By the end of World War II, a third of Milan lay in ruins. The bombardment and the fighting had left twenty-two hundred Milanese dead and four hundred thousand homeless.
The city and its people began to rebuild, burying the past and the rubble under new roads, parks, and high-rise structures. They cleaned the soot of war off the Duomo. They put up a monument to Tullio Galimberti and the martyrs of Piazzale Loreto around the corner from a bank that used to be Beltramini’s Fresh Fruits and Vegetables. The Hotel Diana still stands, as do the chancellery, San Vittore Prison, and the haunted colonnades of the Cimitero Monumentale.
The towers of Castello Sforezsco were repaired, but bullet marks remain on the inner walls. In an effort to forget the savagery that occurred in the Piazzale Loreto, the Esso station was torn down. So was the building that once housed the Hotel Regina and the Gestapo. A plaque on Via Silvio Pellico is all that memorializes the people murdered and tortured inside SS headquarters. Milan’s Holocaust Memorial is inside the central train station, beneath Platform 21.
Of the roughly forty-nine thousand Jews in Italy at the time of the Nazi invasion, some forty-one thousand evaded arrest or survived the concentration camps. Many were put on the Catholic underground railroad that ran north along several different routes into Switzerland, including Motta. Others were helped by courageous Italians, Catholics, and clergy who hid Jewish refugees in the basements of monasteries, convents, churches, homes, and even a handful in the Vatican.
Alfredo Ildefonso Schuster, who fought to save Jews and his city from further destruction, remained the cardinal of Milan until his death in August 1954. A future pope said Cardinal Schuster’s funeral Mass. One of his pallbearers took up his cause for sainthood. That pallbearer became Pope John Paul II, who beatified Cardinal Schuster in 1996. His blessed body lies in a sealed glass case beneath the Duomo.
Father Luigi Re continued to offer Casa Alpina as sanctuary to people in danger. In the days following the end of World War II, he infamously protected Eugen Dollmann, Hitler’s Italian translator, and refused demands from the US Army to hand him over.
Father Re was named to the “Righteous Among the Nations,” an honor given by Yad Vashem, the Israeli World Holocaust remembrance center, to those who selflessly risked their own lives to save Jews. Father Re died in 1965 and is entombed on the ski slopes above Motta, beneath a golden-plated statue of the Madonna said to have been paid for by all the people he’d helped before, during, and after the war. His boys’ school has since been rebuilt as a hotel named Casa Alpina. His chapel is gone.
The seminarian Giovanni Barbareschi was honored for his heroic actions during the Italian resistance, named to the Righteous Among the Nations, and ordained by Cardinal Schuster. After a long career as a priest, he retired and still lives in Milan, where he keeps a collection of his old forging tools.
Alberto Ascari, who taught Pino Lella to drive, went on to live his childhood dreams and became an Italian national hero. At the wheel of a Ferrari, Ascari won the World Grand Prix Championships in 1952 and 1953. In May 1955, while he was taking training laps on the Monza circuit, his car somersaulted and crashed, hurling Ascari onto the racetrack. He died in Mimo Lella’s arms. Thousands of people crowded the Duomo and the piazza the day of Ascari’s funeral. Buried next to his father in the Cimitero Monumentale, Ascari is widely considered one of the greatest race car drivers of all time.
Colonel Walter Rauff, the head of the Gestapo in northern Italy, was believed to be directly responsible for the deaths of more than one hundred thousand people, and indirectly responsible for the hundreds of thousands who died in the portable gas chamber he designed and deployed in eastern Europe before his transfer to Milan. Rauff was captured, but broke out of a prisoner of war camp and ended up in Chile as a shadowy spy-for-hire who became close to the country’s dictators.
Simon Wiesenthal, the famous Nazi hunter, tracked Rauff down in 1962. The German government tried to have Rauff extradited. He fought it, and the case went to the Chilean Supreme Court. Rauff was freed five months later. He died in Santiago in 1984 of a heart attack. Attended by many former Nazi officers, his funeral was described as a raucous celebration of Rauff, Adolf Hitler, and the Third Reich in general.
Major J. Frank Knebel returned to the United States, left the army, and picked up his life in newspaper journalism. He was the publisher of the Garden Grove News in California and later the Ojai Valley News. In 1963, he bought the Los Banos Enterprise. Knebel and Pino corresponded on and off until the newspaperman’s death in 1973. Knebel left behind little about the war except for a cryptic note in one of his files that alluded to his plans to write a “never-before-told true story of great intrigue in the last days of the war in Milan.” He never did.
Corporal Peter Daloia returned to Boston. When he died decades after the war ended, his son was shocked to find a Silver Star for valor for his father’s heroics at the battle of Monte Cassino. It was buried in a box in the attic. Typical of so many, Daloia told no one about his war in Italy.
Albert and Greta Albanese continued to flourish in business. They made a fortune when Uncle Albert decided to wrap meerschaum pipes in leather and sell them around the world. They died in the 1980s. Their shop at #7 Via Pietro Verri is now Pisa Orologeria, or Pisa Luxury Watches.
Michele and Porzia Lella ran a series of successful purse and sportswear companies after the war and were active in the fashion district their entire lives. Before their deaths in the 1970s, #3 Via Monte Napoleone, the site of the original purse store, was rebuilt and now houses a Salvatore Ferragamo boutique. The apartment building on Corso Matteotti still stands, though the birdcage elevator has been removed.
Pino’s sister, Cicci, became as dynamic a businesswoman as her mother. She promoted Milan as a global fashion center and worked in the family business, focusing on the boutiques in San Babila. She died in 1985.