“You’re going to a work camp in Poland,” Pino told the crying woman.
“Pray for us,” she said before the wheels squealed on the tracks and the train began to pull away from Binario 21.
Three little fingers stuck out of a crack on the rear wall of the last cattle car. The fingers seemed to wave at Pino as the train gathered speed. He stared after the train, seeing the fingers in his mind long after he couldn’t see them anymore. His urge was to go after the train and set those people free, get them to safety. Instead, he stood there, defeated, helpless, and fighting the urge to cry at the image of those fingers, which would not fade.
“General Leyers!”
Pino turned. So did the general, who was pale. Had he seen those fingers, too?
Beyond them, down the platform, Gestapo Colonel Walter Rauff was chugging toward them, his face flushed with anger.
“Colonel Rauff,” Leyers said.
Pino took a step away from the general and studied the platform beneath his feet. He didn’t want Rauff to recognize him for fear that he might become suspicious of the Italian boy from Casa Alpina somehow becoming the driver to General Leyers.
The Gestapo colonel started yelling at Leyers, who began yelling right back at him. Pino understood little of it, but he did hear Rauff invoke Joseph Goebbels’s name. Leyers responded by invoking Adolf Hitler. And in their body language, Pino got the meaning. Rauff answered to Goebbels, a Reich Minister. But Leyers answered to the führer himself.
After several minutes of intense threats and ice-cold conversation, a furious Rauff stepped back and saluted. “Heil Hitler!”
Leyers returned the salute with less enthusiasm. Rauff was about to leave, when he fixed on Pino for several seconds. Pino could feel his attention dancing all over him.
“Vorarbeiter,” General Leyers called. “We are leaving. Bring the car around.”
“Jawohl, General,” Pino said in his best German, and then hurried past the two Nazi officers, never once looking at Rauff, but feeling his flat dark eyes fixed on him.
With every step, Pino expected to be called back. But Rauff never said a word, and Pino left Platform 21, praying he’d never have to return.
General Leyers climbed into the staff car with his normal unreadable expression back in place.
“Dolly’s,” he said.
Pino glanced in the rearview and saw Leyers’s eyes screwed toward the horizon. He knew he should keep his mouth shut, but he couldn’t. “Mon général?”
“What is it, Vorarbeiter?” he asked, still looking out the window.
“Are the people in the boxcars really going to an OT work camp in Poland?”
“Yes,” the general said. “It’s called Auschwitz.”
“Why Poland?”
At that, Leyers’s eyes came unscrewed and he almost shouted in irritation, “Why all the questions, Vorarbeiter? Don’t you know your place? Don’t you know who I am?”
Pino felt like he’d been slapped at the back of the head. “Oui, mon général.”
“Then you will keep your mouth shut. You will not ask questions of me or anyone else, and you will do as you are told. Do you understand?”
“Oui, mon général,” Pino said, shaken. “I am sorry, mon général.”
When they reached Dolly’s apartment building, Leyers said he’d take the valise up himself and ordered Pino to return the Fiat to the motor pool.
Pino wanted to follow the general upstairs or go around the back and get Anna to let him in, but it was still daylight and he feared he’d get caught. After a long look at the windows of Dolly’s apartment, he drove away, thinking how much he wanted to tell Anna about all that he’d seen that day. The violence. The violation. The despair.
That night and for many nights afterward, Pino’s dreams were haunted by the red train and Platform 21. He kept hearing the woman beg him to pray for her. He kept seeing those poor little fingers wiggling at him and dreamed that they belonged to a child of a thousand faces, a child who could not be saved.
Over the ensuing weeks and days, Pino drove General Leyers all over northern Italy. They rarely slept. At the wheel, Pino often wondered about the faceless child and the woman he’d spoken to on Platform 21. Had they gone to Poland to be worked to death? Or had the Nazis just taken them somewhere and machine-gunned them the way they had in Meina and a dozen other desecrated places throughout Italy?
When he wasn’t driving, Pino felt powerless and exhausted watching Leyers loot factories for machine tools and seize a staggering quantity of building supplies, vehicles, and food. Entire towns were stripped of basic commodities, which were either shipped to Germany by train or distributed to soldiers on the Gothic Line. Through it all, Leyers remained stoic, pitiless, and committed to his task.
“I keep telling you the Allies need to be bombing the train tracks over the Brenner Pass,” Pino told his uncle one night in late October 1944. “They need to cut it off, or there will be no food left for any of us, and winter’s coming.”
“I’ve had Baka send that message twice,” Uncle Albert said in frustration. “But the world’s focused on France, and forgotten Italy.”
On Friday, October 27, 1944, Pino again drove General Leyers to Benito Mussolini’s villa at Gargnano. It was a warm fall day. The leaves of hardwood trees had turned fiery far up into the Alps. The sky was a crystalline blue, and the surface of Lake Garda mirrored both, causing Pino to wonder whether there was a more beautiful place in the world than northern Italy.
He followed Leyers up onto the villa’s colonnade and to the terrace, which was empty and strewn with leaves. The French doors to Mussolini’s office were thrown open, however, and they found Il Duce inside, standing at his desk, the suspenders of his riding pants hanging by his sides and his tunic well undone. The dictator had a phone pressed to his ear, and his face was twisted into something spiteful.
“Claretta, Rachele’s gone crazy,” Il Duce was saying. “She’s coming for you. Don’t talk to her. She says she’s going to kill you, so close the gate, and . . . Okay, okay, call me back.”
Mussolini hung up the phone, shaking his head before noticing General Leyers and Pino standing there. He said, “Ask the general if his wife is insane over Dolly.”
Pino did. Leyers looked surprised that Il Duce knew about his mistress, but said, “My wife is insane over most things, but she knows nothing of Dolly. How can I be of service, Duce?”
“Why does Field Marshal Kesselring always send you to see me, General Leyers?”
“He trusts me. You trust me.”
“Do I?”
“Have I ever done anything to make you question my honor?”
Mussolini poured himself some wine and then shook his head. “General, why doesn’t Kesselring trust my army enough to use it? I have so many loyal, well-trained men, true Fascists willing to fight for Salò, and yet they sit in their barracks.”