So here is how I know it. Here is the story of me. Not sure why I need to tell it. What’s true is that the story of those who came together to make me is much more interesting and meaningful than what happened once it became time for me to “write” my own story. And for that I sometimes feel a sense of guilt as if I betrayed the miraculous; as if I didn’t quite “live up to the billing.” Maybe that whole aspect of this I’ll save for another time… a time when I can explain it without it sounding pathetic or “maudlin,” as a close friend recently coined that phrase in conversation with me. I’m still not entirely sure of that word, but spell check likes it so I guess it’s real. Anyways… 
                       ~My mother~

Francesca Pensiero was born on July 20, 1931 in Minturno, Italy. A small coastal town south of Rome. I’ve been there since and I can honestly tell you it’s a town that time forgot. The large wooden gates to the entrance said to be from the Middle Ages, the cemetery there like something out of Van Helsing. To this day, the bread bakery is no more than a stone house with a hole in the middle of the floor where the coal pit bakes some of the finest bread you will ever have. The Olive bushes and lemon trees are everywhere, and directly below is the town of Scauri nestled on the bluest water I have ever seen. This beautiful if not antique paradise is now basically the same as when my mother was born, having shaken off the rubble and the ashes of WW2 which she would encounter in her adolescence. The stories she sometimes told me from that horrific period have taken a life of their own in my mind; so many stories from so many relatives, all sure they knew the story to be exactly true . Yet I sometimes got the feeling as I grew older, that they couldn’t all be so perfectly remembered. And yet maybe they were. There was no intentional inflation or fabrication mind you, but in times of true, undeniable horror, those who survive it somehow alter slightly their recollections to somehow make sense in a personal way, just what they endured… at least that is how I’ve come to understand and accept some of the reasons for minor discrepancies.

     What I know for sure as absolute certainty, I will share with you now. The war for the average citizen in Mussolini’s Italy was difficult at first, and a downright nightmare towards the end. Even when things were going decently for the Axis, the German soldiers in town were people to be wary of. Not the “boys with the black crosses and the round helmets” necessarily, but the “machine men,” the “robots with the skulls on their coats.” These were the SS officers. People to be wary of always, but something other worldly to fear when Mussolini was overthrown and Italy withdrew from the Axis at a time when Minturno was still occupied by them. Shortly after the Allied Invasion at Anzio, just a few minutes south of Minturno basically, with the Gustav Line basically at her doorstep, the American bombardments grew and grew with ferocity. Monte Cassino, one of the last German strongholds not far away, was the key to Rome, and the Allied forces mercilessly bombarded the region. According to my mother, by this time as the bombers flew over, their fear was mixed with a hope for liberation. While they feared the bombs, they knew that those bombs were quite possibly all that could save them from their cruel overlords with the Death’s Head Skulls on their coat lapels; the machines who now didn’t just tolerate them, but hated them for their change in alliances. They feared the bombs, yet they prayed for the liberation they might bring. At this point, starvation was the norm. What food stores the town could muster were housed under guard in a large storehouse in the center of town…guarded by German soldiers… meant only to subsist the German soldiers. The turncoat Italians could starve for all it was worth. It was at this place that from more than one person who came from there I heard the story of how my mother, only 12 or 13 years old and already fearless, snuck through the mine fields surrounding that storehouse and stole food from the Germans on more than a few occasions. 

    “I was small and quick,” she would tell me on the rare occasion she talked of it at all, “and we were starving.” She wasn’t kidding when she said they were starving. Only a few times did I hear stories of an uncle I “would have had” but who didn’t survive infancy because my grandmother was so malnourished she could not produce milk. As a child it seemed weird to me that I had an uncle who was forever a baby; an innocent causality of war. I’m sure he had a name, but for the life of me I cannot tell you what it was. Perhaps the pain of remembering him made it impossible for my mother or grandmother to ever utter it.  

     There are many other stories from that time, but one other that sticks with me to this day, perhaps most poignantly because I helped, unintentionally, to resurrect it in a way that will forever haunt me. I remember while I was in Middle School, in the early 1980’s that for whatever reason, camouflage became “cool” to wear. Somewhere in between those god awful parachute pants and British Flag cut off tee shirts, camo was the thing. Not wanting to be behind the trend, I got a really cool camo shirt from a friend at school. Excitedly, I wore it at school that day the minute I got it. When I got off the bus at the end of the day and walked in my house, my mother took one look at me and nearly collapsed. Even at my young age I knew something was really wrong. She turned white as a ghost and went to her knees in a sobbing pile. I was so confused. Later I would come to hear the story of the morning when her town was finally liberated by Allied soldiers. This was at that time I had already described when the bombardments were especially intense, especially at night. 

    “Don’t let the children go outside today,” my mother’s father told his wife that morning, my mother overhearing. “Whatever happens DO NOT let them go outside.” 

     Well that was enough for my mother to hear, always the defiant one, always the curious. She just HAD to sneak out that morning to go see for herself. What she found in the town square, next to the Medieval Castle that had served as her kindergarten, were piles of bodies. Dead American soldiers “stacked like logs as high as my chest,” she later explained. The liberation of Minturno was a costly one. And the sight of all those dead boys in camouflage haunted her for the rest of her life. My “cool” new camo shirt brought that vision back to life for her. I never wore that shirt again. Ever. 

     Time passed and the war ended, and with not much left for them in Italy, America became the beacon of renewal and hope for a better life we all like to think of it as, even today. My mother was the first in her immediate family to go. She would stay with an aunt near Hartford, Connecticut, find a job, and one by one raise enough money to bring the rest of them over. Ever fearless, ever bold, she arrived in NY Harbor on July 4th, 1956. Not knowing the significance of the date, she noticed the American flag toothpicks in their breakfast of half grapefruits on the ship that morning and thought them to be some sort of special “welcome to America” rather than the recognition of Independence Day they actually were. 

     Even that voyage to America had an interesting twist. Originally, she was supposed to come to America in Steerage Class on a ship called the Andrea Doria, but her aunt in Connecticut wanted her sooner and with slightly better accommodations, 3rd class, on the Conte Biancomano. As history would reveal, the Andrea Doria had sunk, most of those 46 lives lost were those in Steerage Class. Her life in America began… so much to tell from that point until that day that, by total chance, she met a pale scrawny Irishman from Gloversville, NY of all places. A man with nothing in common at all except hardship. A man I so proudly call my father. 
                      (To be continued)