A Child Al Confino: The True Story of a Jewish Boy and His Mother in Mussolini's Italy (24 page)

The crunch of fresh powder under my feet evoked memories of my Vienna. I looked around. No one else in sight. Only I was there to see this magical landscape. But not wearing gloves was hardly appropriate for this weather, nor could my shoes withstand the cold and wetness. Staying outside became painful. Obstinate, I stayed as long as I could tolerate it. Then, still unwilling to face defeat, I stayed a few more minutes. Back in the house, I struggled up the two flights with my half-frozen feet each step was torture. Even my fingertips were blue. But it had been worth it.

My face must have shown the pain. “Come here,
Hasele.
” Mother wrapped me in a blanket, kissed my forehead and held me tight. Oh, how I melted in my mother's arms!

That day Mother went through a still-unopened box of clothes to find a sweater set she had knitted for me in Vienna. “Come here,
Schatzele
. Let me see.” She placed the pullover against my back. “I can't believe how much you have grown. This will never fit you. We'll have to make another one. I hope there is enough wool.” From the box she pulled out a scarf, a pair of gloves and a hat. She examined the items laid out on the bed. “Oh, yes. There is enough. Let's unravel these and make you a new sweater.”

Mother found a beginning thread and as she began to pull, she asked, “Do you want to help me?” Without waiting for my reply, she handed me one end of the heavy wool thread. “Here, hold this and wrap it around your fist.” Mamma took my hand, made it into a fist, and placed the yarn firmly under my thumb. “Hold it tight.” It felt good to be working with Mother.

The light blue thread rapidly formed a ball around my fist. The wool had a soft, warm feeling. What riches my hand was holding! Wool was impossible to find. The Italian army needed it for itself. For hours over the next few days, I sat winding the wool around my fist as Mother unraveled it. I remembered how hard she had worked knitting those items, even taking them to the coffeehouse in the afternoons. Now, in a fraction of time and with hardly any effort, she had reduced her creations into a few neat balls of yarn.

Then, armed with much advice and a set of borrowed large needles, my resourceful
Mutti
began to recreate a sweater that would fit me. For days, Mother's knitting was the major topic of conversation amongst the internees, evidence of how any little diversion helped relieve the monotony of waiting for the war to end and our freedom to be restored.

Finally finished, Mother asked me to put on the new sweater. I had trouble standing still. “Slowly,” she said, “you're going to tear it.”

“It's gorgeous,
Mutti
!” I exclaimed. I've never seen anything so beautiful,
Mutti
! Can I wear it today?”

“Of course. I made it for you.”
Mutti
's warm smile expressed her happiness for having pleased me.

“You're the best mother anyone could have.”

The cold weather brought our enjoyable morning walks to an abrupt halt and with them, much of our socializing. Now the afternoons were spent with only a handful of friends, either playing bridge or meeting in one home or another to share a cup of tea. Mamma loved to entertain and now, with a living room in our new apartment, she was able to reciprocate. As people tasted her baked goods, especially the apple strudel, she became the “sensational Lotte.” When she made a walnut or Dobusch torte, it became the event of the week.

Pietro spent most days with us, whether for bridge or tea. He also shared lunch with us on several occasions, the only person who ever did. Often he surprised Mother with a bottle of olive oil he had received from Sicily or, in warmer weather, a bunch of flowers he had picked himself. Once, as I entered the kitchen, the two abruptly stepped away from one another.

While during the warm weather we had shared whatever news anyone had been able to snatch, now the cold weather forced us to stay inside isolated from our friends. One afternoon, Mamma commented, “Would you believe it? I even miss my arguments with old fellow Pierce.”

Local newspapers did not exist, and only once in a long while did a villager bring back a newspaper from Naples. Occasionally, some internee received a daily by mail with news that was more than a week old. Thus, without a radio of our own —
confinati
were not allowed to own one — Mother and even I, though only eleven, felt cut off from the outside world. We had been in Ospedaletto six months and the only news we had access to during that period came from the local folks who listened to the government censored radio and the Fascist propaganda.

Late that December we learned about America's entry into the war. At a time when our lives hinged mostly on hope, knowing America had joined Great Britain to fight Germany provided us the sweetest hope yet. At the time U.S. forces were engaged solely in the Pacific theater and the Italian radio made little mention of that. We longed to know more, but only a few townspeople owned a radio and we doubted any of them would be brave enough to defy the law or even interested in tuning to the short waves to listen to the BBC. In our building, only the landlord owned a radio.

“Can you imagine our landlady listening to the BBC?” Mamma was responding to Ettore Costa's question.

“Ask her,” Ettore suggested.

“You're right. I have nothing to lose.”

The next morning, while Filomena's husband was at school, Mamma approached her. “Could we listen to the enemy radio? I just want to see how they twist things around.”

Much to my mother's surprise, the woman offered no objection. “Do you know how?” Filomena asked.

“No, but we can try.”

Passing through the undulating noises of the short-wave stations, made it difficult to differentiate between music and voice.“I think this is it.” There was a timbre in my mother's voice that had long been missing.

In perfect Italian, the frequently fading voice was reading the newscast. Mother's nervousness reflected in her short back and forth pacing. “Isn't this exciting, Filomena?” Mamma asked.

“Oh, yes. This is incredible. I'll have to tell Antonio.”

“No, no. For heaven's sake, don't tell him! This has to remain a secret just between us.”

The newscast over, Mother suggested moving the dial to another spot then placing a finger on her lips, added, “We don't want anyone to know. Remember, just between us.”

The next day Filomena came upstairs to our quarters. “Let's go listen to our enemy.” The woman was wringing her hands as she spoke. “I'm so nervous.”

We walked down with Filomena. By now, my mother knew the spot on the dial and locked onto the station with little effort.

“Allied armies, augmented by a new American armored contingent, have started a counterattack in North Africa,” the BBC reported. Seven thousand Italian soldiers and their officers had surrendered. For them, the commentator continued, the war had come to an end. These prisoners were being sent to the United States, where they would spend the remainder of the conflict in safety.

“I wish they would take us prisoner,” Mamma said.

Filomena looked puzzled. “Why?”

“Then we could be sent to America.”

The official Italian newscasts had never made mention of American soldiers fighting alongside the British or of Italian soldiers being taken prisoner. We always heard of Allied soldiers being taken prisoner. Only retreating armies are taken prisoner and, according to the Italian radio, the German and Italian armies had never retreated.

Another afternoon during their clandestine listening, with ears glued to the receiver, Filomena jumped from the stool. “I heard a different version of the same news on our own station last night,” she shrieked. “They told us that the Italian army was victorious. These English people are just lying. Do they think we're so stupid to believe whatever they tell us?”

“Maybe our own radio didn't tell the truth,” Mamma said.

Filomena didn't think too long for her answer. “That could be. Maybe Mussolini is filling us with lies?”

Mother had found an unexpected ally. Each day, together the two women absorbed the news like sponges. Then, hurriedly, Mamma disseminated the information throughout our small community of internees. Even I became an assiduous listener, mindful of turning down the volume whenever the BBC's “bum-bum-bum-boooom,” the recognizable drumlike beat forming the first notes of Beethoven's
Fifth,
blared over the speaker.

“Do you think Filomena is on our side?” I asked Mamma.

“I don't know which side she is on. I don't think she knows.”

During those days, Mother became more tense than usual. “If anyone reports me to the
carabinieri
, they'll shoot me.”

I didn't know whether that was true, for I knew Mother could be melodramatic. “Stop scaring me like that,” I said.

Thanks to Filomena's betrayal of her husband's cause, my mother was being kept up to date on what was happening in the world and our lives became more meaningful. Although, more often than not depressed by the successes of the German armies, everyone took great solace from the little bits of good news the BBC transmitted. But good news could also be frustrating, for we had to restrain ourselves whenever we heard of a German defeat. Unfriendly ears could easily have concluded that we must have heard it from the BBC.

At the Howells' we followed the battlefields on a map covered with pins. Having to acknowledge that Germany had conquered most of Europe, part of Russia, and North Africa during the winter of 1941–42 was very depressing.

For me the most fascinating aspect of the BBC broadcasts was the coded messages: “The monkey has gone home,” or “The sheep has escaped from the barn.” Months went by before I found out that these messages were meant for the resistance fighters throughout German-occupied Europe.

“I get ecstatic thinking people are revolting against the Nazis,” Mother said. “I pray every day for the war to be over. So much blood is being spilled because of Hitler.”

Hope for the future helped us endure our day-to-day hardships of being prisoners and waiting to be free again. Encouraged by some of the news, my thoughts went to how soon we would be reunited with
Omama
and Papa.

Although most internees were Christians, Christmas and New Year passed us by with very few festivities. With German forces victorious on every front, the
confinati
had nothing to celebrate. Even the townspeople had their own share of bad news. Most men of military age had been drafted and sent to the front lines, many to Russia. Three of these had already been listed as missing and the internees, who had lived in Eastern Europe and had firsthand knowledge of the harshness of a Russian winter, expressed their gloomy prediction: “Missing means dead.”

“I feel for these families,” Mamma said. “They didn't want to be part of this lousy war.”

Even I had overheard some townspeople express their opposition to the war. They called it “Germany's war.”

The days were shorter. Sunrise was late and by 4:00 in the afternoon, the sun had set behind the mountain, casting a long gray shadow over the village, that matched the shadow of our own mood.
Mutti
and I spent the long, icy evenings huddled around the fireplace in the landlord's kitchen. While our legs were burning from the fire's heat, the rest of our bodies, though wrapped in blankets, felt the chilly drafts whistling through the many breaches in the poorly constructed windows. Sitting near the fire for so many weeks, the women, contrary to the men whose legs were protected by pants, suffered most. And their blotched skin stayed with them year round.

Sitting around the fireplace gave Mother the chance to display her extraordinary ability to have animated discussions with people of all ages. She learned to do small talk. The only educated person in our midst was our landlord, Don Antonio, but Mother rarely got into a serious conversation with this ardent Fascist. Instead, she delighted us with stories about her own youth, from when she first arrived in Vienna during the last war up to the time in March when we were forced to flee. She was a superb
raconteuse,
riveting the rapt attention of everyone around her. During one of those evenings, she told how she went to work in a bank as soon as she had finished school to help her widowed mother. From those chats around the fireplace, I learned much about my own life as a baby, how she had toilet-trained me and how I refused to eat creamed spinach. But I never did find out how my parents met.

“When Enrico was little, he was such a poor eater. I wish he would eat as little now. We could have lots of ration coupons left over.” I knew she was joking, for at every meal my mother encouraged me to eat more.

During that first winter, siblings Gusti and Davide Kampler were transferred to Ospedaletto from the separate camps where they had been kept since 1939. Both in their early twenties, with little knowledge of Italian, they had been isolated and alone in the new country. Their story quickly gained them the sympathies of the Wovsis, Runia, Mother, and all the other
confinati
, who took turns at inviting these traumatized young people to their home for a friendly meal.

The young brother and sister had escaped to Italy hoping to get their parents and their other seven brothers and sisters out of Germany. Instead they found themselves imprisoned after a few months and soon taken in chains to two separate camps.

We could feel David's anguish as he related their experience. “I felt like a common criminal. I finally was able to convince the guard that I had done nothing, and he removed the shackles from my feet.”

At the same time, we also welcomed in our midst an emaciated and pathetic young man from Argentina and two brothers from Czechoslovakia. The unusually shy man from Buenos Aires seemed satisfied to stand quietly by, unable or unwilling to blend into our group. He spoke little Italian and, since none of us spoke Spanish, conversing with him was impossible. We learned little about him, only that he had been a barber in his country and had landed in Italy — we didn't know why — at which time he lost his personal possessions. He was a pathetic fellow, emaciated and malnourished. Every day he came to our meeting spot wearing the same frayed, stained clothes and shoes, of which only the tops were left without holes. He smiled and shook the hand of anyone who had outstretched theirs, but hardly said anything.