The Lost Boys

by Catherine Bailey

  Detalmo’s long-held ambition was to participate in building a democratic future for Italy after twenty years of Fascism. The moment he had been waiting for came on 8 September when, following secret negotiations between the Allies and Marshal Badoglio, the new head of the Italian government, Italy surrendered to the Allies. As soon as the armistice was announced, Detalmo opened the gates of the prison camp at Mortara, enabling some 3,000 Allied prisoners of war to escape. He then left his regiment and went into hiding with the partisans.

  At Brazzà, Fey’s ‘quiet and uneventful life’ was drawing to a close.

  Within hours of the armistice, German troops began to pour across the border as Hitler moved to occupy northern Italy.

  As these momentous events unfolded, alone and cut off from Detalmo, Fey was forced to make the biggest decision of her life. Was it best to stay at Brazzà with the children or would it be safer to leave?

  Inexorably, she and the boys were about to be drawn into the Nazi machine.

  PART FOUR

  * * *

  10.

  Fey described the events of 8 September 1943:

  When the voice of General Badoglio came over the radio unexpectedly to announce that an armistice had been signed between Italy and the Allies, I was lonely but living tranquilly at Brazzà with my two little boys and my sister-in-law, Marina. The house and farm were running smoothly and the war seemed very distant from us.

  I remember that evening so well. I was having dinner with ‘Uncle’ Augusto Rosmini, an old friend of Detalmo’s mother. A distinguished old gentleman with grey hair and a pointed beard, Rosmini was a widower who had made a habit of coming to Brazzà every summer. Ever since his wife’s death, he had worn all her jewellery under his clothes, rings on various fingers and gold bracelets down his arms. He was a funny man, ‘a good sort’, as Detalmo said.

  After Badoglio’s announcement, Rosmini and I looked at each other in shock. We realized that this was by no means the end of Italy’s troubles. German troops were posted all over the country, and the Nazis would never permit it to fall into Allied hands. A period of disorder lay ahead and it was likely that Italy would become far more of a battlefield than it had been. My heart sank when I thought of my family in Germany; correspondence would certainly become more difficult. And Detalmo in Mortara? What would happen to him?

  Rosmini and I spent the next twenty-four hours glued to the radio. The Germans had already surrounded Rome and were fighting the Italian army for control of the city. At lunchtime, we heard that German troops had taken over Bologna, Venice and Florence. From time to time, one of the farm workers came in to report the rumours circulating in the neighbourhood. Convoys of Allied ships had been sighted in the Bay of Naples and were preparing to land on the coast north of Rome – a rumour that was later contradicted. Naples itself was in ruins following an Allied bombardment. Closer to home, the Germans had commandeered the railway lines in and out of Udine, and trainloads of troops and war equipment were streaming south. Given the chaos on the railways, Rosmini was anxious to get home and he left later that day, leaving Marina and me on our own, wondering what to do.

  The next morning, Fey asked Nonino to bring the pony and trap round to the front of the villa. Brazzà was completely cut off; no post, no papers, and the telephone was dead. Even the local tram service had stopped running. Anxious to know whether Detalmo thought she and the boys should leave Brazzà, Fey wanted Nonino to take her to Udine to see if she could telephone her husband from there.

  Avoiding the main road, they took the back route to Udine – a journey they made twice a week on market days. As they trotted along the white gravel tracks, through fields of maize, skirting farms and pretty hilltop villages, Fey was reassured by the peace in contrast to the alarming reports on the radio. ‘It was a still, lovely morning. The figs were out on the trees and the women were working in the fields and tending the vines along the side of the road. Everything seemed to be carrying on as normal. The only difference was that the fires lit by the contadini [peasant farmers] to celebrate the armistice were still smouldering outside the farms. We passed women on bicycles, taking the milk to the latteria, the great churns balanced on the handlebars. Some called out to say their men were back from the army.’

  On the outskirts of Udine, the roads were crowded with Italian soldiers hurrying back to their villages. After deserting from their units, many had swapped their uniforms for civilian clothes and were identifiable only by their military-issue boots. Orders had gone out to deport Italian soldiers to work camps in Germany, and to evade capture those that were able to had paid the exorbitant prices now being charged for items of clothing. Fey spoke to some of the soldiers. They told stories of total confusion and disorganization in the Italian Army, particularly among the high-ranking officers whose priority was ‘to disappear’.

  Arriving in Udine, Fey went to her usual bar in the Piazza San Giacomo. It was where she liked to go on market days to catch up with the local gossip. The sixteenth-century square, with its tight cobbles and tall, pastel-coloured houses, was one of the finest in the city and as she walked across it the festive atmosphere struck her as incongruous; crowds of Italian soldiers, apparently indifferent to the approaching Germans, were celebrating the disbanding of their units. They stood chatting in groups, or strolling up and down with wives and girlfriends, clean-shaven and intent on showing off their new civilian clothes.

  Fey quickly established that the Germans had taken over all the telephone lines in the north of Italy, preventing her from ringing Detalmo. The bar was packed with people exchanging rumours and information, many of whom she knew. Pia Tacoli, who lived on a neighbouring estate at Brazzà, had just arrived after a difficult journey from Milan. German soldiers had boarded the train at all the stops, asking young men for their papers, and she had seen a number of deserters disguised as women. Others reported that large numbers of Allied POWs – escapees from Fascist-run prison camps – were hiding in the woods outside the city. The main concern, however, was that the Communist partisans in the mountains around Udine would use the hiatus to take control of the area. Yet, as one man had heard, ‘They’re saying just give us your weapons, go home, and we’ll take care of the Germans.’1

  On returning to Brazzà, Fey half-expected to find Detalmo there. There were so many soldiers in the area, she imagined she would see him coming up the drive at any moment. Reassured by her visit to Udine, there seemed no reason to leave Brazzà; the neighbourhood was quiet and aside from the truckloads of Wehrmacht troops on the main road – which was a good 3 miles from the house – she had not seen any Germans.

  But then, on the morning of 12 September, four days after the armistice, Field Marshal Kesselring, the commander of German forces in Italy, made an announcement on the radio.2 All territory occupied by the Germans, which encompassed the whole of Italy north of Rome, was to be subject to martial law. Strikes or any other attempts at resistance would be tried by court martial. The railways and the postal service were to be placed under German control, meaning that private letters would be banned and telephone conversations severely restricted.

  Fey was with her sister-in-law, Marina, when Kesselring made the announcement. Soon after the bulletin ended, one of the farm workers came rushing in to say that large numbers of German troops, equipped with tanks and anti-aircraft guns, had occupied Tarcento, 10 miles to the north; more troops were heading towards Udine. ‘Marina, infected by the general panic, did everything to persuade me to leave Brazzà and flee south to the protection of Detalmo’s relatives. I did not want to go. As the daughter of a diplomat, my childhood had been spent living in embassies and Brazzà was my first proper home. Also, I felt that since German was my mother tongue, I might be of use in protecting the house and our contadini in the event of a German occupation. Nevertheless, I was swayed by Marina and our manager, Marchetti, who kept quoting Detalmo’s injunction that I should not hesitate to leave immediately if danger threatened.fn1 Unable to contact De
talmo, I gave in.’

  After packing a few essential things, they left that afternoon. ‘It was a flight in the true sense of the word,’ Fey remembered. ‘We abandoned everything as it was, giving only the vaguest orders to Nonino to hide our linen and silverware with the contadini. I knew that detailed instructions were necessary in such situations, but there was simply no time to issue any. As we drove away, I was filled with misgivings. Abandoning the families who worked for us seemed like an act of cowardice.’

  Twenty contadini families worked at Brazzà, many of whom had been there for generations.3 The mutually dependent relationship between the Pirzio-Birolis and their contadini was enshrined in a farming system that dated back to the Middle Ages. As in most of northern and central Italy, farm workers did not receive wages, nor were they required to pay rent to the landowner for the right to work their land; instead, they were engaged under the mezzadria or sharecropping system. In return for a house and the use of fields, farm buildings, carts and plough animals, peasant farmers gave 50 per cent of every crop harvest, and half of any profit made from the sale of livestock, vegetables, eggs and milk, back to the padrone.

  Besides cultivating the fields and tending livestock, the peasant capofamiglia, or head of the family, was required to maintain his parcel of land. During the winter months, he had to keep the ditches clean, mend walls and terraces, plant trees, prune vines, and repair farm tools worn down after the harvest. It was a contract that involved not just his own labour but that of his entire family; women in the household worked in the fields and milked the cows, and children as young as four worked too, feeding the animals, helping with the grape harvest, and pressing the hay down in the barns.

  The relationship between landlord and peasant demanded a continuing personal interaction, which went far beyond the business of the farm.4 The padrone was expected to guide and protect his contadini; in the event of poor weather or crop failure, he was supposed to be a source of capital, someone the families could resort to in a crisis. Yet many landowners abused the relationship by tyrannizing their peasants or fiddling account books, thereby reducing the contadini’s share. Poor capital investment and the landowner’s right to summarily evict tenants were other sources of grievance and, after the First World War, the harshness of the mezzadria system led to strikes and uprisings throughout the north of Italy. In response, the Fascists supported the landowners, crushing the uprisings and bringing further suffering to oppressed contadini on estates where the system had broken down.

  At Brazzà, however, the relationship between the Pirzio-Birolis and their tenants had remained on a harmonious footing. This was largely due to the efforts of Detalmo’s American grandmother, Cora di Brazzà Slocomb. A wealthy heiress, her father, a New Orleans entrepreneur, had founded a chain of hardware stores in the mid nineteenth century.5 As a young girl, Cora had been sent to Europe for her education. Speaking French, German and Italian, she settled in Rome in her early twenties, becoming an accomplished painter and mixing with other artists and intellectuals.

  In 1887, at the age of twenty-five, Cora met and married Count Detalmo, a scientist and engineer. Moving to Brazzà, she was shocked by the poverty in the neighbouring villages and the poor standard of education and hygiene. Cora’s progressive ideas meant that, unusually for her time and class, she rejected the traditional view of charity, believing it was not enough to hand out money to the less fortunate, but that a means had to be found to raise their status and to give them greater dignity.6

  An early campaigner for female emancipation, Cora resolved to use a part of her fortune to change the position of women at Brazzà. Recognizing that their submissive role was accentuated by poverty, she sought to make them financially independent.7 Astutely, she found a way to do this within the framework of the existing silk industry, enabling the women to continue their labour on the farms. In the spring months, the contadini at Brazzà cultivated silkworms, selling the cocoons on to reelers at Tricesimo, Friuli’s main silk market. Seeing an opportunity to create a local weaving industry, Cora established a lacemaking school in one of the villages on the estate. She oversaw the work of design and production herself and, after the success of the first school, she established six more, creating extra income for hundreds of women in the area. Additionally, she founded a toy factory in a nearby town, where women were employed making stuffed toys, and she also encouraged Delser, a local lady, to open a factory to produce the ‘Brazzà biscuit’, a type of shortbread.

  Cora campaigned on other social issues and by the mid 1890s she had become a celebrity figure in America after taking up the cause of a young Italian woman convicted of killing her lover. Only the second woman to be sentenced to death in the US, Maria Barbella, an émigré to New York, had killed the man after he seduced her and reneged on a promise of marriage. Using her social standing, Cora successfully campaigned for a reprieve, saving Barbella from the electric chair. She also used her public profile to promote Brazzà lace and by the early twentieth century it had become world-famous, winning a gold medal at trade exhibitions in London, Paris and Chicago.

  When Fey married Detalmo, Cora was still alive but the two women had not met. In 1906, at the age of forty-four, Cora suffered a mental breakdown from which she never recovered, and thereafter she was consigned to a private asylum.8 A much-loved figure, the memory of her was still strong among the contadini at Brazzà and, as the new custodian, Fey had a sense of obligation towards them which was in part motivated by a desire to honour Cora’s reputation.

  Cora would not have run away. This thought preoccupied Fey as she left Brazzà with Marina and the children. There were no delays at the station and they caught the first train to the south. It was hot and crowded and Roberto, then a twenty-month-old baby, cried throughout the journey. Fey thought it was because he sensed the fear and nervousness in the packed carriage, which was full of people fleeing from the Germans.

  At Venice, Marina got off the train to stay with her cousin, Princess Pia Valmarana, who owned a large palazzo on the Grand Canal. But Fey decided to press on to Padua, where Detalmo’s other cousins, the Papafavas, lived.

  The Papafavas owned Frassanelle, one of the finest neoclassical villas in the Veneto. Situated 7 miles to the west of Padua, it was surrounded by a large estate which had been in the family’s possession since the thirteenth century. Fey had not visited, but Detalmo had told her about the splendid villa, with its two private chapels and the famous ornamental staircase that ran down through the woods, linking the villa to the estate farm.

  Descended from the family of Da Carrara, lords of Padua in the fourteenth century, Count Novello Papafava was a committed anti-Fascist and had repeatedly offered Detalmo the villa as a refuge. Knowing that the count had eight children, Fey chose to go there rather than to Princess Valmarana’s palace, which, full of priceless objects and expensive furnishings, was less child-friendly. She was also keen to escape from her sister-in-law, whose indiscriminating fondness for grand society, including Fascist aristocrats, irritated her.

  Fey and the boys had left Udine just in time. That evening, upwards of 2,000 Germans occupied the city. ‘I arrived in Piazza Vittorio just as the bulk of the Germans were arriving,’ one resident wrote.9 ‘There was this big military parade of tanks and armoured vehicles – all being driven by kids of 18 or 20 years old. Some were even younger. They were wearing shorts and looked as if they had just been playing football. I feel sorry for them when I think that their parents and siblings must already have died in the war, and now they are taking their place and will probably suffer the same fate. The locals turned out in great numbers to watch this monstrous parade. I couldn’t see any sign of anyone demonstrating any sympathy toward the Germans. Not a friendly crowd. No one waved, no one lifted a hand. Everyone was just a spectator. Very serious and silent. The Germans were nonplussed and even they seemed stunned by the terrible roar of these machines. At the barracks, our soldiers have surrendered and are being guarded by these kids. The Pol
ice have run off and thrown their pistols in the road. No one is standing up to the Germans.’

  Within hours of the occupation, parties of German soldiers pasted flyers on the walls of the buildings in the centre of the city. Issued by the German High Command, the notices warned the citizens of the various penalties in operation under martial law:

  Attention!10

  Italian troops resisting German orders will be treated like traitors! The officers and commanders of these troops will be made responsible for their actions and shot without mercy as traitors!

  Orders to civilians!11

  – A Curfew is now in operation between 9 p.m. and 4 a.m.

  – All weapons of war being held by Italian soldiers or civilians must be immediately handed in. The unlawful possession of any of these weapons, or any other object designed for military use, will be punishable by death. Looting and sabotage are also punishable with death.

  – Those caught listening to British and American radio broadcasts will be subject to extreme punishment.

  That same day, the SS launched an audacious raid on the hotel high up in the mountains in the Abruzzo region of central Italy in which Benito Mussolini was imprisoned. Since his arrest on 25 July, the Allies had moved the former dictator from prison to prison in an attempt to keep his whereabouts secret. But on 26 August, they settled on the Campo Imperatore Hotel, a ski resort, 7,000 feet above sea level in the Gran Sasso mountains. The hotel had been emptied of guests and 200 Italian carabinieri drafted in to guard the prisoner.