father John Bartunek for helping me to fall in love with Florence, art, and Catholicism. I am grateful for his generous time and attention, for his passion for his calling, and for sharing Donatello’s Saint George with me. I know I didn’t quite capture the essence of being a worthy and committed priest, dedicated to the work and to the calling, but I believe Father John understands it full well, and I am grateful for his time and friendship.
