by Amy Harmon
He jerked in surprise when he heard his name being called from the sitting room. Monsignor Luciano was sitting in pajamas and a dressing gown next to an unnecessary fire, a closed Bible in his hands as if he were comforted by its heft but too tired to open the cover.
“Monsignor! Are you just waking up or have you been awake all night?”
“A little of both,” Monsignor Luciano said with a smile in his voice. “It was a terrible day. My sleep was troubled.”
Angelo didn’t want to sit, he needed to sleep, but he sensed his mentor had waited there for him, and he fell heavily into a chair opposite the monsignor and closed his eyes.
“Where have you been, Angelo?” The tone was kind, not accusatory, but still Angelo weighed his words.
“Eva’s uncle, aunt, and cousins were arrested today in the roundup. After I spent all day trying, I had to tell her I could not obtain their release,” he said. It was the truth, but the simplicity of the truth was in itself a lie. Words did not exist that could fully express the horror of the day, the desperation, and the gut-sickening realization that he was almost powerless to save anyone.
“I am worried for you, my young friend,” Monsignor Luciano admitted quietly.
“Why?” Angelo was worried too, but he doubted his concerns were the same as the monsignor’s.
“This is the girl who made you question your decision to become a priest. This is Eva.” Monsignor Luciano clearly hadn’t forgotten Angelo’s agonized confession or his counsel to Angelo after that terrible, wonderful trip in August of 1939.
“Yes, it is.” Angelo nodded, his eyes on his mentor.
“You love her.”
“Yes. I do. But love in itself isn’t sinful,” Angelo said simply, another truth that skirted a lie.
“True. But it is distracting. And you’ve promised your heart to another.”
“God’s heart is big enough for all of mankind, yet mine can’t be big enough for two?”
“Not when you’re a priest. You know this, Angelo.” The monsignor sighed. “You know the dangers.”
“I have loved her since I was a child. It isn’t something new, something I haven’t grown accustomed to. My heart is God’s.” Truth. Truth. Truth. And still, a lie.
“We are at war. War has a way of stripping us of perspective. War is about life and death, and it paints everything in shades of now or never. We do things we otherwise wouldn’t because never is so frightening and now, so comforting. ‘Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we may die.’”
“You are quoting Isaiah. You must be worried.”
Luciano laughed ruefully. “Do not change the subject.”
“You may think I’m rationalizing. And I probably am. But I know one thing. She makes me serve him better. In fact, she is the very reason I serve.”
Monsignor Luciano raised his eyebrows and folded his hands, ever the patient father, listening as his child tried to talk his way out of hell.
“In every Jewish face, I see her. I think it would be easier to ignore their plight and say, as some have done, it was foretold. They crucified our Lord. Some say that, Monsignor. You know they do.”
Monsignor Luciano nodded his head once, slowly, and Angelo knew with a flash of intuition that the monsignor had said the very same thing himself at one time or another.
“But Eva didn’t crucify our Lord. Her father didn’t either. Not a single Jew living on this earth crucified our Lord.” Angelo felt his neck getting hot and his temper building in his chest. He paused and took a deep breath, reminding himself that the monsignor was not the one persecuting the Jews.
“They are just people. And many of them, most of them, are good people. Camillo and Eva loved me and gave me a home; they are my home. Signore Rosselli would never admit it, but I know that he gave a great deal of money to the church so that I would be allowed to attend seminary. I believe he donated again so that I would have a position waiting for me when I became a priest. I never waited in line, Monsignor. Unlike so many others, after ordination I was immediately assigned a parish. It was that money and your influence, not anything I did.
“Camillo gave my grandparents a home, and when the laws were passed—those ridiculous laws—Camillo Rosselli signed his possessions and all his property over to them. He asked that they would return a portion if the laws were ever revoked. And if they weren’t, he asked that they look after Eva and give her a home when he was gone, should she need it.
“When I see a family running for their lives, no home, no country, no one to protect them—hunted—I see Eva, and it makes me try harder. It makes me pray harder. It gives me purpose, Monsignor. I see Eva.”
“Try instead to picture our Lord. Instead of seeing Eva, you should see our Lord. Our Lord was a Jew too, Angelo.” The monsignor’s voice was pleading, trying to redirect his focus to a safer place.
“Yes. He was. And if he were on earth today, the Germans would arrest him too. They would arrest his mother. They would arrest the apostles. They would load them all aboard a northbound train, traveling for days without a place to sit. They would make them stand in their waste, no water, no food. And when they finally arrived at their destination, they would work them to death or gas them immediately.”
“Angelo!” The monsignor was aghast at Angelo’s crass response. Angelo almost laughed out loud at his horrified expression. But he didn’t laugh. He didn’t cover his head and cry either, which was what he wanted to do. It was crass. But it was true. Funny how that worked.
“Here is the difference, Monsignor. Jesus gave himself willingly. He could have saved himself. But he was God. And he chose. Eva is just a girl. She wasn’t given a choice. The Jewish people have been stripped of choice. They have been stripped of liberty. They have been stripped of dignity. And they cannot save themselves.”
Throughout the next day, Angelo watched the military college where the Jews gathered in the roundup were being held. It was close enough to the Vatican that he could see portions of the courtyard from the window in Monsignor Luciano’s office. He arranged for food to be delivered to the prisoners, as much as he could gather and cobble together with permission from his higher-ups. The soldiers made them leave it in the courtyard. He wasn’t certain anyone inside received any of it.
There was little movement. German soldiers with submachine guns guarded the facility, and no one left. But in the early-morning hours of October 18, forty-eight hours after the raid began in the old ghetto, army trucks started leaving the Italian Military College. When Angelo arrived at dawn he managed to arrange for a Vatican car to follow the row of trucks at a distance. The trucks didn’t go through the regular terminal, nor were the prisoners put aboard passenger trains. He and Monsignor O’Flaherty, the Irish senior official who had cleared the food delivery, watched as the trucks filed into the loading platform at Tiburtina Station. Men, women, and children, many still in their pajamas, the clothes they were arrested in, were loaded into freight cars, packed in at full capacity with barely room to stand and no room to sit. The doors were shut and locked. The empty trucks left and returned again, several times.
All day they watched. Truck after truck arrived at the loading dock, and the process was repeated. The day was warm, but the cars were never reopened. The people inside never received water, and the cattle cars had no bathrooms. Angelo and Monsignor O’Flaherty could only watch from afar—a pair of cassocked spies sharing a set of binoculars. They couldn’t hear the crying children or the questions that must have been raised among the crowded occupants of the trains. But they voiced some of their own.
Why would the Germans want to transport all those people hundreds of miles just to kill them? And what reason would they have to kill them in the first place? It would be completely irrational. Surely, they would be put to work. It was the only logical conclusion.
But Angelo knew. He’d had a group of refugees from Czechoslovakia that had told him about the trains. And the evidence was in front of his eyes. The words he’d said to
Monsignor Luciano in the early-morning hours of the previous day were riveted in his head: They would load them all aboard a northbound train, traveling for days without a place to sit. They would make them stand in their waste, no water, no food. And when they finally arrived at their destination, they would work them to death or gas them immediately.
“Why won’t the Pope do something?” Angelo cried, watching yet another transport arrive. “Can’t he intercede? These are Rome’s Jews! They were guaranteed this wouldn’t happen. And it’s happening! We are standing here doing nothing to save them.”
Monsignor O’Flaherty put down the binoculars and rubbed at his tired face, crossing himself and muttering a quiet prayer before he turned to Angelo with wounded eyes.
“I can’t answer that, Angelo. All I know is that sometimes we only see our corner of hell. The Pope has to consider what intercession in one place will mean in every corner, to all people. If he starts making demands for these Jews, what will Hitler do? The line is so tenuous, Angelo. Lives hang in the balance of every decision. Many lives. More lives than these. The church is hiding thousands of Jews and caring for people in every community throughout the world. We can’t continue doing what we’re doing if we draw a target on the Vatican walls, now can we?”
Angelo had no answer, and he could do little but watch as his corner of hell continued to widen. Finally, at two p.m., eight hours after the first trucks arrived at the loading dock, the cargo train—pulling twenty freight cars filled with more than twelve hundred of Rome’s Jews—left Tiburtina Station.
20 October, 1943
Confession: Uncle Felix was right about long notes.
Uncle Felix used to torture me with long notes, the most tedious, painful, boring exercise known to violinists all over the world. One note, sustained endlessly. No volume change, no variance, no vibrato. Babbo hated long notes almost as much as I did. The music room was on the other side of his library at the villa. One day I heard him heave a book at the wall after I’d been playing long notes for more than an hour. It ruined my concentration, and I stopped, falling just short of my record.
Uncle Felix shouted, “You will never master this instrument if you do not master the long note, Batsheva!” I was so frustrated I yelled back, “And you will never master Italian if you only speak in German!” Babbo heard that too. And I was grounded for a week for my impertinence.
I play my long notes when I’m alone in my room at the convent, and for the first time in my life, I’m comforted by them. I’m comforted by my ability to master that one continuous sound, though my arm aches and my spirit longs for music.
Life is like a long note; it persists without variance, without wavering. There is no cessation in sound or pause in tempo. It continues on, and we must master it or it will master us. It mastered Uncle Felix, though one could argue that he simply laid down his bow.
I wonder what the nuns think of this exercise, the long note that wails from my room, night after night. I would think if anyone understood the power of constancy, it would be the nuns of Santa Cecilia.
Eva Rosselli
CHAPTER 12
VIA TASSO
Two days after the raid, looters, realizing the city’s Jews had been forced to leave their belongings behind when they were arrested, had moved into the ghetto and started taking anything and everything of value. In the darkness before dawn of the third day, Mario Sonnino and his little family walked the dark streets to the Church of Santa Cecilia and rang the bell on the gate.
“Father Angelo told us to come here,” Mario said when Mother Francesca peered at him through the iron bars.
“And Eva,” the little girl chirped up. “Is Eva here?”
Mother Francesca took one look at the tired mother, an infant in her arms, and the two children holding their father’s hands and ushered them through the gates and up the stairs to the room next to Eva’s.
Eva came awake to the sounds of a baby crying and the padding of nuns’ feet scurrying down the corridor, trying to make accommodations for the new arrivals. She jumped out of bed and dressed in the dark.
Another bed was brought into the little room, and a crib was fashioned out of a large crate. Mario and Lorenzo would stay on the lower floor where two other Jewish males were boarding. The nuns had rules about these things, but Mario could only nod gratefully. He’d had a plan in place, but it was too late to implement it.
“The escape routes have closed. The Germans have shut down the port of Genoa, and the Swiss border is too dangerous. Giulia and the children would not be able to make it, even if it weren’t. It’s too grueling a trip. I don’t know where to go, Eva. We have the false passes but nowhere to live. And my pass won’t be sufficient to hide me.”
“I was worried about you. I should have come to check on you myself! Angelo wouldn’t hear of it. He said the ghetto was too dangerous,” Eva said as she helped Giulia unpack their small suitcases.
“It was. But don’t worry. Father Angelo came himself. And he told us to come here before the sun rose. It is the safest time to be on the streets. There was a family who offered to hide us, another doctor and former colleague of mine. But it is getting too dangerous. It’s not just the Germans we have to look out for.”
Eva knew what he meant. The Blackshirt Brigades, OVRA—the Organization for Vigilance and Repression of Anti-Fascism—and the Fascist House, all Italians—were reporting to the Gestapo. They were actively hunting Jews and spying on other Italians.
“I didn’t want to endanger his family.” Mario stopped suddenly and looked at the ground as if he were ashamed. “Yet we are here, endangering these women,” he whispered brokenly.
“You will be safe here. And so will the nuns,” Eva replied firmly. “It was the right choice.”
In the days that followed, Angelo brought two young sisters, one fifteen and one sixteen, who had escaped the razzia when their older brother had forced them out an upstairs window and told them to flee across the rooftops, promising them that he wouldn’t be far behind. He’d been shot instead. An older couple and another young family with two little boys, not much older than Lorenzo, followed shortly thereafter. A pair of brothers in their early twenties and a man and his young daughter rounded out their numbers. The small convent was starting to burst at the seams with new “boarders.”
It was illegal to take in boarders without legal documents, and only Eva and the Sonninos had papers that wouldn’t get them immediately arrested. It was also illegal not to list all boarders on an official register. But then again, at this point it was illegal to be a Jew in Rome. Mother Francesca had fretted about their growing numbers and the official register that she had to produce if the police asked. Angelo had pulled her aside and reminded her how the mother Mary herself had been turned away time and time again and ended up giving birth to the Savior of the World in a stable.
“We can’t turn them away, Mother. They have nowhere else to go.”
Angelo also had letters from cardinals asking all religious institutions to open their doors to refugees and do what they could to shelter them, and he used the letters without remorse or restraint. He’d told Eva that the pastors throughout the countryside around Rome had reminded their parishioners that Jesus was a Jew in order to coax them into opening their doors. Catholic guilt was a powerful tool, and Angelo and his brothers showed no qualms at wielding it.
In the days that followed, Angelo and the abbess gave instruction in catechism and liturgy and taught lessons in paters and aves to the refugees, a crash course in Catholicism on which they were continually grilled. The refugees who had false papers and whose accents or appearance would not give them away went with Eva to the municipio to obtain food coupons and proper residence permits. Aldo was able to get forged documents to Mario Sonnino consisting of release papers from the Italian army and a doctor’s labor permit. He shouldn’t flaunt it, but it would give him a measure of cover if he were discovered or detained.
Even with some of the boarders able
to register for ration cards, the numbers at the convent—the numbers at every convent and monastery throughout Rome—were far greater than the rations allotted. Mario knew where Levi had gone to buy items on the black market, and he and Angelo braved a few clandestine meetings to secure butter and milk, two things Giulia Sonnino desperately needed. She wasn’t well, and she wasn’t producing enough milk for her new baby.
But Angelo was resourceful. Two weeks after the raid on Rome’s Jews, a woman in his old parish lost her baby in a house fire. Somehow Angelo got wind of it and brought the poor mother to the nuns of Santa Cecilia, giving the woman a roof over her head and providing little Isaaco Sonnino with a wet nurse. If there was a need, he found a way, his abilities as a goalie translating beautifully to his abilities as a wartime priest. Scramble, protect, defend.
Angelo inspired the same ingenuity and respect among everyone he served, and he never stopped moving. He’d drawn some attention from the local Italian police, who had questioned him on more than one occasion, but he’d just blessed and genuflected his way out of trouble every time, doing as much business as he could from inside Vatican City, where the law of Rome could not touch him. But he was adamant where Eva was concerned. She would not risk herself. It was his one stipulation, until it was taken completely out of his hands.
He sat on the long bench, slumped, his cap in his hands, a German officer alone, and people scurried past him. He seemed unaware of the discomfort he was causing, the fear and derision in the looks tossed his way.
Eva had spent the morning in long ration lines, the one thing Angelo would allow her to do, and she had very little to show for it. She had brought Mario’s violin with her that morning, instructed to barter with it if there was anything worth bartering for. There had been nothing. Now, several hours later, she was waiting for a streetcar to take her back across town.
She still had fifteen minutes to wait. At least. And she was tired, her feet hurt, and watching the big German occupy the whole bench suddenly filled her with a rage and an insolence her father would have trembled to see. She could almost hear his voice in her head.