A Child Al Confino: The True Story of a Jewish Boy and His Mother in Mussolini's Italy (37 page)

Looking at the freshly shaven, bloodless cheeks, I kept wondering whether his soul had floated out with that last sonorous breath. Why else would the man's last breath have been so loud? I pondered life and death, spirit and body, and thought about heaven and hell. There had to be eternal life. At that moment all my misdeeds flashed through my mind. So many! Could I ever be forgiven? I was terrified. I certainly didn't want to go and meet Lucifer.

Though surrounded by all those noisy mourners, I felt lonely in that large, crowded room. Couldn't at least one person comfort me? But no one noticed. The mid-July afternoon was intensely hot, yet my shoulders shivered with cold wetness flowing from my skin. My conflicting emotions made it difficult to decide whether to stay or leave and, because I could not take my eyes off the dead body, my feet remained glued to the floor.

Don Pasquale entered with an altar boy, who was swinging an incense holder. The room began smelling like a church. The priest started to chant and, except for an occasional “
Cosí sia
” response from the mourners, a respectful hush descended on everyone present.

The calm broke the spell. I had seen enough for one day. No need to stay for more of the religious rites. Slowly I backed out of the room and, as if chased by some wild animal, flew down the stairs, wanting to be out of that house. As I hit the dusty road, the fresh air relaxed my tense body. I drew a long breath and ran home.

Up the two flights I raced and, gasping for air, yelled from the hallway, “Mamma, I just saw someone die!” I had hoped that getting the words out would finally calm me down. It did not.

Mother met me at the door. “Oh, my
Schatzele
. Come here. That must have been terrible. Let me hold you, then you can tell me what happened.” She put her arms around me and held me tight to her bosom.

“Signor Sanseverino just died. Just like that. He let out a big breath and
puff.
What a spooky sound! It was scary.”

“Try not to think about it. Maybe we'll go out for a walk.”

I freed myself from her embrace. “It was Raffaele's father. I didn't know dying was so easy. One moment he was talking to his daughter and then he was dead. You should have been there to see what went on afterward.”

“No thanks. Just tell me what happened.”

“There was such screaming and yelling and crying. They came from everywhere. I don't know how they knew the man had died. Some people tried to shake his body to bring him back to life. Can you do that, Mamma? Bring someone back from death?”

“I don't think so.”

“The barber came and shaved the man. Why do they do that?”

Mother had a puzzled look. I sensed she knew as little as I did about the barber. “He did what?”

“He shaved him.”

“I don't know why.”

Death occurred often in Ospedaletto and was not restricted to the elderly or the military. While playing bridge one afternoon, my mother learned of the death of a newborn baby that day.

“With so much ignorance and superstition, it's no wonder so many children die here,” she remarked. “The women have more babies than they can care for.”

“And no one wants to call a doctor or go to a clinic,” Agatha Howell added.

The nearest clinic was in Mercogliano, about two miles down the road to Avellino, but the local women preferred relying on Maria, the village midwife, to help with their childbirth. I saw Maria a few times. She resembled a gypsy fortune teller rather than a professional midwife. Her hands, the first to touch every newborn, looked wrinkled, not from her forty-some-odd years but by years of layers of encrusted dirt. Even I had learned that the lack of running water and the people's ignorance of hygiene could cause the infant population to dwindle rapidly.

At the Howell's one afternoon, Mamma related the experience of seeing a woman, sitting outside her house, the blouse unbuttoned and feeding two children from her naked breast. Mother repeated the conversation she had. She had given birth to twenty-five, the woman said and thanked the Holy Mary for the seven she lost soon after birth.

Pierce's Betrayal

A
fter Pietro's departure for Sicily, Mother devoted her time to bringing up Lello and writing long letters to her love. Seven days a week she wrote, sometimes even twice a day.

My time was divided between Enrico's shop, the billiard hall, tutoring, reading, and my stamp collection. I stopped singing with the church choir. Although not as observant as my grandfather would have wanted me to be, I was developing a strong feeling for my Jewishness and was less comfortable spending that much time in a Catholic church.

Mother began to smoke again, a sign of her increased nervousness. To save money and totally out of character, she bought a pack of cigarette paper and a package of bulk tobacco.

“What are you going to do with that?” I asked.

“I'll start making my own cigarettes.”

The first time she tried to roll a cigarette, I saw her destroy more than half of the paper booklet without making one cigarette.

Runia, who was visiting, watched too. “Wouldn't it be cheaper to buy cigarettes?” she asked. “Look at all the tobacco you've dropped on the floor.”

Mother looked frustrated. “Erich! Stop laughing!” she yelled. “If you think you can do better, here, you try it.” With a large smile, she shoved the torn sheets and the bag of tobacco my way. “I guess you can tell I wasn't born to do this.”

“Lotte, I admire your vitality,” Runia said. “I often wonder how you keep that sense of humor under these circumstances. I get so depressed sometimes.”

Internees loved having my mother around for her
joie de vivre
. Her optimism helped them raise their own spirits. Only when alone with me did she sometimes show her inner foreboding.

A few days after the failed cigarette-making incident, I watched a man make cigarettes using paper tubes and a plunger. “It looked simple, Mamma. Something even you could do.”

“I am thrilled you have so much confidence in your mother. And where do I find these items?”

“I guess at the tobacco shop.”

The next day, Mother brought home a box of cigarette sleeves and the metal stuffer. “Would you do it for
Mutti
?” she asked.

“Sure.”

I had watched the fellow and was pretty confident I would have no trouble. But I soon learned the tubes were hard to fill. “The paper keeps splitting, Mamma.” I used almost a full box of one hundred tubes before succeeding in making the first cigarette. But by the end of the first week, the cigarette machine worked flawlessly and seldom did I ruin another tube.

One morning Mother and I noticed Karel Weil saving his cigarette butts. Leaning against a wall, he crushed the cigarette tip against the sole of his raised shoe. Then, rolling the tip between two fingers, he let the ashes fall to the ground, felt the butt for any remaining fire and slipped it into his inside jacket pocket.

“What do you do with those butts?”
Mutti
asked.

“I use them to make cigarettes. Cheaper than buying new tobacco.”

From that day, Mother began saving her own stubs. She did not crush the stub against her shoe but stepped on it instead. “Not very ladylike to raise my leg,” she said. A week later she handed me a handful of butts. “Use these.”

In 1942, Allied planes began flying over our heads on their way to bombing Naples and, by the end of summer, the raids had become a daily occurrence. Listening to some of the internees speak of these air raids, I became convinced that we had nothing to fear from these friendly planes.

“What would they want to bomb here in Ospedaletto, between two wooded mountains?” John Howell asked.

Yet, the deep rumble of wave upon wave of these large and noisy planes made everyone uneasy.

One morning I watched a group of American bombers being intercepted by Italian fighters. I heard the
rat-a-tat-tat
of machine guns, the sound muffled by distance. Watching those little planes chasing the big ones was an electrifying spectacle. I had only seen that at the cinema. Now I was witnessing reality. I was rooting for the Americans and, without realizing it, stirred by my heightened emotions, I was talking out loud. “Watch out, he's on your tail,” I yelled in Italian. “Let him have it. You're much bigger.” I glanced around and, to my relief, saw no one there to hear me.

Rat-tat-tat
and a puff of smoke spurted from one of the giant American planes. It felt like a bullet had hit me in my chest. The plane started to fall. Oh, my God! Suddenly, small dots jumped from the plane's belly seconds before the crippled craft, nose turned downward, ended its flight in a long, lifeless, pathetic spin. These men were fighting for us, trying to liberate us. What would happen to those unfortunate aviators?

The parachutes opened. One, two, three … seven. I lost track. I saw the dots float toward earth until the chutes disappeared behind a distant hill. My concern was tempered by the knowledge that these Americans, falling from the sky, were touching down in a country of good-hearted and generous people.

Hypnotized, I stood on the dusty road. This had been the real thing. No cops and robbers, no target-shooting. These were people, flesh and blood, being killed and real planes shot down. The palms of my hands were cold and clammy.

With every passing day, the number of planes flying over us increased in number. I made a game of counting the aircraft flying overhead. Fifty, sixty … ninety-five. The raids escalated and as the numbers increased, we felt the earth's tremors responding to the impact of the tons of bombs. My own anxiety increased, and Mother was constantly jumpy. We never got used to the loud drone of the big engines.

Then one day the Earth shook. Mamma and I were in the kitchen having breakfast. We looked at each other.

“That was no bomb,” Mamma said.

“What was it?” I asked.

That same question was on everyone's lips that day. There was no one to ask, no one to contact. For the first time since we had settled in Ospedaletto, I saw real fear on the faces of the local citizens

Weeks passed before we learned the mystery: A munitions ship had been hit by Allied bombs in the Bay of Naples. Struck while in port, the burning ship was piloted into the open bay by a few brave Italian sailors, where it exploded, carrying those valiant young heroes to their final resting place. But this was only the rumor. The information came from refugees arriving from Naples. They told us that windows of every building facing the bay were shattered, but not a single civilian death was attributed to the doomed vessel. The truth, as we learned it later, differed greatly from the rumor. The ship,
Caterina Costa
, exploded at the pier, causing tremendous damage and killing hundreds. Several ships nearby caught fire and sank, while heavy tank parts were found as far away as Il Vomero, several miles from the port.

For months some internees had expressed their suspicion that William Pierce had been sent in our midst to spy on us.

“I can't believe it,” said John Howell after he first heard it. “Not even the Fascists would pick someone that dumb.”

But if anyone had doubts, what happened next must have certainly dispelled them. A day or two after the big blast but before anyone knew any of the details, Pierce reported to the
carabinieri
that Giorgio Kleinerman was somehow involved in that whole affair. Pierce claimed to have heard the boy make mention of the event before it ever happened. These were times when facts did not have to match fantasies, nor did accusations require proof.

One morning at the roll call, Maresciallo Marchetti invited Runia Kleinerman into his office and told her of Pierce's accusation. Desperate and out of breath, Runia came running to us.

“Pierce has accused Giorgio of being a spy.”

“That swine. He's a mean, crazy man,”
Mutti
exclaimed.

“He accused Giorgio of knowing ahead of time about the mysterious explosion. I told the
maresciallo
that it was utterly ridiculous. My son is only eighteen and could not have known anything about that. He has never set foot outside Ospedaletto.”

“No one knows anything about it. We're still trying to find out what it was,” Mother said.

“The
maresciallo
said we must go away from here. I am beside myself. He apologized, told me that no charge can be ignored. I don't know what Pierce told him. What do I tell my parents? This might kill my father.”

“Calm down. Let me make you a glass of tea. We'll talk.” In those days a glass of tea was a cure-all for anything that ailed us. It was the first thing anyone offered when you had a cold or a tragedy.

Mother used the small electric immersion heater to prepare the tea for her trembling friend. “Maybe someone can talk to the
maresciallo.
”

But no one could. The
maresciallo
gave everyone the same answer, “You know, spying?”

The day this news spread, Pierce showed up for the morning walk.

“You should be ashamed of yourself,” Runia said.

William Pierce strained to offer an explanation. As a loyal Italian, he justified exposing anyone who was against his country.

“You are a mean old man!”

“You are a beast!”

“A bastard!”

These and other invectives were hurled at the man until they chased him from our midst. From that day, Pierce was ostracized by all the
confinati
and was left to spend the rest of his internment period by himself.

Runia and her family were ordered to move to Paternopoli, another internment village not far away.

The German Occupation

I
n the spring of 1943, our sleepy village awoke to the sudden and massive arrival of a contingent of German troops. Military vehicles were everywhere, creating the kind of traffic Ospedaletto had never experienced before. Motorcycles roared back and forth and the multitude of armed soldiers walking through the village made me think that at any moment we were going to be in the midst of war. The troops set up camp in the surrounding forests and, in the short span of one day, we found ourselves encircled by the full force of the German army. Since that fateful day at the Vienna railroad station in March 1938, I had learned enough to be alarmed at having soldiers this close.