“I will, Your Eminence. I must also caution you, Cardinal, about your public pronouncements in the days ahead. There are powerful people who are looking for a reason to have you imprisoned, or worse.”
“They wouldn’t dare,” Dollmann said.
“Don’t be na?ve. Or haven’t you heard yet about Auschwitz?”
At that, the cardinal looked weakened. “It’s an abomination before God.”
Auschwitz? Pino thought. The work camp where the red cattle cars went? He flashed on the little fingers sticking out the side of the boxcar. What had happened to that child? To all the others? Dead, certainly, but . . . an abomination?
“Until next time, Your Eminence,” Leyers said, clicked his heels, and turned away.
“General?” the cardinal called after him.
“Your Eminence?”
“Take good care of your driver,” Schuster said.
Leyers glanced hard at Pino, but then seemed to remember something, softened, and said, “What else could I do? He reminds me of my late nephew.”
Auschwitz.
Pino kept thinking about that word, that place, that OT work camp as he drove General Leyers to his next appointment at the Fiat factory in Turin’s Mirafiore district. He wanted to ask Leyers what the abomination was, but was too frightened to ask, too scared to see how he might react.
So Pino kept his questions to himself, even when they went into a meeting with Calabrese, the Fiat manager, who looked unhappy to see Leyers again.
“There’s nothing I can do,” Calabrese said. “There have been too many sabotages. We can’t run the line anymore.”
Pino was sure Leyers would explode. Instead, Leyers said, “I appreciate your honesty, and I want you to know that I am working to make sure Fiat is protected.”
Calabrese looked unsure. “Protected from what?”
“Total destruction,” the general said. “The führer has called for scorched earth if there is a retreat, but I am making sure the backbones of your company and your economy survive. Fiat will go on, no matter what happens.”
The manager thought, and then said, “I’ll tell my superiors. Thank you, General Leyers.”
“He’s doing them favors,” Pino said later that night in his aunt and uncle’s kitchen. “That’s how he does things.”
“At least he’s helping Cardinal Schuster to protect Milan,” Uncle Albert said.
“After looting the countryside,” Pino said hotly. “After working people to death. I’ve seen what he’s done.”
“We know you have,” Aunt Greta said, seeming preoccupied. For that matter, his uncle was, too.
“What’s wrong?” Pino asked.
“There was disturbing news this morning on the shortwave,” Uncle Albert said. “About a concentration camp in Poland called Au-something.”
“Auschwitz,” Pino said, feeling nauseated. “What happened?”
Uncle Albert said that by the time the Russians got to Auschwitz on January 27, parts of the camp had been blown up and the records burned. The SS men who ran the camp had fled, taking fifty-eight thousand Jewish prisoners with them as slaves.
“They left seven thousand Jews behind,” Uncle Albert said, his voice choking.
Aunt Greta shook her head, distraught. “They evidently looked like human skeletons because the Nazis had been trying to work them to death.”
“Didn’t I tell you?” Pino cried. “I’ve seen them do it!”
“This is worse than what you described,” Uncle Albert said. “The survivors said that the buildings the Nazis blew up before leaving the camp were gas chambers used to poison Jews, and a crematorium to burn their bodies.”
“They said the smoke covered the sky around the camp for years, Pino,” his aunt said, wiping at tears. “Hundreds of thousands of people died there.”
The fingers, the little fingers waved in Pino’s mind, and the mother of the sick girl, and the father who’d wanted his son saved. They’d gone to Auschwitz just a few weeks before. Are they dead? Poisoned and burned? Or are they slaves retreating toward Berlin?
He hated the Germans then, every last one of them, and especially Leyers.
The general had told him that Auschwitz was an Organization Todt work camp. They build things, he had said. Like what? Like gas chambers? Like crematoriums?
Shame and revulsion poured through Pino at the thought that he’d worn the OT uniform, the same uniform worn by people who built gas chambers to kill Jews and crematoriums to hide the evidence. In his mind, the builders of those camps were as guilty as whoever ran them. And Leyers had to have known. After all, he had Hitler’s ear.
By the time Pino and General Leyers reached the village of Osteria Ca’Ida on February 20, 1945, they had been driving for hours. The last twenty minutes had been spent spinning in greasy cold mud up a steep road to a high promontory that looked southeast toward the medieval fortress of Monte Castello, some three kilometers away.
Pino had been to the spot several times the prior autumn, so Leyers could study the castle from afar to better understand how to fortify it. Monte Castello loomed eight hundred meters above a road that led north toward Bologna and Milan. Controlling that road was essential to holding the Gothic Line.
In the last month, the castle, along with the battlements Leyers built at the towns of Belvedere and Della Toraccia, had held off the Allied attack four times. But now, on a pale, frigid morning, Monte Castello lay under siege.
Pino had to cover his ears to the whistle and thunder of the artillery shells falling in and around the castle. The blasts felt like hammer blows in his chest. Each hit threw gouts of debris and flame that gave way to uncoiling clouds of oily smoke, which rose, billowed, and blackened the pewter sky.
Pino shivered and watched as Leyers, bundled in a long wool overcoat, used his field glasses to scan the battlefield, and then looked away to the southwest across a series of ridges and mountains. With his bare eyes, Pino could see an army of men about five kilometers away moving over the dull-white and dun winter hills.
“The US Tenth Mountain Division is fighting for Della Toraccia,” General Leyers said, handing Pino the binoculars. “Very well trained. Very tough soldiers.”
Pino used them and saw fragments of the battle before Leyers said, “Glasses.”
Pino handed them quickly back to the general, who peered through them southeast past the base of Monte Castello. Leyers cursed, and then chuckled sardonically.
“Here,” he said, handing Pino the glasses. “Watch a few black bastards die.”