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.
She managed to find a place against the wall. They’d designated a corner for waste, and though no one wanted to use it, they all eventually had. The humiliation of the older women especially, crouched in that corner, trying to maintain their modesty while not stepping in the waste of others, tears of mortification streaming down their faces, was something she didn’t think she could ever forgive. It is one thing to kill someone. It is another to degrade and humiliate, to strip away a person’s dignity like stripping away flesh. One made a man a murderer. The other made him a monster. Eva was sure many of the women aboard that train would prefer death, clean and quick, to the slow loss of their humanity.
They were on the train for hours. It stopped once and they could hear dogs and commands, the sounds of more people being loaded into the cattle cars, but the doors were never reopened. Eva thought they were in Florence. It smelled like Florence, like home, and she pressed her palms to her eyes, trying not to weep and call out for Nonna and Nonno like a child. She couldn’t afford to cry. She was too thirsty.
It was the end of March, and the temperatures were moderate. It could have been so much worse, but it was hard to tell yourself how much more terrible a situation could be, when you were already on the outskirts of hell. The hungry children suffered the most, or maybe that wasn’t true. When children suffer, the ones who love them suffer even more, helpless to alleviate their agony.
When the train started to move for the second time, the occupants almost wept in relief, just to be leaving one torture for another, and Eva sank down, pulling her knees to her chest so she wouldn’t take up too much space, and rested her head against the side of the car. She had slept deeply that first night of confinement, waiting for the train that would take her away from her life. From the struggle. From everything that had become so impossibly hard. Now she slept deeply again, an ability she’d always had, and in sleep she escaped for a while.