For Jews in Italy like the Goldenbergs, life had entered a new nightmare phase. The Germans and their Fascist collaborators ratcheted up the intensity of their persecution, even as it became increasingly clear that they would be defeated in the war. In addition to raiding convents and monasteries, Nazis invaded old-age residences and hospitals looking for Jews. The numbers soon illustrated the results of their murderous zeal. By the spring of 1944, little more than six months into the occupation, more than 6,500 Jews (both foreign and Italian) had been carried by train from Italy to Auschwitz alone.
When Elvira Goldenberg appeared at the Santa Marta Institute, Giorgio was thrilled at the prospect of being reunited with his parents and sister Tea. He soon discovered, however, how dramatically their lives had changed. The house in Fiesole was long gone, and their room in the Bartalis’ apartment on Via del Bandino was evacuated for fear of the increasing frequency of German and Fascist raids. In its place, Gino had found them room in the cantina, or cellar, of a building a few houses down. This space was barely more than ten feet by ten feet, with a low ceiling and stone walls. There were no windows and the one door was always closed. Dark and cold, the room fit little more than one double bed that the four Goldenbergs shared. There was no electricity or running water.
Life in the cantina was lived on the smallest scale imaginable. Only Giorgio’s mother ever ventured out, armed with a water bucket in each hand. With light brown hair and blue eyes, she did not draw any attention in Florence. For Giorgio’s father, his sister, or himself, it was too dangerous to leave their underground hideaway. As a result, their days moved between overwhelming fear and boredom. “What can you do if you are closed in a room twenty-four hours a day without permission to go out?” said Giorgio later. “My sister and I sat there counting flies.”
Hunger remained a constant obsession. Food was forever scarce and usually consisted of a meager portion of rice, pasta, or stale bread. Most of it had come from Gino and Sizzi, and the rest Elvira Goldenberg found on her expeditions in Florence. In the corner of the basement room, she kept a sack where she saved any leftovers from their meals as supplies for the next day.
Nighttime brought curfew and mandatory blackouts. In the long hours of darkness, any sound, perceived or real, preyed mercilessly on the children’s imaginations. For Giorgio, the shrill cry of an air-raid alarm conjured up that indelible image of a sky teeming with bomber planes. For Tea, it was the sound of German jackboots clattering on the stone streets, their metallic thud becoming the terrible soundtrack to her nightmares.
As the violence dragged on, Adriana Bartali felt as if she were in free fall. After nearly four years, the war no longer seemed like an event with a defined beginning and a probable end. Instead, it had devolved into an incessant hallucination, punctured by sudden relocations whenever the danger escalated and they left their home to stay with friends in safer parts of Tuscany. She dreaded the nights when the screech of the air-raid warning ripped through her slumber and, in a mad dash, she and Gino would scoop up Andrea and flee into the fields to join countless others trying to escape the bombs.
“The air reverberated with the heavy roll of engines, like a blanket of sound waves suspended overhead,” wrote one man about a bombardment of Tuscany at the time. “The hypnotic droning throbbed and saturated every cubic inch of air.” Overhead they could see the bluish Bengal lights—flares used by bombers to illuminate the sites they wished to target. The flares would hover, suspended by parachutes, and for a few seconds everything was floodlit in a ghastly glow, leaving the people below feeling completely exposed and blinded as they cowered in the deep trenches and shelters carved out of the soil in the Tuscan countryside. The planes, invisible in the inky night sky above the flares, dropped a barrage of bombs that screamed through the air until they walloped the earth and unleashed an ear-piercing series of explosions. If Adriana was holding Andrea, she covered his ears with her hands and folded him inside her arms while they crouched and felt the earth tremble as the bombs made impact. Finally, the all-clear siren would sound, but most let it ring for some time before they dared to move. As they cautiously stood up to return home, they could often smell acrid smoke and hear the sirens of ambulances. They plodded slowly back to their homes, where they would wait tensely until the next time the alarms started wailing.
Daytime was no less lethal. As the Allies inched up slowly through Italy, the bombardments increased in frequency and ferocity and spawned an ever-present anxiety that started to permeate everything until it seemed to assume a life of its own. One early-summer day in 1944, Gino had evacuated his family to a friend’s home on a hilltop town southwest of Florence. The front was inching closer to Florence, and they could hear sporadic gunshots and ordnance in the distance. Artillery was particularly treacherous. Unlike the air-raid sirens, which gave people a few minutes of advance warning of aerial attacks, shells could appear unannounced from anywhere, launched from tanks or other land-based artillery, often miles away.
When the initial panic that prompted the evacuation had subsided, the Bartalis found themselves with a welcome lull. Gino, his friend, and Adriana decided to go for a short stroll near the house, a reliable remedy for pent-up nervous energies. The men were soon lost in conversation and walked ahead of Adriana, who lingered a bit behind; walking was becoming more laborious as the child in her womb continued to grow. As she stepped, Adriana heard a loud thud, no more than five yards away from her. A hard artillery shell had pelted the earth. Adriana stopped still in her tracks. Where had it come from? Transfixed, she stared at the shell, and could hear nothing but a lethal silence.
After several agonizing seconds, Adriana carefully exhaled. The shell was a dud. If it had exploded, I would have been blown up, she realized in horror. She walked slowly back to the house, ashen-faced. Gino was devastated when he heard what had happened, and realized how close he had come to losing his wife and unborn child.
Somewhere along the line, the collective weight of such concerns about his family and his secret work for the cardinal began to cloud Gino’s mind. “Try to line up, day after day … without joy, without satisfaction, in a state of depression and continual anxiety,” he said. Distressed and withdrawn, Gino grew more and more restless and volatile—telltale signs of a condition known at the time as “war neurosis.” (Post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, was not given that name until 1980.) “Everywhere, I felt like I was being tracked,” Gino recalled. “I, who sleep very little, didn’t sleep at all anymore. I rested the whole night listening to the sizzle of a petrol lamp wick.”
Gino was cracking. Given his mysterious trips around Tuscany and Umbria and an alibi that must have grown increasingly questionable as the spring races of the previous year became ever more distant memories of the past, it was becoming clear to anyone paying attention that he was up to something. In the early summer, a volatile Fascist brigand named Mario Carità took notice.
One unhappy day in July 1944, Gino received the summons that he had dreaded for months. He was required to appear at Major Mario Carità’s headquarters, the building that most in Florence knew only by its nickname, Villa Triste, or “House of Sorrow,” so named for the screams heard coming out of it. Had one of his neighbors tipped off Carità’s thugs to Gino’s mysterious trips to Assisi earlier that year? Or, worse, had someone discovered the Goldenbergs? Gino grew very jittery. “These were times when life was not highly valued, it was held by a thread and vulnerable to circumstance and the moods of others,” he said. “You could easily disappear as a result of hatred, a vendetta, rumor, slander, or ideological fanaticism.”
In these uncertain times, no Italian wanted to cross Carità. Less than two months into the German occupation of Italy in September 1943, he had “erupted on the scene like an insane Minotaur to begin his wholesale repressions, tortures, ceaseless interrogations, all of which were accompanied with the most degrading brutality and humiliations,” as one historian put it. His surname, Carità, meant “charity,” but h
is behavior was anything but charitable. The major’s ambition was simple. He wanted to be “the Himmler of Italy”; Heinrich Himmler, the German head of the Gestapo and the SS, was known internationally for his role running the Nazi concentration camps. Carità’s men, a degenerate gang of two hundred, had ingratiated themselves with the Nazis by zealously pursuing Jews and anti-Fascists. By the time Gino arrived in Villa Triste in July 1944, Carità had turned the torture of suspected enemies of the Fascist and German forces into a grim science.
Just a few miles from the heart of Florence, Villa Triste was not a typically dreary prison, at least from the outside. It was a five-story luxury apartment house made of marble and yellow sandstone in a neighborhood popular with lawyers, businessmen, and other professionals. “The close-carpeted corridors and sumptuously large apartments gave the house the impression of an oceangoing liner, which had docked unaccountably in the midst of a peaceful countryside,” wrote one historian.
The polished exterior, however, did little to calm Gino as he walked through the neat courtyard, past a low row of narrow windows, which offered glimpses of the coal bunkers in the basement that had been turned into prison cells. As Gino entered the building, he grew more alarmed. Villa Triste was “a sinister place that aroused terror,” as he put it. How will I ever get out of here? he wondered as he crossed the threshold.
He found himself in a large entrance hall flanked with tall marble columns, off of which there was a spacious room with a dining table, often littered with scores of empty wine bottles and the remains of lavish feasts if Carità had felt like using a prisoner’s inquisition as the entertainment for an evening. On such occasions, he would bind prisoners to a chair and interrogate them, sometimes staging mock executions. He fired his revolver just past the nape of their neck to scare them as he and his guests watched and laughed. Nearby stood a piano, where a monk who had joined Carità’s gang was said to play “Neapolitan songs and Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony … to drown the cries of the tortured.”
Most prisoners, however, including Gino, were first dragged downstairs, to the subterranean cellars. Before their eyes could adjust to the dim shadows, their senses were assaulted by the sour smell of old blood and rancid sweat. Their feet crunched as they walked on the floor soiled with a mix of coal debris and blood. Carità liked to terrify his prisoners in advance of their interrogation, and among the first shocks, as their eyes began to focus on the inferno they found themselves in, was the array of medieval torture tools. There were “thick whips, rods of steel, pincers, manacles,” not to mention the primitive carpentry tools used “to tear off earlobes of recalcitrant victims.” In one room was a heavy wooden triangle, where Carità would splay and tie prisoners and then beat them until their flesh hung in bloody ribbons from their bodies. In another area, medical equipment stolen from hospitals was used to administer electric shocks to prisoners.
Gino glimpsed the horrors that he could expect as he was led into a questioning room to wait for Carità. He sat petrified. As the minutes ticked by, he grew increasingly apprehensive about meeting the man who had become one of the most bloodthirsty Fascist villains in Italy.
While Gino waited, he spied some letters addressed to him sitting on a table. Somehow Carità’s squad had intercepted them. Gino panicked. How could he possibly respond if Carità had found any scrap of evidence of his work carrying forged documents or sheltering the Goldenberg family? Helping declared enemies of the state such as Jews was treason. Men had been shot for lesser crimes.
Carità burst through the door. He was a force to behold, with his “frog-like mouth” and “hooded eyelids covering his cold, lizard-green eyes.” The major launched into a tirade against the Catholic religion, hoping to provoke the cyclist from the get-go. Gino struggled to stay calm.
Carità snatched up one of the letters on the table addressed to Gino and started reading it aloud. The letter came from the Vatican and thanked Gino for his “help.”
“You sent arms to the Vatican!” yelled Carità.
“No!” Gino responded. “Those letters refer to flour, sugar, and coffee that I sent to people in need. I didn’t send arms. I don’t even know how to shoot! When I was in the military, my pistol was always unloaded.”
“It’s not true,” the major said, fixing his prisoner with a knowing smile.
“It is true,” Gino replied, matching the major’s steady gaze.
Carità was not convinced. He threw Gino into a cell, leaving him to stew with his worries and listen. For the basement in Villa Triste was a very noisy place. Men and women were dragged kicking and screaming down the stairs and thrown into the coal-bunkers, holes barely nine feet long and six feet wide, which could serve as a prison cell for weeks on end. When they weren’t being interrogated or tortured themselves, they could hear the moans and screams of other prisoners as Carità and his men tried to secure information and force admissions of guilt. They put out cigarettes on the faces of prisoners, pierced their eardrums with daggers, and forced open their mouths to pour scalding hot liquid down their throats. If prisoners still didn’t confess, beatings continued until people became unrecognizable husks of bloodied, swollen flesh, so battered they had to be sent on to prison hospitals or they would have died in Villa Triste.
Gino knew most of this from rumors that had spread in Florence, and his imagination filled in the rest of the ghoulish details as he waited in the semidarkness, listening to every footstep near his cell, wondering when his time in Carità’s torture chamber would come.
On his third day at Villa Triste, he was pulled once more into the interrogation room with Carità and three of his henchmen. Carità asked again about the letters from the Vatican, and Gino repeated his story. Some Tuscan parishes were gathering coffee, flour, and sugar to send to the refugees who had flooded into the Holy City. Gino had helped procure these supplies from various farmers he knew and had them sent to the Vatican.
Carità still wasn’t persuaded.
Exasperated, Gino added, “If you want to try yourself, Major, I will teach you how. Give me sugar and flour. We’ll make a package and we’ll send it in your name. You’ll see that the Holy Father will send you thanks.” Gino was never one for tact, and he had slept so little in the past three days that he had become testy. But as soon as he said it, he knew that he had gone too far. Carità was enraged.
But before Carità could lay his hands on Gino, one of his militiamen stepped out of the shadows and interrupted the proceedings: “If Bartali says coffee, flour, and sugar, then it was coffee, flour, and sugar. He doesn’t lie.”
Gino had been so terrified of Carità he had hardly noticed his other interrogators. When he looked at the man who had defended him, he was startled to see a familiar face, framed by a short-cropped head of dark hair. It was Olesindo Salmi, the same man who had been his military supervisor in Trasimeno and had authorized Gino to use a bicycle instead of a scooter for his military duties. Salmi had taken a big risk by defending Gino, a suspected anti-Fascist, but he had waited until he was sure Carità had been unable to rustle up any further damning evidence.
Gino didn’t know any of this, and just sat astounded by Salmi’s words. He was even more astonished by what happened next. Carità finally relented. Gino was to be released. His fame had certainly helped save his skin, but Carità was also distracted by bigger worries than Gino. The Allies were moving closer to Florence by the day.
“We’ll meet again,” Carità sneered menacingly as he left, instructing Gino to remain in Florence.
“I hope I never see you again,” Gino said quietly as he left the building.
Gino returned home to find his pregnant wife a nervous wreck. Adriana had known full well that many men did not emerge alive from Carità’s clutches, and, given young Andrea and her pregnancy, she was even more panicked about losing Gino. She could scarcely believe he had survived and evaded the notorious torture that scarred so many who spent any time in Villa Triste.
Gino and his family
were now living in downtown Florence in the home of his friend who owned the pasticceria across from the department store where Adriana had once worked. The Florence that surrounded the Bartalis in July 1944, however, couldn’t have been more different from those innocent days in 1936 when Gino had first courted Adriana. The Germans were determined to wreak as much havoc as possible before the Allies arrived. So they blew up seventeen of Florence’s pasta and flour mills, and destroyed the city’s two main telephone exchanges with corrosive acids and then smashed them with crowbars. At night, they soaked the bases of railway tracks in gasoline and set them on fire. All over the city they plundered goods ranging from beds and binoculars to specialized medical equipment from doctors’ offices. And they commandeered vehicles of every description: ambulances, hearses, even the three-wheeled garbage carts used by the town dustmen. Florence reeled in response to this desecration. Garbage and horse carcasses rotted in the streets, attracting flies, and it was not unusual to see people walking their dead in pushcarts to a garden behind the University of Florence where bodies were being collected and sprinkled with lime to prevent the spread of disease.
At the end of July 1944, the German army was in full retreat. Rumors circulated that the Germans planned to destroy Florence’s bridges to slow the Allies. A directive from the German commander in control of Florence at the end of the month left little doubt. Those who lived in neighborhoods along the Arno were ordered to evacuate their homes by noon on July 30. Gino grew very alarmed. Though their hiding place wasn’t in the evacuation zone, they were still less than half a mile from the Arno.
Chaos followed close behind as thousands of Florentines scrambled to find a place of refuge. Those evacuees without friends or relatives created a sad parade through the streets as they traveled with whatever they could carry to designated gathering centers, one less than a mile from the Bartalis, the famed Pitti Palace in the Boboli Gardens. A correspondent from the Manchester Guardian described the scene on the ground: “It is as if a cross-section of London’s population were camping out in Kensington Palace, sleeping on the floors of the royal apartments, among the old masters and bits of period furniture, cooking picnic meals while the Germans snipe intermittently from the roofs of Barkers and Derry and Toms’ and lob shells on Bayswater Road. Only this morning two civilians were hit by snipers.”
Road to Valour Page 16