As The Years Go By

“You know, I have only one chance at being 81” my grandfather tells me in his broken English on a snowy Saturday morning. We are sitting over a plate of freshly made Italian cookies which my grandmother made at 5am this morning. Our family just celebrated my grandfather’s 81st birthday last weekend, and although his age is starting to show, he is still one of the most active people I know! As we share a plate of treats, I ask him what he wants to do now that he is 81. He thinks about this question for a bit as we sit in comfortable silence in the warm kitchen, and he finally responds, “I guess what I always do, work in the garden!”. “How about taking Grandma on a vacation” I ask, the ongoing joke being that my Grandma never wants to leave her kitchen. My aunt sitting in the living room gives a chuckle, but my grandpa replies “Well, I would like to go back to Italy, maybe this is the year”. Both my aunt and I look at each other, surprised by this answer. He talks about the “homeland” all the time, and we know all the stories of his youth off by heart, but he has only been back to Italy twice since immigrating to Canada in the summer of 1965, where he started a family and has seen his three children though university and now raising families of their own. A humble man of few words, Bruno has a lot to be proud of in his life. But I wonder, aside from the thrilling adventures of his youth that we all know so well, what other memories and stories are locked in his mind of a time and place very different from the life he created here in Canada. Born in 1939 in a little town just an hour south of Rome, my grandfather would have been alive during some of the most tumultuous years of the war for Italy, and on this Saturday afternoon, I ask him “Grandpa, if I came to Italy with you, what would you want to show me?” And he decides to tell me a story, one that I had never heard before, yet one that deserves to be preserved on pages.

At the age of three, Bruno remembers his father and his two uncles being called to war; a call, that my grandfather says could not be ignored. In his small house lived 16 family members; his immediate family of 5, his cousins, aunts, uncles and their grandmother. Describing what a normal day looked like for him in this time isn’t quite so different from how he lives his life now as a retired man. Young Bruno would wake up early to work the land, he would play in the fields with his cousins and siblings and every evening all 16 family members would sit down to dinner all at the same table. Of course, when the men left for war, that number was reduced to 13, and Bruno, even in his young age, was expected to take on more responsibilities in the absence of the men. Life for Bruno at this time was simple, yet the absence of his father and the men of the town coloured his experiences. It was in 1944, my grandfather tells me, that everything changed.

His town knew for a long time that their nation was the fighting ground of German and American conflict, but Bruno remembers a distinct time when those rumours became more immediate threats. His town started to hear stories of German soldiers who had bombed and burned an entire village down near their own, and news arrived that the Germans are coming to their town next. In his town of less than 100 people, Bruno quietly admits that they were terrified. With only women and children left, and no one to defend them, my grandfather can’t seem to find the words to describe what he felt, but the emotions on his face say a million words. One day, as Bruno and his cousins are playing in the early morning sunlight, a moment happens which has remained etched in his memory forever. As they play in the fields behind their house, Bruno and his companions see what he can only describe as a dark cloud rising. Bruno recalls that in that moment, the sun disappeared, and they hear the dreaded sound of firing guns. They race back to the house, and the town waits in a desperate silence for something, anything, to happen. They later learn that the attack took place at the railway station in the valley bellow, and it was not the Germans who had arrived, but the Americans. The incident can only be described as a terrible mistake. The Americans had been fed false information about a troop of German soldiers who were supposed to be arriving at the train station on that early morning, however, they were mistaken. The American’s open fired as the train arrived, however the carts were not full of German soldiers, but rather innocent Italian civilians. Bruno remembers that 150 civilians were killed that day, and they were all buried in a cemetery near the station; a reminder that no one was safe in this deadly war.

As my grandfather retells the story, it is obvious that these memories have not faded with time. And as he continues, the stories start to become even more vivid, like they have been impressed on his mind in a life changing way. After the horrific American mistake, rumours of German attack start to become more urgent, and out of fear that they would bomb houses like they did in the nearby village, Bruno and his family sleep outside. It was the only thing they could think to do. They wake up the next morning to the sound of tramping feet and engines. The Germans had arrived. The Germans set up a camp in the middle of town, and amid a haze of fear and paranoia, my grandfather remembers that suddenly, they were in his own home. And so, for the second time, Bruno and his family were forced to sleep outside, as German soldiers slept in their beds, ate their food and destroyed their home. They opened and ravaged through his grandmothers’ goods, stole his mother’s wedding band, and drank from their best wine barrels stored in their basement. The next morning, Bruno walked into the house and down to the basement, where he saw wine pooling all across the floor from the wine casket the German’s had purposefully left open to spill out. Wine everywhere, like red blood, staining everything. That specific memory has never left him.

My grandfather had a neighbour next door, a wife and her husband who had been in hiding. The Germans stole one of their horses, and when the neighbor found out, he decided to go up to the German camp and ask for the horse back. The Germans laughed at his request, and when they searched him for identification, they found an American dollar folded in his wallet. The Germans immediately become angered and suspicious, and suddenly, as they try to arrest him, he runs away. My grandfather sees him running down towards the house, with German soldiers screaming and chasing after him. Suddenly, the sound of a single gunshot fills the air. There is silence, and the running man is no longer visible. Suddenly, they see him running again; the Germans missed. The chase continues until finally, they catch the terrified man directly behind my grandfather’s house. Bruno sees the man’s wife wailing and crying hysterically as her friend tries to hold her back. He remembers his mother’s urgent and trembling hand grabbing his own to pull him inside, but he couldn’t leave, he fought to stay. The Germans send one of their soldiers into my grandfather’s barn, where they find a shovel and hand it to the arrested man. The five soldiers stand in a circle around him and force him to start digging a hole. Everyone is standing in petrified silence as this horrific scene continues, until the silence is broken, once again, by a single gunshot. The man, digging what would be his own grave, falls, dead, and the only sound Bruno can hear is the heart broken wailing of the now widowed wife, whose innocent husband lies dead in a pool of his own blood, in his own backyard. The Germans leave him in the hole and bury him inside, but they leave one of his arms out, a morbid display of death, the German’s idea of a monstrous joke. The soldiers finally leave, and my grandfather and his family go outside to unbury their murdered neighbour and present his body to his broken wife. As they return to the house, Bruno looks back at that empty hole, and that is the last thing he remembers.

We sit in silence as the story finishes and return to 2020, as we remember these stories that have never been told and were left in the 1944 Italian countryside. I ask him if that was the last memory he has of the Germans, but, he has one final memory to share. The Germans had placed a machine gun and a solider to fire it hidden in a big bush near his house. That gun had been firing off into the sky for the last 48 hours at planes flying overhead which must have been American. After the Germans had all retreated to their camp for the final time, Bruno remembers thinking that the gun was left alone, and unwatched. And so, he crept towards the bush, and finding the gun, he stole the one ammunition belt left, and running as fast as he could, he hid it in his basement, and closed the door. He had forgotten about that little act of rebellion, but when he returned to that old house in 1985 with his wife and three teenage children, he was exploring the now abandoned house and stumbled across that door to the basement. He ventured down, and suddenly, came upon an old and dusty ammunition belt, and suddenly, he remembered. That one act of rebellion had remained, and in the silence of that basement, my grandfather says all the memories came flooding back, memories he hadn’t thought of and had pushed away for years.

As we sit together, finishing our cookies, I think about the victims in this tale whose stories and deaths have never been told. The innocent man who dug his own grave, the bombing of an entire town that easily could have been my grandfathers, the terrible American mistake that has never be recognized or been apologized for. I think about my great grandmother and aunts who were left alone and in fear while their husbands were off fighting a war they did not even understand. And I think about my grandfather, who is telling me this story for the first time, and whose story deserves to be told. As he gets up to leave, to go and sit in his favourite chair in front of the fireplace, I see a man of bravery, of courage and of fortitude, who has overcome trauma, poverty and fear to create a life here, in a new land, and raise a family. I see a man who takes joy in the little things, like working in his garden, and is thankful for each day as it comes. As I look at my grandfather, I see a role model, and someone who has experienced hardship, and has overcome it. I am sure my grandfather does not see himself as someone who has accomplished something special, but that doesn’t matter. What does matter is that we remember. That we take the time to listen to people and to hear their stories, whether they want to share them at 25, or 81. We can learn to better understand each other and love more deeply when we listen to one another’s stories and we can only hope that more people, like my grandpa, will have courage enough to share them.