“Faith is a strange creature,” Schuster said. “Like a falcon that nests year after year in the same place, but then flies away, sometimes for years, only to return again, stronger than ever.”–Mark Sullivan, Beneath a Scarlet Sky
PIno Lella wants to be a normal Italian teenager–spending time with friends, eating, playing, and having a girlfriend. Unfortunately for him, the war is going on around him and there is no such thing as normal. When his family home is struck by an Allied bomb, he goes into the mountains to stay at a church camp he used to attend in the summers. There he joins an underground railroad and helps Jews escape by guiding them through the Alps.
When it becomes necessary for him to return home, his parents convince him to join the German army when he turns 18, thinking it will keep him safer. After Pino is injured in a freak accident, he becomes the personal driver for the highest ranked German officer in Italy. This gives him the opportunity to spy for the Allies and be close to Anna, the woman he loves.
I have not read a lot about WWII in Italy so I found this book interesting. It is full of adventure, close calls, and danger, but also features heavy topics, horrific violence, and disturbing situations. There has been quite a bit of controversy with this book. It is based on the real life account of Pino Lella but the author states that corroborating data was hard to come by. He interviewed Pino was Pino was 79 years old and his memories were maybe not as accurate as one would hope. As a result Mark Sullivan has filled in a lot of the story with his own ideas of how things happened. This is a work of historical fiction with some basis in fact.
Content Advisory: War violence, executions, violence, death, bombings, language, references to sex