“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.