by Amy Harmon
Captain von Essen looked stunned that Angelo knew the details. Had he felt so powerful, so invincible, that he hadn’t really thought anyone might have seen?
“You killed a man in cold blood,” Angelo said quietly. “But I won’t name you if you let Eva go.” He willed Eva to stay silent. Captain von Essen did not need to know it was she who had seen him murder Aldo.
“You think anyone cares about the death of one Jew?” Captain von Essen said, incredulous. “This is what you bargain with?”
“The war will end. Germany will lose. And you will answer for your sins,” Angelo said, spitting the words through bloody lips. “Let Eva go. I will testify on your behalf. The testimony of a priest will mean something. I will say you were a merciful man. You will be able to go back to Germany with your wife, unlike the others who will be punished for their war crimes.”
Von Essen laughed. “I don’t know how you know about the Jew in the street. But clearly you were there, which makes me even more certain that Eva is not the only Jew you have assisted.”
He leaned out the door once more, and two SS men entered the room seconds later.
“Take her back to her cell,” von Essen told the soldier behind Eva. To the two new arrivals he directed, “And take the father away too. Keep working him over until he talks. Make sure the girl can hear his pain.”
It had been thirty-six hours since they’d been separated. Thirty-six hours of Angelo being questioned and tortured. Thirty-six hours of hell.
Eva had heard him ask for a drink. He’d been given nothing. Instead, he’d been doused in ice water and deprived of sleep. She’d heard him cry out in pain, though she knew he tried not to, for her sake. They’d hurt him. They’d beat him. They’d threatened him with descriptions of what they’d do to her. But he never talked, beyond prayers and the quiet insistence that he had no information.
On Friday, the guards started pulling men from their cells, clearing them out, Jew and non-Jew alike, leaving only Eva and two other Jewish women—sisters—who had been detained and were awaiting deportation on the next train. Eva heard the guards open Angelo’s cell and tell him to get up. She rushed to her door and pressed her face to the glass, aching for a better look as they dragged Angelo past. His swollen and bruised face was hardly recognizable, but they hadn’t taken his cassock, and his formerly white collar was splattered in blood. He turned for one last look, struggling to stay on his feet.
“Angelo!” she screamed. “Angelo!”
The two remaining guards elbowed each other and walked over to her cell. She moved away from the glass as they unlocked the door, but as soon as it was opened, she fought to see beyond them, desperate to know where Angelo was being taken.
She was immediately pushed back, shoved hard enough to make her fall back against the adjacent wall.
“Come now, Fräulein. You mustn’t carry on this way. What will your Jewish friends think?”
“Yes! They might think there is something going on between you and the priest.” One of them mimed prayer while pumping his hips lewdly.
“Go to hell,” Eva spit out in German, her tears bottled up behind her shocked eyes, her head pounding with denial. Angelo hadn’t just been dragged away. Surely, she would see him again.
“Ahh! The little Fräulein speaks German!” The officer sounded surprised.
“You speak German,” the other said flatly. “Are you a German Jew?”
“Go to hell,” she repeated.
He brought his face an inch from hers, his eyes cold and icy. Blue. The same color as Angelo’s. But Angelo’s eyes were like the sky. Warm. Clear. Endless. Beloved.
“I’m already there, madam. But unfortunately for you, this hell isn’t quite as bad as where you will be going. And you will be going there soon.”
“Good news, though,” the other guard said with false levity. “Your priest won’t have to live without you. You know where they’re taking him, don’t you?”
She waited, knowing that they were going to enjoy telling her.
“He will be executed with all the others. Thirty-three German police died yesterday from a bomb set by partisans on Via Rasella. Ten Italians will die for every policeman who was killed. Via Tasso isn’t the only prison we emptied out. The prison at Regina Coeli was emptied too. Every Jew, every partisan, every antifascist we could find. Now we’re pulling civilians off the streets. Three hundred and thirty men. Next time, maybe the partisans will think twice about setting bombs.”
“There won’t be a next time for some of them,” the other guard added. “There won’t be a next time for your priest. I hope you gave him something to remember you by.”
Eva covered her head with her arms and sank to the floor, too despondent to listen any longer. She wasn’t even aware when they left.
24 March, 1944
Angelo Bianco, my white angel.
They have taken you
and I am lost.
But we were both here,
once.
Eva Rosselli
CHAPTER 21
ARDEATINE CAVES
They were lined up and counted, their hands linked behind their heads, and then they were loaded into trucks—just like the Jews on the morning of the October roundup—and taken south of the city to an old quarry not far from the storied catacombs that tourists came to see and Romans never thought about. There were no tourists in Rome these days. Just Germans, beleaguered Italians, and the Catholic Church. Just war, hunger, hopelessness, and death.
Angelo’s ribs had been kicked a time too many, and one eye was swollen shut. He hadn’t been able to see where they were taking them, riding in the back of the covered truck, but it hadn’t taken overly long for them to arrive. When all 336 men—six more than was required—were herded from the trucks and lined up once more, he’d recognized his surroundings. His spirits had plummeted. It was the perfect setting for a massacre.
The German guard kept them sufficiently contained with bound hands and intimidated with pointed guns. No one tried to escape. Why was that? Was hope so powerful that it would cause a man to cooperate to the very end? He’d seen it over and over again. So few people actually fought, because fighting seemed so futile. Fighting back meant certain death. So they all cooperated and hoped.
The hope ended when the killing began inside the quarry. At that point weeping and praying also commenced, and Angelo began dispensing comfort the only way he knew how. Amazingly enough, the German soldiers allowed him to administer rites, and they ignored his prayers and his movement up the line to reach those who would enter the caves first. With his hands bound behind his back he couldn’t properly make the sign of the cross, but he moved his right hand in the proper direction and continued on.
He accompanied the second group of men into the quarry, winding through tunnels until they reached a large cave. He kept his mouth moving, administering last rites and hoping God would understand and forgive his own inadequacies and provide for these three hundred thirty-five souls who were looking to him, a fallen man who no longer wanted to be a priest.
Five would kneel. Five executioners would press the noses of their guns to the backs of the prisoners’ necks. Five triggers were pulled. Five men would die. Five more would then kneel behind the pile of the dead only to share their fate. Each time, Angelo expected to be pushed forward and forced to his knees. And each time, he was bypassed and allowed to continue the rites for the men who were dying all around him.
A boy and his father knelt side by side and were murdered side by side, their bodies falling into a sloppy embrace, and Angelo wept as he prayed. But he refused to close his eyes. He needed to see, to bear witness, even in his last moments, to what was occurring. The blood of the innocent demanded it.
It took hours.
When the pile of bodies grew too high, they would create another row until the cave was filled with the dead, and then they would move to another opening. Still Angelo prayed, blessing those waiting to die. When the final man was thrown face-first onto the
blood-soaked mountain of death, would there be anyone left to die beside him?
As the Germans neared what had to be the end, there was a brief lull as bodies were moved, and more men were led through the dark passageway. Suddenly, Angelo was being shoved from behind and urged to walk. When he resisted, he was grabbed by his bound arms and yanked forward.
“Come with me, Father,” a voice said, but he wasn’t sure if the voice was in the caves or in his mind. His ears were ringing, the result of hundreds of gunshots, one after another, with nothing to protect his eardrums from the report. He staggered and fell down, his already poor balance compromised by his hearing loss.
Rough hands jerked him to his feet, and he tottered again.
His hands were suddenly cut free from his bindings, and his arms screamed in pain as the blood rushed through his limbs. He was urged forward again, the hand gripping his arm steadying him through a narrow passage that led to a tapered swath of light. The light grew, and the man leading him urged him on until he found himself crawling through a small opening, coming out of the caves about a hundred and fifty feet east of the craggy main entrance where the prisoners had first formed the long line. He stopped and turned around, still not sure what was expected of him. He was on higher ground now and could look down on a semicircle of helmeted, blood-soaked Germans that stood a ways off. Others—those who had guarded the men awaiting execution—leaned against trucks that were now empty, smoking and drinking bottles of cognac. Cognac for courage. More than one officer had grown sick inside the caves, and others had refused to shoot, only to be dragged off or forced to participate by a commanding officer. The assembly of soldiers wasn’t nearly as orderly and contained as it had been at the start, and no one had seen him or his unknown deliverer, who tugged on his arm once more and pointed through the trees.
The German soldier had a blunt nose, a wholesome face, and red-rimmed eyes, and Angelo noticed there were blood spatters—small, red, pin-size dots—all over the soldier’s cheeks, making him appear diseased.
The soldier’s mouth moved around words and Angelo focused on their shape, trying to understand. He heard the words as if he listened through water, and he wondered if his hearing would return, or if it was simply the first part of him to die.
“Go. None of us wants to kill a priest,” the man mouthed.
The soldier shoved Angelo away from the rocky outcropping and motioned with his pistol.
“Go!” he growled, sticking his face in Angelo’s, his eyes frantic. Angelo heard enough to realize he was being told to flee.
He turned and began to put one foot in front of the other. His prosthetic straps were loose, and he staggered and almost fell, but he didn’t dare stop and make the necessary adjustments, expecting a bullet in his back at any moment.
But none came, and he kept walking, limping through the trees toward a road he knew must be there. The terrain was muddy and wet from recent rains, and the trees were just starting to grow leaves again. Some were still completely bare, as if the winter had been harder on them than on others. Angelo wondered, still reeling from shock and horror, if those trees would ever come back to life, or if they would simply stand, skeletal, among the living and wait to be brought down.
He wondered if he would ever come back to life. Then he stopped thinking at all. He just walked in circles, stumbling and slipping, and after what could have been an hour or merely minutes—he wasn’t really certain—he reached the road. A sign next to a fork pointed the way to the old quarries at Fosse Ardeatine. Suddenly, a boom rocked the ground beneath his feet. Angelo fell to the earth once more and lay there, reeling, wondering if bombs were falling. He couldn’t hear the whine and shriek or see the stars and stripes above him in the sky. The ground rumbled again, then again, and the trees above him shook in whispery terror, their new leaves dancing in the tepid March sunlight.
Then he realized what was happening. The Germans were using explosives to bring down the rocks inside the caves. They were trying to hide the bodies and seal the openings, attempting to cover their tracks, as if more than three hundred people would not be missed.
He crawled back into the shelter of the foliage that lined the road, weak with pain and horror, sick with despair, and waited until the trucks rumbled down the road an hour later, the deed done. Darkness descended, and his cane was gone. His cross too. And Eva would be gone. The truth assailed him like a relentless whip, and he moaned audibly, his agony escaping through his clenched teeth.
Save my family, Camillo had said. Become a priest and save my family. But there was no one left to save. He didn’t even know if he had the strength to save himself. Still, he rose on shaking legs and willed himself forward. It was a long way to Rome for a crippled man with a broken heart.
“He is dead. Father Bianco is dead. You realize that, don’t you? You don’t have to die. I will let you walk out of here. I will keep your little secret. But you need to tell me where he was hiding the fugitives,” Captain von Essen said reasonably.
Eva didn’t even bother to look at him. He was an idiot. He’d left himself no real incentive, no bargaining chip. Didn’t he realize that without Angelo, she wanted to die? Didn’t he realize she had absolutely nothing left to live for? With the gold file she kept in her shoe, she’d scratched his name into the wall of her cell, along with the date and a testimony that she’d been there. That he’d been there. But it was tedious, scratching the words into the walls. She wanted to write one last confession, even if no one but the captain ever read her words.
“I would like a piece of paper and a pencil,” she said quietly.
He jumped to his feet and walked to the door. He snapped his fingers and told someone what was needed. A soldier was back within seconds, and Captain von Essen set the paper and pencil down in front of her. He sat down and smiled, nodding his head like he was proud of her, certain she was finally cooperating.
She put the date at the top—24 March, 1944—and she started to write in German.
Confession: My name is Batsheva Rosselli, not Eva Bianco, and I am a Jew. Angelo Bianco is not my brother but a priest who wanted only to protect me from the very place I now find myself.
She wrote for several minutes, filling the page with her final thoughts. When she was done, she slid her paper toward the captain and stared at him dully. He read with growing anger, not having received the confession he sought.
“You are going to die. Do you understand?” he spat.
“We’re all going to die, Captain, eventually. If I were you, I would kill me now. Because if I live, I will tell the world who you are and what you’ve done,” she answered, folding her hands. “I will tell Greta that you are a vicious killer. But then, I think Greta already knows what kind of man you are.”
“Take her away! She’s useless,” Captain von Essen called to the guard. Then he stood and looked down at Eva. “Enjoy your trip, Fräulein Bianco.”
Eva flinched at the name. Angelo’s name. She would never be Eva Bianco.
She had almost felt relieved when she was arrested. The thing she had dreaded, feared, run from, had happened. When it came, she was strangely liberated from the fear. She couldn’t dread what had already come to pass. She didn’t have to anticipate the horror when the horror was right there. With her arrest came a certain calm, a quiet comfort. It had come. She had known it would. And she could stop fighting.
But then they arrested Angelo, and they tortured him. When they dragged Angelo away, the comfort left, and the fear came back. Fear is strange. It settles on chests and seeps through skin, through layers of tissue, muscle, and bone, and collects in a soul-size black hole, sucking the joy out of life, the pleasure, the beauty. But not the hope. Somehow, the hope is the only thing resistant to the fear, and it is that hope that makes the next breath possible, the next step, the next tiny act of rebellion, even if that rebellion is simply staying alive.
When they told her Angelo was dead, she lost her hope.
“Help me, Saint George
,” Angelo prayed, beseeching the statue overlooking the church fountain. It wasn’t Saint George, but it could have been. Maybe it was Saint Jude, the patron saint of lost causes, the apostle of the impossible. If so, Angelo had a task for him.
“Help me face what is to come,” he murmured through lips that wouldn’t cooperate. “Help me get to Rome, and most of all, watch over Eva. Take care of Eva, until I can do it myself.”
He’d filled his belly with brackish water from the fountain and washed himself as best he could, trying not to think of the blood and death he carried on his skin and in his clothes. Then he turned and stumbled away from the fountain of the unknown saint and continued his painful slog toward Rome. He needed to reach Santa Cecilia before dawn. He had to find Eva.
Hours later, when he limped the final steps and collapsed against the gates of the convent, the church bells began to ring, but Angelo was too far gone to notice.
Eva was still wearing the gray dress she’d worn to work on Wednesday, still wearing her low-heeled black shoes and her little black belt. She was stylishly filthy. Her hair was matted. It hadn’t been brushed in—she thought back—days? How many days? Wednesday she had been arrested. Friday they had dragged Angelo away, Saturday morning she was loaded on a train. It was still Saturday, and she still sat in the stinking darkness of the cattle car, the press of bodies keeping her warm but making her want to climb up to the little window that sat high on the side, just so she could breathe air that hadn’t been breathed a hundred times and see a stretch of sky. There were only women and children in this car. The Jewish men detained in the prisons had been taken to help satisfy the numbers required for the reprisal killing. Just like Angelo.
Four days. It had been four days since she’d brushed her hair. Or her teeth. Or looked in a mirror. She had a strange feeling that if she saw herself, she wouldn’t recognize her face. Seven days ago, she’d lain in Angelo’s arms, the happiest she’d ever been in her entire life. Now she sat shivah over her old life in a train that would take her to her death.