A Child Al Confino: The True Story of a Jewish Boy and His Mother in Mussolini's Italy (7 page)

We learned to make papier-mâché puppets, to milk goats, and to feed the farm animals living on the property.

My stay in this idyllic spot almost ended before its time when a counselor wrote to my parents asking them to take me back so the other children could enjoy the remainder of their summer. All because I poured cold water on the boy sleeping in the bed next to mine? It was only for fun. Protected by some unknown source, I was allowed to stay for the duration.

At the end of the season, I returned to Milan wearing the full regalia of an American Indian, complete with a spear and feathers, the costume I had created in a handicraft class.

Artwork by Eric sent to his parents in Milan from camp in Switzerland in the summer of 1938.

Settling Down

I
learned much of what was happening from the conversations between my parents and their visiting friends. Italy had kept its borders open to many displaced Jews from Austria and countries of Eastern Europe, but by 1938 Mussolini was cultivating his alliance with Adolf Hitler. To appease his new ally, he promulgated a milder version of the German racial laws. Among other things, they barred Jewish children from attending public schools and Jewish men from serving in the military. And while the latter did not concern me at all, I was delighted about the former. But I was only eight and did not grasp the meaning of “racial laws.”

So, that fall, my parents did not enroll me in school, leaving me to cultivate my friendship with the cabinetmaker and the young women at Upim. Now I could build and tinker and not have to worry about homework.

My father began working soon after we arrived from Vienna. He would buy silk stockings from a factory, then went house-to-house to sell them to other immigrants. I don't know how well he made out financially, but my mother had plenty of silk stockings and many of the premiums Papa used to give his customers.

Hardly a day went by that one or two salesmen did not come to our door peddling bolts of fabric, stockings, pens, or useless little gadgets.

“Why are so many people coming to the apartment door?” I asked.

“Hasele
! The police will not give immigrants a work permit. This is their only way to earn some money,”
Mutti
explained. “Not even Papa can get a permit.”

By sleeping in the same room with my parents, I had become privy to many of their concerns and adult conversations. That's how I learned that a new industry had sprung up in Milan: the manufacture of furs made from remnants.

“Leave it to the Jews,” Mamma remarked. “They always find a way to earn their bread.”

Papa described these factories. They had been set up in old abandoned apartment buildings no longer suitable for human habitation. Cutting tables and sewing machines were crammed into poorly lit rooms, creating intolerable working conditions, especially during the hot summer months, when a few small electric fans were all there was to mix some outside air with the stale air inside.

“Those poor workers! Because they are illegals, would not dare complain,” my mother remarked. “They are glad to earn some money. No one else will hire them. I ask how God could allow this to happen. I've met people who were wealthy men in the old country and now are laborers. They look like beggars.”

One hot day my father took me along to one of these sweatshops. Just as he had depicted, the inside air was intolerable. I found it hard to breathe and wanted to leave, but Papa had to speak to the owner. While I waited, I watched a worker take a small piece of fur, not much larger than a postage stamp, place it on a table next to many similar squares, and painstakingly try to fit it into a matching pattern. Slowly he turned each tiny piece a full circle until his trained eye was satisfied with the fit. Then with a pin he fastened the new remnant to the others, picked up a new square, and repeated the process. After several fur pieces had been pinned together, he carried the large puzzle to a special sewing machine, where he fed it into a curved needle and sewed the many sections into one continuous pelt. As one hand was pushing the jigsaw puzzle through the fast-moving machine, two fingers of the other hand removed the no-longer-needed pins. When the last pin was removed, he lifted his finished masterpiece high over his head, displaying it first to himself, then to me. He had a sparkle in his eyes. I would never have guessed this was anything but a single pelt.

In spite of my many requests, Mother had never allowed me to wear long pants. After I celebrated my eighth birthday, I thought it was a good time to ask again.

“They're only for dressy occasions. Do we understand each other?”
Mutti
admonished.

With a military salute, I said, “Oh yes, sir!” I was ready to understand anything she wanted me to understand as long as I got my long pants. In the end, she relented. I wrapped my arms around her and covered her face with kisses. “Oh,
Mutti
, I love you.”

“I love you too,
Hasele
. You're my whole life.”

That week Mother took me to a tailor. There was a long conversation about the kind of pants before the man started taking my measurements. I was dancing around from being so excited. Annoyed, the tailor said, “Unless you stop moving, I won't be able to make your pants.” I froze in my tracks. Around the waist, down my leg, then from the crotch, around the hip, and the thigh. I never knew pants needed that many measurements. Meanwhile, my mother had chosen a gray checkered fabric from the swatch book.

“Do you like it?” she asked.

I liked it a lot.

“Come back next week for the first fitting,” the tailor said.

Back for the fitting we went, but all his measuring did not seem to help the pants fit my body. Perhaps he'd made a mistake and used someone else's measurements. Perhaps this was a plot to deny me my long pants. The man looked puzzled. He walked around me twice, pinched some loose material, circled me again, and marked some places with chalk while other spots he pinned.

“Come back next week,” he said.

Although my mother had ordered knickers and, while not quite the long pants I had hoped for, they were more adult than anything I had owned before. I had to wait through one more fitting and two more agonizing weeks, but when I tried on the finished knickers, they fit and I walked out from the small shop wearing my first long trousers. I swaggered like a man instead of the boy I still was. I felt taller and certain everyone on the street was aware of the fine figure I cut.

The second time I was allowed to wear my new pants, I took a tumble on a stone sidewalk, causing an irreparable rip to my knickers. My knee was torn up also and bleeding badly, but my crying was not for the physical pain. It was for the loss of the long trousers I had wanted for so long.

Mother took one look at me then at the pants. “Well,” she said, “I guess that's the end of your long trousers.”

My initial infatuation with our landlady blossomed. Often Rina invited me to eat with her, developing my taste for a variety of Italian specialties. I loved being the center of her attention when her husband worked late and she and I were the only ones at the kitchen table.

Within weeks after our arrival, the going-to-bed ritual also required a goodnight kiss from Rina.

“Signora Gigli, you like children so much. How come you never had your own?” Mamma asked.

“I would have loved to but we couldn't. But you brought Enrico and he means as much to me as a child of my own could.” I had cuddled up to her and she held me close to her bosom.

From the time I returned from Switzerland, I began spending more and more time with Rina. Mother was happy I was staying off the street, while Rina and her dog were delighted to have me around.

My papa and I had never spent much time together — a few minutes each morning just before I left for school and at mealtimes. On occasion, when I got home before he did, I waited on the street and, recognizing his characteristic waddle from a distance, I'd run and throw myself into his waiting arms.

Nor did I know much about the relationship between my parents. I saw many tender moments, but there were also many shouting matches in their impenetrable Polish. Once my mother threw a metal plate at my father, hitting the wall right over his head with a force that left a chip in the plaster. Judging from the spankings she gave me, I knew that Mother had a strong arm, but fortunately for Papa, not very good aim.

One day my father had just come home for the midday meal. Breathless, he tried to explain to my mother what had happened that morning. “I went to the police office and they sent me to another office. Lotte, they don't want to renew our permit.”

“What do we do?”
Mutti
asked. Within days, my parents applied at the U.S. Consulate for an immigration visa. The Polish quota was much too small to accommodate the large number of applicants. At least a two-year wait, my father was told. We had to leave Italy.

Hearing talk about going to America, I asked, “Why do we have to leave? I like it here.”

“We can't stay here any longer,”
Mutti
said.

There was much discussion between my parents and lots of shouting, but I couldn't figure out what was going on.

One morning after breakfast,
Mutti
announced, “We are going to France and Papa is going to Lwow.”

The news caught me off guard. “Why can't we all go together?” I asked. Where was France? Why don't we all go to Lwow to be with my beloved grandparents? “I don't know anyone in France,” I cried. “That's the way it has to be,”
Mutti
replied.

I tried to find out where France was located. Asking, I learned that France bordered with Italy. From conversations my parents had with friends, I heard that France was still a safe refuge, but the French denied visas to Jews. Somehow I had overcome my earlier feelings of being dislodged and had settled down in our new home. Now I was being uprooted again.

When in November we prepared to leave, friends and acquaintances filled the living room for days as they came to wish us well and kiss us goodbye. We left Milan with all of our belongings minus my trolley car and the Indian outfit I had made in the Swiss camp. My heart was shattered. In Vienna I had been forced to abandon my brand new sleigh, my beloved Teddy, and my irreplaceable silver watch. But at the moment when Rina held me close to her, my greatest ache was having to leave her. Without the slightest notion about where Paris was in relation to Milan, I promised her I would be back to visit.

“I'll get a bicycle and come back,” I assured her.

As I descended the stairs, tears running down my face, Rina threw me kisses with her fingers. She was standing on the landing where I had first seen her holding the little gray cat. Unlike the welcoming smiles of that earlier day, she was sobbing and, what little makeup she had put on that morning, was now smudged and flowing with the tears down her pretty face.

A taxi was ready at the front door. “To the terminal,” Papa said in respectable Italian and the driver took us to the station where we had arrived eight months before. The train was already waiting on the track. The porter placed our luggage on the racks inside the compartment while, on the platform, my parents held each other in an extended embrace.
Mutti
looked anxious to board but Papa kept holding on. Then came my turn. My father lifted me up in his arms and, just before, he squeezed me tight. I looked into his eyes. They were swollen and red. This was the first time I had seen my father cry.

“Don't cry,” I said. “We'll be back together soon.”

“Sure, sure.” There was an odd sound to his voice.

He kissed me again and, as the conductor's whistle announced our imminent departure, he picked me up, set me on the train, and pushed me inside. Tears were now streaming openly down his face. What a sad picture of a proud man. Even in his double-breasted suit, with his hair neat and his tie in place, he did not exude the dapper look I knew so well. Slowly he pushed the heavy metal door shut — but not before an admonition in a quavering voice: “I want you to listen to your mother.”

Back in our compartment, I found my parents speaking through the open window. With a loud whistle and a sudden jerk, the train started to roll. My parents grasped each other's hands. Papa walked alongside the window until the train's speed forced him to let go. Mother, her eyes swollen, pulled back from the window. Quickly I took her place to watch my father's image get smaller and smaller and disappear as the train followed a curve. The tiny people I had seen from the hill in Lwow came to mind, and I finally began to understand what my father had tried to explain on that distant day.

“Mamma, now I know what an optical illusion is.”

The ride to Ventimiglia, the Italian town bordering France, took all morning. I sat in silence for most of the trip. So much crossed my mind. I thought of Rina, the dead cat, my trolley car,
Omama
, Millie. But what gnawed most at me was my papa. The sad picture of him standing on the platform had seized my mind and refused to let go. Would I ever see him again? He had seen me leave before — the times I went on vacation with Mother, with Millie, the time I left alone to go to Switzerland — yet never had I seen him so distraught. Did he know something I didn't?