“How dare he leave morality out of it!”
“Morality requires resistance!”
“The Jewish Agency has denounced the bombing. Ben-Gurion denounced it.”
“No one knows who did it. Who said it was Jews?”
“Jews are being scapegoated. An old story.”
“Lionni did it.”
“At the Bagnoli camp, the inmates cheered the news of the bombing.”
“Bagnoli is full of Ukrainians and Hungarians. What do you expect?”
“They cheered because they know what’s happening on Cyprus.”
“Attlee is not Churchill. He can be reasoned with. But no Englishman will—”
“Cyprus is the issue. New camps in Cyprus. There’s the violence!”
“And Jews are being attacked again in Poland.”
The stew of complaint was familiar to Warburg, and he ignored the roil, except for the young man who had dropped Lionni’s name into the cauldron.
The young man’s face was vaguely familiar. Thick black hair crowded his forehead. He was sitting next to Anselmo, and now Warburg noticed that the older man was gripping the younger by the forearm, a quiet gesture of pressure: Say no more!
Then Warburg saw that the young man’s face—thin lips, wolf’s jaw, deep-set dark eyes beneath hairy brows bridged above the sharp nose—was a version of Anselmo’s. His son? Warburg had heard of Anselmo’s son. The young man was staring at his clenched hands. His father was staring at Warburg, worried, as if to ask, Did you hear?
The argument was going full bore, and it was clear that several in the room were prepared to take the battle to the British. Enough of Jewish passivity! But why bombs against Englishmen and nothing but surrender to Nazis? Where was the great Irgun before? And so on.
Warburg stood and left the room. At the end of the corridor was an open window. He went there, lit a cigarette, tossed the match out into the night air, and waited. A few minutes later the men began to leave. As he expected, when Anselmo appeared at the threshold, his eyes found Warburg’s. Anselmo nodded when Warburg lifted his finger. Anselmo was not a man to avoid what he knew was inevitable. He walked down the corridor to Warburg, with his left hand stretched behind, firmly gripping his son’s arm, pulling him along.
Warburg had his cigarette pack ready, and each man took one. Then each took his light from Warburg’s match.
“This is my son Enzo,” Anselmo said, adding with a smile, “He takes his name from the end of Lorenzo.” He nudged the young man forward. “He is the end of me.” An old joke between them.
“I’m David,” Warburg said. They shook hands. Enzo’s grip was firm.
“My son was in the mountains,” Anselmo said, a euphemism for service with the Partisans.
“I’ve heard that,” Warburg said. “So you know about resistance.”
Enzo nodded.
“Are you with Jocko?”
“No. Lionni works alone. Almost alone. A small group from Palestine. You know him?”
“When he was with the Delegation, I knew him, yes. Seems long ago. He left Rome. Are you saying he’s back?”
Enzo did not reply. His father poked him. With eyes downcast, Enzo said, “They say he was in Palestine. Italian kibbutz. Training with the Irgun. He returned to Rome last month.”
“Where is he?”
Enzo did not reply. His father nudged him. Enzo raised his face, with a miserable look that Warburg immediately understood.
“Enzo,” Warburg said, “you are sworn to secrecy. Is that right?”
The young man nodded.
“I am not asking you to betray Lionni. But do this for me, would you? Get this to him.” Warburg produced a card, the contact card he handed out to the desperate and bereft, if judiciously—not wanting to promise what he could not deliver. “Pass the word that I need to see him.”
Where had Lionni disappeared to the year before? He answered with a rambling account. Kibbutz Lavi, in Galilee, near Tiberias, was a collective founded in the late twenties. Lionni had liked Galilee for its rolling hills and familiar weather, the wet, dank winter. Umbrian grape growers had been among the first to make aliyah at Lavi. Once the war broke out, the vines were neglected, as the young men of the kibbutz divided between those who joined the British Army and those who went underground with the Haganah. By 1943, Lavi, because of its still lively ties to Italy, had been a training center for Jews joining the Partisans there. At the onset of the Irgun’s open revolt against the Mandate authority in 1944, the kibbutz had become a training center for the underground. Jewish Partisans with whom Lionni conspired during his time as a fugitive from the Nazis had brought him there.
Warburg interrupted Lionni. “So it was Fossoli?” He let the question elaborate itself in silence. So it was Fossoli that sent you away and brought you back, armed? In the nearly thirty minutes he’d been speaking, Lionni had not mentioned the death camp. The two were seated at a corner table in the deep, isolated interior of a Trastevere café. Warburg had found a note under his door the night before, instructing him to come here. It was late afternoon. Lionni was haggard-looking, coughing, obviously ill. That had not stopped him from talking. He seemed eager to explain himself to Warburg.
“Of course. Conscription. I was conscripted at Fossoli.”
“But into an army too late to kill Germans.”
“Perhaps not.” Lionni coughed, a hollow rattling from deep in his chest. He wore a soiled shirt under a tattered serge coat, what was left of a suit. Under his clothes the skin hung on his bones. His fingers were bones. His flesh was gristle.
“But it’s the British you attack now.”
“We made our point. It remains to be seen if the point must be made again.”
Warburg shook his head. “From reports out of London, Attlee has just ordered a doubling of the Cyprus garrison, which presumably means a doubling of internment capacity. There are plans being laid for a camp in British-controlled Port Said. The Admiralty has ordered two fresh destroyer squadrons deployed to the Mediterranean, one to Piraeus and one to Malta. The JDC was preparing to buy ships for emigration, but to run a Royal Navy blockade? Never. So much for the point you made. Incredibly stupid, Jocko.”
“The embassy was the center of operations for Cyprus. A new Fossoli.”
“No. Don’t confuse the two.”
“You think we Jews should simply wait until the world decides to be nice to us? The British will never yield the Mandate without force being applied. Some Jews are uneasy about force. A habit of passivity. If Attlee is doubling the Cyprus garrison, that is good. It means he heard us. And he must not be able to unroll fresh wire there without the world knowing it. A bomb in Rome—and the eyes of the world go to Cyprus.”
“We want the eyes of the world on the camps in Germany, Jocko. In Hungary, Romania, Italy. There’s the outrage—Jews still in those camps. Some in the same striped uniforms.”
“Jewish victims. To the world, not so different from Jewish vermin. Meanwhile, the Nazis escape. Speaking of outrage.”
“What do you mean?”
“That’s why I returned to Rome. Nazis escaping here. Rome is a sewer of Nazis, fat turds washing along its tunnels, spilling out into the sea, away from Europe. Jews can’t leave, Nazi criminals can. So don’t speak to me of outrage.”
Warburg was accustomed to layering over his uneasiness with the business of cigarettes, and he did that now. Lionni declined his offer with a snap of his head. Waving away the match, Warburg said, “How?”
Lionni snorted. “Afifyor.”
Warburg waited.
Lionni said, “The Pope.”
“The Pope helps Nazis escape?”
“Of course. He is a Nazi himself.”
“That’s not true, Jocko.”
“A friend of Nazis. There are German criminals on Vatican premises all across Rome. Places exempt from being searched. The Germans approach the Red Cross for displaced person visas with identity papers stamped by the Pontifical Commission
.” Lionni produced a sheaf of papers from his coat and spread the sheets on the table, smoothing creases with the same deliberation that had marked his display of the railroad map at their first meeting. Warburg had been brought here, he realized, to be shown this. He leaned forward. Lionni’s nubby fingers poked the papers as he spoke—here, here, here. What Warburg saw was a list:
Jesuit Academy, Via Borgia 6, Slovenian
Franciscan Monastery of the Holy Spirit, Via Sicilia
Illirici Foundation: Collegium Illiricum, Croatian
Collegium Orientale, Via Carlo Alberto 7, Slovenian
Pontificio Collegio Croato di San Girolamo, Croatian
Santa Maria dell’Anima, Piazza Navona, Austro-German
Another page held a list of names:
Ante Vujovic, Minister of Defense, Croatia
Lazar Socic, Police Chief, Zagreb
Dr. Stefan Pujak, Director, Krajina Institute
Eng Valiljevic, Commerce Minister, Croatia
Marislav Petrovic, SS Formation, Croatia
Dr. Boris Miladic, Chief of Police, Sarajevo
Jusuf Kosovac, Ustashe assassin
Rev. Slobodan Vukas, Sisak
Isa Noljetinac, Chief of Police, Pristina
Dr. Dimitrije Najdanovic, University of Dubrovnik
Dr. Hefer, Deputy to Ante Pavelic
Rev. Krunoslav Draganovic, Director of Resettlement
Warburg looked up at Lionni. “These are Slavic names.”
“Known criminals from Yugoslavia. All at present guests of the Holy See in Rome. Here in Rome. Now.”
“You said Germans.”
“I said Germans receive false identities from the Vatican. We are working on the German identities. They forgo the name Hans.”
“You said the Pontifical Commission. Which commission?”
“Pontificia Commissione di Assistenza.”
Warburg reined in the rhythm of his own breathing: Kevin Deane’s commission. “Why would the Pontifical Commission help Nazi war criminals to escape?”
“They are not war criminals. They are ‘anti-Communist heroes.’ And not all of them seek to escape. Some are waiting to return. Waiting in Rome to be restored, in Croatia, for example. No need as yet for new identities. Proud men. The Pope believes a Catholic regime is coming soon to Zagreb. The Pope makes it come. To defeat the Bolshevik Tito. So Croatian heroes sit quietly, for example”—Lionni poked the page—“here in the Monastery of the Holy Spirit. Headquarters of a new Catholic Croatia.”
“Holy Spirit, on Via Sicilia? Wasn’t that Padre Antonio? Your friend?”
“Yes. It was from him we began to learn what was happening. He was forced out of Holy Spirit. The French nuns were replaced by Croatian friars.” Lionni slapped the table, the pages jumped. “Do you know what happened to Jews in Croatia?”
“I know it was bad. The death camp at Jasenovac. But we see few refugees from Croatia.”
“You know why.”
Warburg did know, although not until that moment.
Lionni coughed brutally. “There were forty-five thousand Jews in Croatia in 1940. Now, none. Forty thousand murdered—by ratio, the worst toll in all of Europe. Why is that? Croatia is the most Catholic nation of them all. That is why. Jasenovac was run by priests. Finished with Jews, they murdered Orthodox. Roma. The Ustashe makes the Nazis seem good. The Pope met personally with Pavelic in the Vatican. Pavelic is to be head of the new Croatian state. The Vatican is protecting him.”
“You know this? You know where Pavelic is?”
“No. But we will learn. He is here in Rome. The Pope protects him. The Pope has convinced the Allies to release Croatian prisoners. The Americans are arming them.”
“How do you know all this?”
Lionni shrugged. “I have a hairdresser on the Via Veneto.”
“You said the Red Cross. The Red Cross is issuing DP visas to war criminals?”
“Yes. The Red Cross does not refuse the Pope.”
“You have a source in the Red Cross?”
Lionni shrugged again. “We have many sources.”
Warburg toyed with his cigarette, tracing the edge of the ashtray with its tip. He thought of the Villa Arezzo on the Aventine Hill, where he had his offices; the crammed corridors, walls marked proudly with the Geneva cross; the once grand stairways now lined with cartons. He thought of the rooms lined with file cabinets into which he himself had plunged, desperate to match names, uncover histories that might qualify this DP or that DP for the prized visa. The Red Cross was a final arbiter of legitimacy—no, of life itself. Until the Red Cross said otherwise, stateless refugees simply did not exist.
For most of the past year, neither had she existed. Yet only weeks ago, Warburg saw her, in her blue uniform, in the canteen. He had not seen her since. “Did she go with you?” he asked now.
When Lionni did not acknowledge the question, Warburg added, “To Galilee.” He gave Lionni a chance to answer. When still he said nothing, Warburg went on, “She disappeared from Rome when you did. Now she is back, same as you. Same schedule.”
“Kibbutz Lavi is for Jews only,” Lionni said with ice in his voice, a match to his dark-hued skeletal body that could have been cold with death already.
So Lionni knew of whom he was speaking, and Lionni’s answer told Warburg more than he had asked. “She converted,” Warburg said, as if testing the outlandish idea by speaking it aloud. “After Fossoli.” Lionni did not respond. It was true. “She became a Jew.”
Warburg’s heart hammered. Still, Lionni said nothing.
“Am I right?” Warburg asked. “How would that work?”
“She was instructed by a rabbi.”
“But to become a Jew out of pity? Is that—”
“She is one of us,” Lionni said. “Becoming one of us saved her.”
Warburg recalled how she had fled from him in the canteen. Was this what she could not talk about? But he realized that the caring woman’s embrace of a devastated people was not unlike his own.
Lionni gave way to another fit of coughing. When he had collected himself, he said again, “The Red Cross cannot refuse the Pope, even if they know the identities presented are false. Identities presented to the Vatican are false, too, of course. But the Vatican Secretariat requires photographs.”
“If the Red Cross required photographs, no one would cross a border in Europe.”
“That is why our source in the Red Cross is insufficient,” Lionni said. “The Vatican has the means of checking photographs, determining who the fugitives are, which no doubt it does. The Vatican only pretends not to know whom they are dealing with. You have an American friend in the Pontifical Commission, no? The sealed signatures below the Latin rescripts we see are Perugino, Filipepi, Bugiardini. We do not see the signature of your friend Deane. What does he know of this? There are dozens of officials on that commission operating all over Europe. Does he know what they are doing in its name? Making documents that certify good German Catholics.”
“And you know that these Germans are not good?” Warburg was off balance, having Deane brought into this.
“If they are good, why are they not dead?”
“But you don’t know who they are.”
“They are SS. They are senior Gestapo. Their real names are on the Allied war criminal lists. They are being hunted. That is why they need Vatican documents in other names. That they have come here, or soon will, proves they are important Nazis. Otherwise they would not be making it as far as Rome. They follow a map drawn for them by Himmler. He called it Aussenweg, the Road Out.”
“How do you know that?”
Lionni tossed his head sideways, as if Himmler’s posthumous mischief was obvious. “The map points them to Argentina. But from Vienna to Zagreb to Trieste to Rome, they are using the Croatian underground, based here. The Croatians are protected by the Vatican. The Croatians are creating a Catholic state-in-exile in Buenos Aires, in the event they do not push Tito back to Serbia soon. For now, Ro
me remains the Croatian foothold. Hence Pavelic here, somewhere, awaiting his chance at Zagreb again. The escaping Germans care nothing for Zagreb. To them the Croatians are the sheep of the Cyclops. German Nazis riding out of Europe clinging to the Croatian underside the way Odysseus and his men rode out under the sheep of Polyphemus. The Croatians are happy to be used in this way, but they are prevented from knowing whom they are dealing with.”
“Only the document providers in the Vatican know that.”
Lionni coughed. Warburg sensed how much less than everything he was being told. If the Jewish fighters knew senior Nazis were at large and making their escape, why not just kill them? But then the escape route would detour away from Rome, to Istanbul or Barcelona. Lionni and his comrades wanted Rome to remain the Aussenweg crossroads.
“You said important Nazis. How important?”
“So far—how shall I say?—Gruppenführer, Oberführer, not Reichsführer. Himmler’s escape route is being tested before the top Nazis try it. We know the most infamous criminals are waiting—in Vienna, in Trieste, in Marseille, in Basel. Waiting to run, waiting until the route is proved safe.”
“Who?”
Lionni raised his hand, ticked his fingers: “Klaus Barbie, Gestapo chief in Lyons; Franz Stangl, commandant of Treblinka; Alois Brunner, commandant of Drancy; Adolf Eichmann, the deportation chief in Hungary; Gustav Wagner, commandant of Sobibor; Hans Stendahl, Stangl’s deputy; Klaus Hillmann, Gestapo chief in Paris—”
Warburg interrupted, indicating the list on the table between them. “But the men on this list—”
“Croatians, Slovenians, resident in Rome. Monasteries, churches, living as priests, monks. We know where they are. We are watching them. The Germans are on Himmler’s list, men he promised passage on the Aussenweg. For now, most are waiting, but they are expected in Rome. They will be greeted with large automobiles bearing the SCV plates of Vatican City.”
Warburg in Rome Page 28