DISCLAIMER: This website contains Amazon affiliate links, which means that if you click on one of the product links, we will receive a small commission.

Dorians in Milan and interviewed catholic priests and members of the partisan resistance, I visited every major scene with Pino I skied and climbed in the alps to better understand the escape routes. I held the old man when he collapsed in grief in the Piazzale Loreto, and I watched the agony of his loss ripple through him in the streets around the castelos forzesco. He showed me where he last saw Benito Mussolini in the great cathedral of Milan, the duomo. I saw his shaking hand as he lit a candle for the dead and the martyred through it all. I listened to a man looking back at two years of his extraordinary life growing up at 17, growing old at 18, the ups and downs, the trials and triumphs the love and the heartbreak.

My personal problems and my life, in general, seemed small and insignificant in comparison to what he’d endured at an unfathomably young age and his insight into life’s tragedies gave me a new perspective. I began to heal and Pino, and I became fast friends when I returned home. I felt better than I had in years that trip led to four more over the course of the following decade, allowing me to do research on piano’s tale between the writing of other books. I consulted with staff at yad Vashem, Israel’s main Holocaust remembrance and education center, and with historians in Italy, Germany, and the united states. I spent weeks in the war archives in those three countries and in the united kingdom I interviewed the surviving witnesses at least those.

I could find to corroborate various events in Pino’s story, as well as the descendants and friends of those long dead, including Ingrid brook the daughter of the mysterious nazi general, who complicates the heart of the tale wherever possible. I have stuck to the facts gleaned from those archives, interviews, and testimonies, but I learned quickly that, due to the widespread burning of nazi documents as world war ii, ground to a close, the paper trail surrounding pinot’s past was scattered at best. I was also hampered by a kind of collective amnesia concerning Italy and Italians. After the war, legions of books have been written about d-day, the allied campaigns across Western Europe, and the efforts of brave souls who risked their lives to save Jews in other European countries. But the nazi occupation of Italy and the Catholic underground railroad, which was formed to save the Italian Jews, have received scant attention.

Some 60 000 allied soldiers died fighting to free Italy, some 140 000 Italians died during the nazi occupation, and still so little has been written about the battle for Italy. Historians have taken to calling it the forgotten front. Much of the amnesia was caused by Italians. Who’D survived as one old partisan fighter told me. We were still young and wanted to forget.

We wanted to put the terrible things we’d experienced behind us. No one talks about world war ii in Italy, so no one remembers due to the document burning the collective amnesia, and the death of so many characters. By the time I learned of the story, I have been forced in places to construct scenes and dialogue based solely on Pino’s memory decades later the scant physical evidence that remains, and my imagination, fueled by my research and informed suspicions. In certain instances, I have also co-mingled or compressed events and characters for the sake of narrative coherence and have fully dramatized incidents that were described to me in much more truncated forms. As a result, then, the story you are about to hear is not a work of narrative non-fiction, but a novel of biographical and historical fiction that hues closely to what happened to Pino Lela between June 1943 and May 1945.

Part one none shall sleep chapter one June 9, 1943, Milan, Italy, one like all the pharaohs emperors, and tyrants. Before him, el duce had seen his empire rise only to crumble. Indeed, by that late spring afternoon, power was bleeding from Benito Mussolini’s…

More From This Category