S for Stella? Perhaps that’s Luisa’s grandpa standing alongside her – Luisa barely remembers him, only a fleeting image of a kindly face. But his name was Giovanni. So who is C? It’s entirely possible he was a suitor before Grandpa Gio, as she knows they called him. Luisa’s curiosity gives way to a smile, her first in days, and the movement of the muscles feels odd. She thinks they look so stylish, he in his high-waisted suit trousers, and she in a neat Chanel-like suit and elegant court shoes, her hair swept in a chic, black wave.
Luisa bends to replace the photograph in the box, but sees that underneath a decaying layer of tissue paper there is more – photographs and paper scraps, some hand-scribed and others typed in an old font, perhaps on the newly discovered machine? To any other curio browser it would warrant a look at the very least, but to a journalist it spikes the senses. There is something about the smell too – the pungency of old dust – which sticks in Luisa’s nostrils and makes her heart beat faster. It reeks of lives lived and history unmasked.
The whole box is heavy and awkward to manoeuvre down the attic stairs and into the living room. In the daylight however, she sees the real treasure come to light. Under a layer of loose type and several browned, brittle newspapers bearing the name Venezia Liberare, Luisa can sense it: a mystery. It’s in the fine sandy texture under her fingers as she gingerly lifts the paper cache – men and women grinning in fuzzy tones of black and white, some she notes casually using rifles as props, or proudly holding them across their chests, women included. Momentarily, she is shocked; in a distant memory, her grandma never appeared as anything other than that – a sweet old lady who dished out cuddles and chocolates, grinning mischievously when she was inevitably rebuked by Luisa’s mother for spoiling her with sweets. Sometimes, Luisa remembers her slipping little wrapped bars when no one was looking, whispering ‘Shh, it’s just our secret’, and she felt like they were part of a little gang.
The typewriter is momentarily forgotten as Luisa picks up each piece, peering at its faded detail, squinting to fill in the gaps of pencil scratchings lost to the years. It hits her squarely then – how many people’s histories are contained in this cardboard box with its sunken edges and corners gnawed at by the resident mice? What might she discover in its depths amid the deceased spiders and smell of mould? What will she learn about her family? She wonders, too, if there is an element of fate in her discovery, if today of all days she was meant to find it – to piece it all together in some order, and in turn glue her recently shattered self back together. For the first time in weeks, she feels not defeated or leaden with grief, but lifted a little. Excited.
Venice, early December 1943
I think of that pre-war exchange with Popsa often; the word ‘havoc’ resonates a lot these days, more so after last night’s atrocities in the Jewish ghetto: hundreds rounded up like cattle by Nazi troops and their fascist handmaidens, men and women pulled out of their homes – stoical in the face of their screaming, tear-stained children abandoned behind them – and herded into boats destined first for the prison of Santa Maria Maggiore. To be separated from their families was bad enough, but all of Venice knew their eventual destination, and they did too – east into Germany, to Auschwitz. To an almost certain death.
I rub the obvious lines around my eyes, hoping to smear away any smut from the fires that continue to smoulder in the ghetto. Having spent the early hours running from house to house across Venice, breathlessly passing messages and false identification papers to those in need of them, the smell of cordite and desperation is still there in my nostrils. If there was any chance to save even a few families from the cull, we – the Resistance – had to try; huddling women and children in the smallest of hiding places, in cupboards and attics. I saw mothers trying desperately to keep their babies quiet, hands cupped over little mouths, the fear of just one cry or murmur etched on their faces. Our partisan leaders were taken by surprise by the Nazis’ sudden strike on the Jewish enclave; as I weaved breathlessly through the warren of alleyways and tiny passages, avoiding the Nazi scrum, staying out of sight of any patrol and their inevitable questions as to why I was out during curfew and where exactly I was going, it felt like we were fighting a losing battle. We worked all night but, in the clear light of day, it’s evident we only succeeded in damage limitation.
My whole body feels limp and defeated, though I’ve had the luxury at least of returning briefly to my own apartment for an hour’s sleep, a change of clothes and a smear with a wet flannel. Those Jews taken simply for their birthright, born into a religion despised by the Nazis, are now on a cold, inhospitable floor with little respite to look forward to. I am a lucky woman.
‘Another espresso?’ Paolo pulls away my empty cup from the counter and pushes a second, full cup in its place, without waiting for an answer. He only has to look at my face, hastily touched with some of the precious make-up I’ve been rationing and a smear of red lipstick. The coffee is welcome, though it isn’t, of course, the sharp but silken blend of pre-war days. Paolo and his father, owners of the café in the square below my apartment since time began, are masters at making the fake coffee – ersatzkaffee – seem Italian at least; the hiss of the gleaming machine, the way Paolo pours it lovingly into the tiny cup with a true flourish. If nothing else, it helps wake me up.
‘Good luck, Stella,’ Paolo chimes as I swallow down the coffee and wave goodbye. His parting wink tells me he knows exactly where I’m going.
I walk the twenty minutes from streets around the Fondamenta Nuove to the Nazi headquarters on the grand central piazza of San Marco, trying to nurture a spring in my step the closer I get to the Platzkommandantur. The bright winter sun rising over the Arsenale helps lift my mood, lending a distinct pinky hue through the smaller canals, from one bridge crossing to another, the milky jade of the water lapping at the red and orange brickwork. Usually, this is the best time of the day for me, when Venice is waking up, stout old women in black optimistically on their way to buy whatever they can in the relatively sparse markets. Today, though, the morning buzz feels dampened as news of the ghetto’s cull winds its way through the city. Soon, each and every café and bar will have talk and opinion, someone will know of another who has been taken – be it relative or colleague. In a city like Venice, the people connect and weave like the canals that are its vital arteries.
There are few troops – either Nazi or fascist – around at this time of the morning, but we Venetians have been schooled into believing that eyes are everywhere. Despite my true feelings, those of a proud anti-fascist, like my beloved grandfather, I have to look eager as I’m about to enter the enemy’s nerve centre – and not as a prisoner or suspect, but an enthusiastic new member of staff. Automatically, I adjust my mask and take on the look of a grateful collaborator, a Venetian glad to have the protection of our better, bigger German cousins. We Italians have learned to play the part of the poor relation very well. We’ve had years of practice.
We know what people in the outside world say – that Venetians have had a ‘soft’ war, protected as a kind of oasis because of our city’s beauty and grandeur, its precious art, targeted by the Allied bombers as a place to avoid rather than effect ruin. To some extent it’s true: the classical music still plays in Piazza San Marco, although these days it’s more likely to be the Hermann Goering Regimental Band with its stylistic pomp, replacing any true elegance. The annual celebration of art at the Biennale continues, attracting the rich and beautiful, as well as the Nazi propaganda king in Joseph Goebbels. But tell that to the mothers whose teenage boys were swiftly marched away to Lord knows where as slave labour for the Nazi machine, like a warped playing out of the Pied Piper fable. That early September day only a few months ago is still fresh with me, when the coloured leaflets fluttered from the sky, informing us that the Nazis were coming to conquer our
