War in My Town (14 page)

Chapter 26

Don Turriani, our beloved parish priest, was one of the bravest men I ever knew. He gave to his parish willingly and always assisted his parishioners with whatever they needed. The true measure of his character would not be realized until one day in late November, when the cord of a field telephone belonging to the Officer’s command post was found severed in a field outside the village.

The villagers were going about their work as usual, trying to stay out of trouble, as always. Suddenly, there was a commotion of angry German shouting coming from behind the Palazzo. People began to scatter. “Bruna, run away, hurry!” shouted my mother. She and I were on kitchen duty that day.

Frightened, I ran out behind the archway and down to the stone stairs leading to the cobbled lane just outside of Vincenzo’s house. We were staying there more often as it had become too dangerous to go back to Poggetti since it faced Barga where the bombs were coming from. I got far enough away so that I felt safe but could watch from the top of the stairs at the retaining wall.

As the shouts continued, I recognized the commander’s voice. He was the angriest I had ever seen him. He pointed to a group of soldiers who began grabbing villagers, prodding them at gunpoint toward the retaining wall just under the churchyard. I wanted to run away, but I was frozen.

Next, I heard boots on the move, clomping over the stones. It sounded like they were behind the church. Then I heard shouts and shuffling, clicking rifles, moans and sobs.

“You! Here!” shouted the interpreter. “And you! All of you!”

People passed me in a panic. I felt someone grab my arm and pull me. I ran alongside them into the house across from Vincenzo’s. Ersilia and her sister Rita had plucked me up as they ran by and pulled me to safety. Once the door was shut and bolted, I whispered, “Why are they shouting? What happened to make them so angry? And where’s my mother?” I suddenly felt very alone, separated from my family.

“Your mother and some of the other women are hiding in the church,” answered Rita, trembling.

“What do they want with us?” I whimpered.

“They think that one of us did something to one of the telephone wires they buried in the Bora. They worry that we are sympathetic to the partisans.” She gasped out the last bit of information with a sob. “We ran because they were starting to round up some villagers.”

“Rounding them up for what?” I asked, my whisper barely audible. I debated whether to unbolt the lock and run to look for my family. I was still close to the door.

“Come sit with me by the stove,” Ersilia said in a kindly voice. “Don’t worry about your mother. She is a very smart woman.”

I decided to listen to Ersilia and sat beside her near the warm embers. Outside the entire village was suddenly quiet. For a torturous hour we waited. For what, I didn’t know.

Finally, we heard footsteps from wooden shoes, not Nazi boots. We looked into the narrow street from the tiny window. Among others, I saw my mother, Cesar, Pina, and Mery. I scrambled to the door, almost falling to get to them. I unbolted the door and grabbed at the latch. “Thank God, you’re all right!” I cried. I reached for Mamma and pulled her in. The rest followed.

“Was anyone hurt?” I searched their eyes for answers. They were stunned, unable to communicate. “What happened?”

Cesar secured the lock from the inside. They sat in silence near the hearth, my mother with tears in her eyes. Cesar lit a cigarette.

“God in heaven!” Rita looked from one to the other, her palms open ready to receive a response. “What did they do? Who did they shoot?” She clasped her palms together, as if in prayer.

When I heard those words, my heart sank. They were looking to punish us for the cut wire. I gasped at the thought that they had killed some of our people.

“They killed no one,” Mamma said, expressionless.

“No one?” questioned Ersilia, her eyes wide.

“No,” Mamma’s head moved slowly from side to side.

“It was Don Turriani who saved us,” said Cesar. “He wouldn’t let them touch us.” Rita sat gaping at him in disbelief.

“How? How did he manage…” I was motionless, astonished.

Mamma spoke. “They went into the fields, behind the church in the Bora. They were shouting that a telephone wire had been cut and they wanted to punish the villagers.”

“The commander and his men wanted to set an example,” said Pina. “They were going to shoot some of us for disrupting their communication line.”

“That’s when I ran away,” I whispered.

Mamma nodded and breathed deeply. “Cesar was one of the men they captured.” All of us were shocked at this.

“Don’t worry. I’m fine,” he said. His voice sounded brave, but his hands were trembling.

“I couldn’t think of anything else to do,” Mamma continued. “So I ran to the church to Don Turriani. I told him what they were about to do. He didn’t hesitate for one moment.” Now that some of the shock had worn off, Mamma began to cry. “Don Turriani ran from the church, straight into the valley. I followed him to the edge of the Bora, but was too frightened to go with him.” At that moment I imagined our priest running to his people, his robes flying in the harsh November winds.

Cesar continued the story. “The commander was there and he was yelling at the people. They didn’t know what he was saying to them — everyone was confused. They were just working there and then the next moment they were hit and pushed against the wall. Father walked straight to the Nazi commander, his hands in the air in surrender. He approached the commander slowly, talking very calmly. He placed himself right in front of us and begged the commander to have mercy. We were already lined against the wall. They came so close to doing it.”

Mamma wept. “They were all crying and moaning, men and women alike, powerless.”

Cesar looked at Mamma and then at us. “They were preparing to shoot us,” he continued, “but Father wouldn’t move. He talked quietly to the commander. All the while, the soldiers were waiting for the commander’s order to shoot. Father swore to the commander that his people would have done no such thing, that we had cooperated with the soldiers all these long months. The cord might have accidentally been chewed by an animal or cut unknowingly by a spade or shovel. He said, ‘I will vouch for my people. They did not do this.’

“The commander threatened him, saying that he would be shot too, but Father still didn’t move. He fell to his knees in front of the commander and continued to plead for our lives. He said to shoot him instead, to make him the example and let his people go.

“It took a while, but the Nazi commander finally let us go. He told Father that if it happened again the entire village would be executed. Then he told all of us to get out of his sight before he changed his mind.”

I just sat stone still throughout the story, feeling grateful to our priest for offering to sacrifice himself for his people, my brother included. “And then what?” I whispered.

“Father thanked him,” added Pina. She wiped at her eyes. “Everyone scurried away after that.”

“What about Father?” I asked.

“I think he may have gone back to the rectory to lie down,” said Pina. “When it was over, I saw that his hands were shaking.”

PART SIX

Nazi Defeat and Liberation
1945

In December 1944, the Allies took control of the city of Ravenna, northeast of Tuscany. In retaliation, the Axis planned a ground offensive in which they tried to recapture some of the land lost to the Allied forces in Tuscany. This resulted in renewed aggression in the valley and mountain areas around Eglio. Safely hidden in bunkers and in the villagers’ homes, the Nazi soldiers stubbornly held their ground.

In other parts of Europe, the Russian army was advancing deeper into formerly Nazi-occupied territory. On January 27, 1945, the concentration camp at Auschwitz was liberated by Russian troops revealing to the world the horrible crimes against the Jewish people. On January 31, the Russian army crossed the Oder River into Germany, less than 50 miles (80 km) from Berlin. Soon the Allies bombed Germany on a massive scale.

Isolated from the rest of the world, the citizens of Eglio knew nothing of what was occurring around them. What they experienced were the bombings and gunfire by Allied strafing aircraft flying low. The villagers continued to be the moving targets of the automatic weapons mounted on the underside of these planes.

In the spring of 1945, an important breakthrough occurred on the Gothic Line. Beginning with the Po Valley Campaign in northern Italy, Allied forces captured Lombardy, a region in north-central Italy bordering Switzerland, and swept downward toward the mountains of the Garfagnana region. One by one, pockets of Nazi-occupied territory in Italy were overtaken. On April 24, 1945, the Allies surrounded the last of the Nazi armies, taking the German front near Bologna. The war in Italy had finally come to an end. The agonizing months of captivity and forced labor under the Nazis were soon to cease for the people of Eglio, in a way that they never dared to hope for.

Chapter 27

Not long after Christmas Day, 1944, there was a particularly horrific exchange of fire. My family and I huddled in the back room of Vincenzo’s house while Allied planes launched mortar rounds. Nazi soldiers returned fire at the Allies and, again, we villagers were caught in the crossfire. The drone of airplane engines overhead warned us moments in advance of their approach. Our only defense was to run and hide as far from the outside world as we could get — anywhere but out in the open.

“Hurry! Get in! There’s more gunfire coming!” Vincenzo’s voice was sharp. It had to be, to be heard over the sounds of war outside his front door. Earthshaking crashes were all around us as mortar shell after mortar shell whistled its familiar arrival above us and found its target, bursting into the buildings and any reinforcements that were left. The Nazi gunners discharged steady rounds of thudding artillery fire.

We ran for our shelter in Vincenzo’s house, the women farthest in at the safest point, the men in closer proximity to the front of the room. We huddled close to one another, against the dirt walls. Vincenzo lit a lantern and, to our surprise, we saw that in our midst was one of the German soldiers, the short potato soldier with the steely blue-gray eyes. But his eyes were not so steely now. Instead he had the look of a frightened child. He must have followed us into the shelter when he heard the shots, terrified like the rest of us. He shook in the corner like a scared rabbit, alone, powerless, and afraid. I should have felt vindicated that he felt a small portion of what I felt every day, but instead I felt pity. I wondered, could there be a human being beneath all that cruelty, afraid to die like the rest of us?

The candle’s flame quivered wildly with each pounding contact from the shelling. We all worried that this night might be our last. I was sure that our luck had run its course. I wept.

My sister Pina was hunched beside me. She was crying, too. My brilliant sister, whom I always relied on for strength, was crying like a baby. Mery was on the other side of Mamma, and then there was Nonna. They held onto each other, with their faces buried in their arms. Cesar was with the men on the opposite side of the room, and his sweetheart, Ersilia, sat devotedly beside him.

The drone of plane engines and gunfire seemed unrelenting. Then,
smash!
There was an enormous thud. The sturdy house shook to its foundations. The door to the shelter blew open, and displaced air spewed hot embers from the point of contact. Before we could even react to the sound, the bomb had hit Vincenzo’s house.

With instinct that I can only attribute to great courage and love, Pina threw herself on top of me, shielding me from the flying rubble that swept like a wave across the stone floor. It took a moment for us to realize that we were not dead. We looked up in a daze at the destruction, coughing and sputtering as the dust entered our lungs.

There in front of us was a bomb — intact and imbedded under the front entrance. Burrowed into the ground, unexploded, the metal shell had left a cavernous hole in its wake. Through the thick cloud of dust, we could make out fallen eves and debris covering the living room and kitchen. We all sat rooted to the spot, stunned, our mouths gaping at the instrument of death right in front of us.

Everyone I loved was in the shelter that day — my family and as many of our neighbors as could fit. And then there was the potato soldier. If the bomb had exploded, we all would have perished. What happened that day to save our skins, I will never know. Perhaps whoever had assembled it was having a bad day and hadn’t put everything together correctly. Or maybe it had not hit at the correct angle. Maybe it was just a dud.

“All right everyone, just stay calm,” Cesar breathed hard. He closed his eyes and his head hung back for a moment. “Don’t make any sudden moves.” His voice was a husky whisper. His remark was a bit laughable since there was shooting and shelling all around us. Our own sudden movement would not have made much difference to the bomb.

But there we sat, staring at it, as if even blinking the wrong way would set it off. We flinched at every round, at every mortar shell, at each gunner thump for the next hour or so, not daring to even speak. Our whimpering had stopped and raw fear took over. We felt that our survival depended on our intense focus on the bomb. Nothing else mattered.
Keep still and quiet.

When the shelling and gunfire finally subsided, Vincenzo made the first move. He got up cautiously, nodding toward Cesar and the other men. It was time to leave the shelter. The men held out their hands, the soldier included, helping the women up with unparalleled calm. One by one, we trod at a snail’s pace, our backs against the walls using measured steps around the rubble and debris. With painstaking care, we all managed to step around the bomb giving it a wide berth. I lost track of where the potato soldier went. Instead I watched the faint pink sun sinking slowly into the western horizon.