A Face Etched by War
by
Sam Loschiavo
I used to gaze at grandmother's photo and ask myself, "What secrets lie behind those haunting eyes? What stories do those wrinkles tell?" I had never known my paternal grandmother or knew very much about her. We were divided by an ocean and half of each of two continents. Twenty-six years after her death in 1961, 1 learned of an event in her life that, in my opinion, contributed to the deeply etched lines in her face.
She was born in 1872 in a small town in the arch of Italy's boot. Although she had come from an educated family and was herself a school teacher, the economic situation in Italy at that time was not bright. One of her first sorrows was to bid goodbye to each of her three sons as they left home in their late teens or early twenties to seek a better life in Canada. The intent was that they would earn enough money to enable them to return home within two or three years and become a reunited family. As it turned out, this was not to be. They soon learned that the streets of North America were not paved with gold, but that is another story.
In 1936 my grandfather died leaving grandmother, who was then 64 years old, to care for a small farm a few kilometres from the town and approachable only on foot along a winding Mountainside path. By this time the clouds of war were darkening over Europe, and just three years later burst into the storm that raged for six years. It was during this period of insanity that the event occurred that profoundly affected her life. She kept it secret and revealed it only to my father during a visit to Italy in the late 1950's.
The event began in 1943 when the local parish priest visited her to seek her help in hiding and caring for refugees from Germany on their way to seek safe haven across the Mediterranean Sea. The priest felt that the little stone shed on her farm would provide temporary sanctuary. Grandmother was frightened beyond description because she knew that to harbour people branded as enemies of the Third Reich was punishable by death. She was not so much concerned about the occasional German patrols that passed through the town as she was about local people who could be informers. However, being devoutly religious as well as compassionate she gave her consent. To allay her fear, the priest assured her that refugees would be brought only in the early morning hours in groups of two or three. Despite the scarcity of food, grandmother shared what she had with the poor unfortunates who had lost their homes and, in some cases, members of their families. As grandmother described it to my father, although she lived in fear during this period, she was more than compensated by the looks of gratitude on the faces of the refugees. Father, too, was good at keeping secrets. He told me grandmother's story only about two years before he died in 1987.
Today, when I look at grandmother's photo, I no longer have to ask what secrets lie behind those eyes and that deeply lined face.