A Child Al Confino: The True Story of a Jewish Boy and His Mother in Mussolini's Italy (45 page)

Years later I asked
Pupo
if everyone in his family was against him marrying Mother. “What about your mother?” I asked.

“My mother is the sweetest person in the world,” he replied. “I would have her blessing no matter what I did. That is what she told me the first time we all went to Sicily.”

We returned to Sicily several more times. Everyone was always cordial, but that cloud always seemed to hang over us.

We had lived in Naples for almost six years when, toward the end of 1949, just as I had started my studies of engineering at the university, Mamma announced we were going to America. None of our friends could understand why we would leave such a comfortable lifestyle to seek who-knows-what in the New World.

The villa, our home for more than three years, included our own three-tier garden filled with a variety of flowers and thirty-three fruit trees. But more than its size was its idyllic location, the envy of most who came to visit. Located on winding Via Agnello Falcone, halfway between the town below and Il Vomero, the district at the top of the hill, we faced the gulf of Naples and had a clear view of Capri and Mount Vesuvius.

Pietro had built up a successful wholesale food business, and Mother, after managing a bottling business for the Allied forces, had begun to enjoy the type of social life she had known in Vienna. Both my parents had a large circle of friends and dinner parties at our home were at least a weekly occurrence. Judging from our lifestyle — the vacations, the full-time housekeeper, and the luxury car with our own chauffeur, I had to assume that Pietro's business was doing well. Nevertheless, my mother had made her decision.

“Why are we leaving Naples?” I asked.

Mamma explained the reason. Not having been born in Italy precluded me from ever applying for citizenship. “I don't want you to live in a country where you will always be a foreigner.”

With a heavy heart I accepted my mother's explanation and plans for our departure began in earnest.

During the last few months in Naples, our home became a beehive of social activities. Friends came for lunch and for dinner. It seemed that Mother never left the kitchen, but she loved that. Several times I overheard close friends question her decision to leave. “You have everything you want. Anything. A man who adores you and would reach for the moon if you asked him to.” Mother had many reasons, but I never heard her say that one of them was Pietro's family.

As the time of our departure drew closer, I began feeling the pain of parting from friends, from my dog and my cat. I had grown up in Naples during my most important formative years. I had many friends and
Pupo
had bought me a motor scooter for graduation, giving me the freedom to move around. It was a comfortable life, finally without the fears we had faced for many years before. The war was behind us, so why leave this heavenly land? Why should I care if I could not become a citizen? But in the end I never revealed my true feelings.

Two weeks before our planned departure, leaving the housekeeper to take care of the pets and home, we moved from our villa to a small hotel and the day before our sailing, I went back to the house to bid my pets a final goodbye. They knew I was leaving them. I had been away on trips before, yet they had never displayed the kind of behavior they did on that day. The cat saw me and ran away, while the dog allowed me to pick her up. She soon wiggled out of my arms to slowly climb up the stairs of the garden. I called her name several times, but Dianina never as much as stopped or turned her head. This little dog, who would jump at the sound of my voice, had to know I was abandoning her.

Life in America

O
ur ship, the SS
Atlantic
, sailed from Naples on February 2, 1950, and landed in New York in the midst of a snowstorm on February 16. Only Mother and I had sailed. Pietro, who had to settle some matters in Naples and Sicily, would follow us a few months later.

During the trip I realized the irony of it all. My whole family — Mother, Father, and I — were supposed to have emigrated together before the war if not for the difficulty of obtaining an American visa.

We stayed in New York, living in a hotel on 103rd Street off Broadway. The hotel and the neighborhood were crowded with immigrants, so much so that I wondered if the entire city was made up of transplanted Europeans. We knew we were not going to set up house in New York. We had been told so by HIAS, the Jewish sponsoring organization that had facilitated our immigration to the United States. So we stayed only long enough to decide where to go and for HIAS to make the necessary arrangements.

During our six months' stay, Mother made contact with several of her old European friends. It was almost like going back in time, except that living in a hotel room made it impossible for Mother to entertain as she would have liked.

I started to work, a new experience. On my first job I learned to box macaroons, earning seventy-five cents an hour. From there I graduated to waiting on tables, which paid forty dollars per week.

One afternoon, soon after our arrival, Mother and I walked into Eclair's, a Viennese coffee shop on New York's Upper West Side. From a table in the rear, a woman let out a shriek. “Lotte!”

I had heard that shriek before. Mother immediately realized it was Bertl, and the two women repeated the performance I had witnessed on the streets of Nice eleven years earlier. Mother began crying, something she was doing more frequently as of late. They hugged and kissed.

“Bertl,
du bist so dick geworden
.”

“
Du auch
,” Bertl said. They were both shouting, referring to their added weight.

“Erich,
ich muss dich anschauen
,” Bertl said. Holding me at arm's length, she wanted to look at me. “
Ich hätte dich nicht erkannt
.” Then she kissed me and pulled me to her abundant bosom.

I would have recognized her anywhere. There was a short applause from the patrons for a scene that repeated itself almost daily in those postwar years.

Under pressure from HIAS, we moved to Philadelphia on July 3, where a nice furnished room had been arranged for us.

Within days Mother made friends with a family living across the street from our rented room and soon that family, with its many members scattered across town, became our family. Overnight I was adopted by this generous and warm group of people and acquired new aunts and uncles and a most wonderful grandmother.

Neither my mother nor I allowed for the world to pass us by and, while Mom looked for an apartment and some furnishings, I looked for a job, any job. My English had improved enough so that I could hold a simple conversation. Within days we both succeeded.

In October, Pietro followed us, but his landing turned out anything but smooth. To bypass the Italian immigration quota, my dad arrived on a tourist visa but only purchased a one-way ticket, never thinking this might create a problem. But it did. In fact, he was detained at Ellis Island for five days and the indignity of living in that large hall with hundreds of other detainees without any privacy engendered in him a negative feeling toward America. Eventually we posted a cash bond to secure his return to Italy and release.

When Pietro was able to join us in Philadelphia, he found us in a furnished one-bedroom apartment surrounded by a large extended family, all of whom immediately adopted him, too. Despite language difficulties — Pietro did not speak a word of English — he impressed everyone as a most unusual person. His warmth, his friendliness, but mostly the affection and love he held for my mother needed no language to be expressed.

Evelyn and Lou Maximon had adopted Mother as their sister and a very close relationship developed between us. On April 1, 1951, they planned and paid for my parents to be married officially. The happy event took place at the Inn in Princeton, New Jersey, with half of our new extended family attending.

Because I was already working, Pietro, a university graduate who had never worked for anyone, decided he too should find a job. To him it was unacceptable to have his son support the family. He considered that his responsibility. A new acquaintance suggested that, because of the language difficulty, he contact the Italian community to seek employment. There he did find a job in a cheese factory where he had to endure standing in water for most of his working hours. Soon after he was offered a job at a bakery, where he reported to work before midnight and stayed until early morning. Our conflicting hours disrupted family life, so Pietro sought another job. Months later, through people in the Italian community, he landed one as a presser with a clothing manufacturer.

For more than two years, while Mother was able to get his tourist visa extended,
Pupo
endured these low-level jobs, which crushed the spirit of this cultured and refined man. The menial work, the only type my dad had been able to find, reinforced his negative feelings about his future in the United States.

The residency problem needed to be resolved. Mother had been advised at the time of the visa extension that another one would not be granted. Pietro needed to obtain a permanent residence status, which required a congressional bill or return to Italy. Never to be deterred, Mother made a connection with a Philadelphia congressman, who agreed to introduce a bill to grant Pietro an immigration visa. There remained one additional hitch. United States immigration laws required anyone who became a permanent resident through such a special congressional bill to exit the country and re-enter it under the new visa.

Rather than return to Italy, Pietro chose to go to Mexico, a closer destination. He traveled by bus from Philadelphia, partially to save money but also because other modes of transportation were not readily available in those days. This was 1952.

On his second day in Mexico, my dad met Ernesto Segre, a Jewish doctor of Italian origin. It was the meeting that would change my family's future. The two men formed an immediate bond, and through Ernesto, Pietro was introduced to members of an Italian community who welcomed him and immediately made him feel comfortable and at home. He wired Mother that he had found the land where he wanted to spend the rest of his life and asked her to prepare for the move. Pietro did return to Philadelphia for a short stay, long enough to convince my mother to make the move permanent, which they did in 1953.

In Mexico my parents adapted easily. They soon met a large contingent of European immigrants, which offered them a continental lifestyle such as the one they had left back in Naples. My mother even met a branch of my real father's family that stemmed from his uncle, Max Lifschütz, my
Opapa'
s brother. When Mother wrote to me about her encounter, it was exciting news since I remembered that in Vienna, when I was only five, I had seen Uncle Max's two young daughters, Martha and Edith.

I visited my parents often and met many of their friends, who were unanimous in feeling that my parents were two unusual and unique human beings. The love they felt for one another served as an example and admiration for all who knew them, a love that would last for thirty more years.

In Mexico my mother, for the third time in her life, at the age of sixty-four, exhibited her ability as a remarkable entrepreneur. In Vienna she had opened a vegetarian restaurant. In Naples she succeeded in the wine-bottling business and now her apple strudel helped launch a wholesale bakery that, after two years, could boast of more than two hundred employees.

My parents lived in Mexico City until my mother's Parkinson's disease became hard to manage at home. In 1972, she entered the Jewish retirement home in Cuernavaca. Pietro, after several stints in his own business, had gone to work for a close friend. When Mother moved to Cuernavaca, Pietro remained in the city during the week but spent every weekend with his beloved Lotte. In the true spirit of their marriage vows, his life was devoted to his wife “in sickness and in health.”

Anyone to whom I spoke marveled at the devotion this man showed for his ill wife. Not one weekend would go by without his traveling to Cuernavaca.

“Mamma needs me and waits for me,” he said when I tried to convince him that he needed a life of his own. It was at a point when
Mutti
was no longer fully aware of her surroundings, but Pietro was as stubborn as he was good. For him Lotte was his whole life and he wanted to spend his weekends with her.

From the time he joined us in Naples in February of 1944, Pietro remained Lotte's friend, companion, and husband for the next thirty-nine years. Earlier, while still in Ospedaletto, he had taken on the role of my father and I have always referred to him as such. He was the best parent any son could hope for. He set the highest example of morality, rectitude, and integrity for me. In the midst of our time as
internati
, during the low period in our lives, Pietro was the greatest gift Mussolini could have given us. The effect this gentle and sensitive man had on people prompted an acquaintance in Mexico to say, after asking me whether Dr. Russo was my father, “You should be proud to have a father like him.” Indeed I was.

My adored
Pupo
succumbed to a heart attack on July 31, 1983, while traveling through a small village in Mexico. He was buried there until December 1996, when, with help of a Mexican friend, I had his body exhumed and cremated. With great love, on my next trip to Italy, I carried him to Mazara del Vallo, his beloved land, to rest next to his own mother.

My dear mother never learned of Pietro's death. She left me two years later, on February 17, 1985, and was laid to rest in the Jewish cemetery in Mexico City. Because Pietro was not Jewish, he had been denied his earned right to be next to her.

Epilogue

M
any of the internees had settled in Naples, although some did so only temporarily. Clara Gattegno and the Howells returned to their former homes. We ran into Runia, her son Giorgio, and her parents, as well as the Spaechts, the Kamplers, and the few others with whom we had never grown close.