The first thought I have when reading this book is, "What a movie you could make! Second thought: "No one will believe this movie, they will say: too Hollywood plot, too many unbelievable coincidences; twisted by the filmmakers.
But if we believe the main character and the narrator Pino Lell and fact-checker Mark Sullivan, life itself has twisted the story. And it did its best. Unbelievable coincidences and almost impossible encounters; last-minute rescues; extremely risky ventures; scenes full of drama, no less than Verdi's operas...
Mark T. Sullivan (b. 1958) is an author of thrillers. Born in a Boston suburb, he joined the Peace Corp after college, traveling to West Africa to live with a tribe of Saharan nomads. Upon returning to the United States, he took a job at Reuters, beginning a decade-long career in journalism that would eventually lead to a job as an investigative reporter for the San Diego Tribune.
"Under the Scarlet Sky" by Mark Sullivan
My first thought upon reading this book is, "What a movie you could make!" Second thought: "No one will believe this movie, they'll say: too Hollywood plot, too many unbelievable coincidences; twisted by the filmmakers."
But if we believe the main character and the narrator Pino Lell and fact-checker Mark Sullivan, life itself has twisted the story. And it did its best. Unbelievable coincidences and almost impossible encounters, rescue at the last minute, extremely risky ventures, scenes full of drama, not less than the operas of Verdi ...
And while Pino, like a true Italian, might have exaggerated something out of disinterested artistry, he certainly could not have invented everything. After all, Sullivan, apparently a little taken aback by the story he heard, checked it out pretty thoroughly. So the main thing about this unbelievable story is the truth. The truth about an almost unknown, especially in our latitudes, war in Italy, about a "forgotten front" that ran through a country that was supposedly "almost untouched. Yet tens of thousands died and hundreds of thousands fought there.
Many more thoughts come to mind as you read. The last one, which remains after reading it, is a bitter one. It is the thought that this book is not only about an unknown war hero. Above all, it is a book about the fact that justice does not exist. That the greatest, hard-won, long-awaited victories sometimes turn out to be an illusion.
However, in order.
As I was getting ready to read this book, I thought the most interesting question would be how a man who is not forced by life to do so, comes to the decision to participate in the Resistance, fighting for others, risking for others, for strangers. At the risk of ending up in the Gestapo, in a concentration camp, of dying. How do you become a hero?
The 17-year-old Milanese Pino Lella did not dream of being a hero or standing up for the honor of his homeland occupied by the Germans in 1943. The boy had only fun and girls on his mind. His world, and the world of other Milanese, had long remained cloudless. The Germans didn't bother him much. Pino didn't dream of feats.
He got involved in the Resistance movement... Simply because he was asked to. And he was asked by a man whom Pino would never have refused: his mentor of many years, a Catholic priest and a head of a young mountaineers' camp, Father Re. His parents send Pino to the Alps, to Father Re, so that he can escape the bombing: the Allies are now bombing Milan every night. Father Re and his mountain camp, Casa Alpina, prove to be a link in the chain of the underground road of life organized by the Catholic Church in Italy to ferry people, mostly Jews, to the safety of Switzerland. Almost daily, small groups of people who need to escape, Jews, Allied pilots shot down, people hunted by the Nazis, are leaving for Switzerland over mountain passes at dizzying heights. Pino, and then his younger brother, Mimmo, and the other boys--experienced mountaineers and skiers--get involved easily and enthusiastically. The work they do is dangerous, difficult, and fascinating. One difficulty is that many of the people who need to be taken to Switzerland are far from mountaineers. Some are old, unhealthy, and have no athletic training: in those days, adults rarely played sports. To help them climb the steep ice wall, wielding an ice-axe, in the freezing cold, during a blizzard, it is not enough to be a mountaineer: you have to be a psychologist. And Pino manages to find the right words to inspire confidence and courage in people who are much older, exhausted and sincerely do not believe that they will be able to climb the rock. Sometimes the young guides have to dig themselves out from under an avalanche, sometimes they have to confront bandits posing as guerrillas. But up there in the Alps, in the "Cathedrals of God," everything is generally simple and clear: here is Good, here is Evil. This is what needs to be done, and this is what gets done. And Pino and his brother and Father Re succeed.
The real difficulties lie in the valley, in Milan, where Pino has to return to play a completely new role. There, by an incredible coincidence, he becomes the personal chauffeur of the Nazi General Leyers, perhaps the most influential Nazi in Northern Italy. And Pino will meet him near the workshop of his own uncle Alberto, one of the leaders of the Milan underground: Leyers will be stuck in this leather goods workshop just enough for Pino to have time, almost for fun, and to help the young driver, to fix the engine of Leyer's Daimler. That is how, thanks to chance, Pino would become the shadow, companion, sometimes interlocutor of a man of whom surprisingly few documents remain, but who would speak to Hitler - by telephone and to Mussolini personally - in Pino's presence.
Formally, General Leyers is engaged in a seemingly unscary business: construction. But according to Giuseppe (Pino) Lella, this man is responsible for the martyrdom of many construction "slaves" of different nationalities, as well as for the famine in Northern Italy during the terrible winter of 1944-45. He is the perpetrator of many war crimes. In fact, he is the commandant of a never existed, nameless, but huge concentration camp, whose prisoners would build fortifications and tunnels for the Nazis in hard labor conditions, dying of hunger and beatings. Active builder of the fortified Gothic Line that blocked the Italian "boot," which would delay the Allied advance until the spring of 1945. Yes, it is strange to anyone who remembers the date of the Victory, but in Milan, so far from Berlin, at the end of April 45 the war would still be going on and people would be dying right in the streets.
But that April will still have to be lived for.
In the meantime, Pino will receive the code name Observer and in this capacity will transmit invaluable information to the Allies, which he will have access to literally from the first day. Of course, the information will not fall into his hands like ripe apricots. He will have to take risks, apply ingenuity, and walk on the edge. And he'll get away with it. Even when the chief of the Gestapo of Milan himself, the famous Rauff, would stop him on his way out of Uncle Alberto's workshop with a bag he had borrowed from Leyers, full of plans of the Gothic Line fortifications.
One would have to read all the way to the end to bitterly suspect (or guess?) that it was no accident that Pino managed to get away with it so brilliantly. That perhaps it was no accident that Uncle Alberto was able to get out of prison alive and well. That perhaps it was no accident that the seminarian Barbareschi managed to escape from San Vittore prison twice... That perhaps all these truly heroic men were extras in one big game of a calculating, prudent, devilishly clever scoundrel. Or rather, two scoundrels: Leyers and Rauff.
And it is they, not Pino, who truly get away with it.
Suspicion on this score will become especially strong at the moment when Leyers, by arrangement with Rauff, rescues four Jewish children from the train bound for Auschwitz at the last moment. Big enough that they will be able to remember and repeat the name and title of their savior: he will urge them to do so. Cleverly devised!
And how many more such clever contrivances will be up Leyers' sleeve - saving the ancient churches of Milan from barbaric destruction by his less cunning tribesmen, saving the rebellious, striking Fiat factory, its management, workers and facilities from massacre... And, terrible as it may be, it may turn out that we all, the whole world, owe it to this Nazi. After all, maybe if it hadn't been for him, the great Cathedral of Milan would have been blown up. Or maybe Leonardo's Last Supper would have been destroyed...? That's something we won't know.
Later, the thought would involuntarily come to mind of what role Anna might have played in Leyers' diabolical patience puzzle. A sweet, resourceful, brave beauty whose love Pino will carry through life. So would his pain for her. Maybe what happened to her was one of the elements of a dastardly, minutely thought-out plan? At the same time, someone managed to get rid of a pesky mistress. At the same time - and destroy the witness, and in addition, take revenge on her, daring to go against the "masters", and her fiancé ...? All at once - one blow. One address, reported to "the right people". Could it be? It could.
No one would know what really happened. And Anna... Anna.
The memory of her will remain for Pino both miraculous and terrifying. Because of her, the victory and liberation of Milan will remain in his memory not with a crazy party with the Americans, when drunk with happiness and grappa Pino will play jazz with his friends. Not by spontaneous dancing in squares and alleys. Victory and liberation will be remembered in Pino's memory by the mountains of corpses in the city cemetery. These, the stacks of corpses, the dead in the streets, rather than the triumph of victory, will be the days of Liberation and Victory for Pino. Somewhere among these bodies will lie his friend, the brave pilot who fought for Italy, who survived all the battles and was shot in the street of celebrating Milan by someone who would like his watch and who would shout: "Fascist! Death to the fascist!" - and shoots him point-blank. That shot will forever cross the joy of victory for Pino. He will be very close and will not be able to do anything. As he will later, at the Castello Sforzesco, where he will see Anna once more.
And then Pino would have to flee from the bloodthirsty and massacred mobs of those he had fought for. It was to be expected: too many saw him, a scout, next to Leyers, with a swastika on his sleeve... Probably every "Stirlitz" has to experience something like that in the days he was looking forward to. Nothing can be explained to anyone. No one will hear anything. One can only run. Insane, some very cinematic scenes of Pino's escape - through the ruins of Milan, through the dilapidated La Scala Theater, on the stage of which the tenor is rehearsing the aria Vesti la giubba from Pagliacci: "Laugh, pagliacci, at your broken love!" - Pino will think it's about him. Wasn't he the clown? Wasn't his love broken? The chase behind the scenes of La Scala, the search for salvation in the Cathedral - like in the Middle Ages, only now the fugitive is saved not by the sanctity of the place, but by the darkness: the protective shields have not yet been removed from the windows... Victory! Is it supposed to be like this? Laugh, Pagliacci. You played your part well in a play written for you by the devil's servant.
That story needed another writer. Stronger. More talented. Mark Sullivan did what he could to unearth a forgotten story-one of thousands of incredible forgotten war stories-he managed to personally interact with the still-living Giuseppe Lella, but he couldn't make the story into the terrific book it deserved. Well, thank him for the facts.
Thank you for the music that fills this very Italian story. Music constantly accompanies the narrative: in the summer of '43, the Milanese, fleeing the bombing, go to sleep outside the city, in the meadows, and there, in the fields, Pino's father and his friend Carletto's father play at sunset the aria Nessun dorma from Turandot. Here the pregnant Jewish violinist from La Scala, rescued by Pino in the Alps, finds herself in Switzerland, playing to her rescuers, and the sounds of the violin floating between the mountain peaks and the sky. Here, on arriving at the liaison's apartment, Pino hears an opera aria sung by his own aunt Licia Albanese, an opera singer, from some apartment. Here, on the last night of happiness, at a party of Americans, Pino and his friends play the jazz they have adored since childhood. And here comes the sobbing aria of Canio from "Pagliacci" again, and it sounds like a spooky joke: life has graciously provided Pino's story with the most appropriate soundtrack.
... Then the years pass. The wounds of the people and the city heal. Pino and his dashing younger brother Mimmo (Domenico), whom the fellow partisans proudly call "the Universal Terror," become adults, successful, rich, get married, get involved in business, skiing, car racing, their friend Alberto Ascari becomes a legendary Italian racer... The past becomes the past. People begin to forget the dead: they don't want to remember the bad. No one bothers one prosperous Nazi criminal or disturbs another. Everyone lives their lives. Piazzale Loreto, where Signor Beltramini, father of a friend of Pino's, was killed by a partisan bomb, and where another friend of Pino's, the handsome, underground man Tullio Galimberti, was shot by the Fascists - Piazzale Loreto has changed greatly...
So what is this book about? Maybe about the fact that, as my husband once said, Evil is stronger than Good, but Good is still invincible?
Maybe it's about that.
P.S. Of the approximately 49,000 Italian Jews, thanks to the organized actions of the Italian Catholic Church and the selfless help of ordinary Italians, friends and neighbors, some 41,000 survived the war. Some of the survivors were captured but managed to survive the camps, although most Italian Jews, judging by the Jews of Rome, did not return from the camps. So the vast majority of the 41,000 people were saved. Among these people are those who owe their lives personally to Pino and Mimmo Lella and Father Re.
And this is just the tip of the iceberg that the story of Pino Lella represents.
This article was sponsored by Shawn Mostyn
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