BY THE SHORES OF LAKE GARDA.

This is the story of Jewish youth whose father came from Rhodes. He was only in his early teens when his life was cut short, having been exterminated, with so many Jewish kids of his age, in the German death camps.

Nazism has been guilty of depriving the world of the contribution so many young people would have enriched civilisation with.

The war had been over a few months that clear September morning when I saw Lake Garda again and the shores seemed changed to me though only two years had elapsed. How different a Landscape can be when it surrounds our lives during a tormented period like war from the views, which offers itself to ones eyes in peacetime serenity.

I was a child of about eleven who felt at odds in a senseless world in which bloody wars, air raids and racial persecution were every-day events, and tried to make friends with nature and lent my feelings to those lifeless things which seemed to me to be better than human beings: a particularly beautiful cliff had shared in one of my secret joys and I preferred it to all others; a narrow lane that led to the hills had once stifled the sobs of a day of grief: a bench along the shore had given me the courage to smile through the panic-stricken beating of my heart when two German soldiers had sat down beside me. I sought out the cliff, the lane, the bench, but they no longer spoke to me. They stood before me like unknown objects, indifferently – or perhaps it was I who knew no more how to give things that life they expect from human beings, because I was now a happy post-war child and had no more use for their companionship.

I had spent a year at Maderno in a small house on the lake, and evacuee together with my mother and sister. The air raids on Milan had become more and more frequent and my father decided to place us out of danger’s reach. He had remained in Milan to continue working and would come to stay with us over the weekend, from Saturday to Sunday. One lived at Maderno as in an artificial oasis of peace and I felt somehow the injustice of our quiet life there, while in events were wiping our entire families at a time.

My only direct experience of war was the memory of air raids. A shrill and lugubrious siren would wake me in the night – in fact, the slumber of my childhood years became less and less profound, as if in waiting for that sound which brought destruction and death. I would dress hurriedly and rush down the five flights of stairs with my parents and sister to reach the air-raid shelter. On our way down we would meet other families living in the building. We all did the same things automatically, like convicts who willingly accept their forced labour rather than die. The only difference being that we hadn’t done anything. Or so we thought.

The air-raid shelter consisted of a narrow corridor and a couple of small, barren rooms with benches along the grey, ferro-concrete walls. The en usually preferred to stand in the corridor and talk politics while to omen sat n the benches and talked of everything and anything to get through those anxious hours. I would it close by my mother: I kept quite, and watched and listened to the others. There was a young mother who kept her infant wrapped in a blanket; every time and elderly asthmatic woman wheezed she made me feel as though each breath she drew would be her last, a blonde woman whom I often met in the elevator – always elegant and stylishly coifed – seemed now another person; without make-up, her hair unkempt. It was as though we wee all there waiting for the Last Judgement and we would hide nothing from one another’s eyes; a bluish light made the faces look somewhat spectral and heightened the impression of having already passed into the world of eternity?

The rumble of each bomb would make us start and then a hush would fall: perhaps our building had been hit when we got over our initial fright someone would go up to the door of the shelter which led to the courtyard and then come down to reassure us that our building had not been damaged. A sigh of relief came from everyone: once the alert was over we could go back to our every-day lives.

Though many years have gone by, I still remember the minute's details of those hours spent in the shelter as if my memory had severed them from time and fixed in eternity. The air-raid sirens were soon forgotten at Maderno and I began one again to sleep profoundly. But we worried, the three of us, for Father and awaited his arrival each Saturday with impatience and anxiety.

My first disappointment on having to lave Milan was not being able to go to school: being Jewish meant that I could only attend a Jewish school and at the age of eleven I felt almost unemployed at Maderno with no lessons to occupy my day. It filled my with envy to met other children in their smocks and with their schoolbags, and once home I would haul out my books and study on my own.

“Racial laws” had existed in Italy since I was ix years old: I had received my very first schooling privately but had to take my first-year exams in a public school. I was made to enter the classroom first, take my written exams at a desk separated from the others, and leave the classroom last. I wasn’t to be allowed to contaminate the Aryans! At that age, however, I could neither grasp the extent of the idiocy of these measures nor suffer because of them.

But some emotions, which seemed to have been forgotten after four years of attending Jewish schools, now came back to my consciousness. At Maderno the memory of that child of six would come back to my mind: isolated from the others, a bit frightened and somewhat surprised, she had taken her exams and had tried her very best. I resolved, initially, the being born into a Jewish family had been a great misfortune; but after some reflection I began to feel resentment towards such unjust laws and pride in being Jewish. Racial prejudices would one day disappear from the world and all children, (Christian and Jewish, black and white, would find themselves together (I only thought of the children).

I tried to fill days at Maderno as best as I could: the owner of our house had a huge Alsacien which I would take for long walks; I grew vegetables and raised chicks in the garden; I had learned o bake such good cakes that my mother’s friends called me cordon bleu: I read novels by Deli (found on my sister’s night table) which wee no exactly suitable for my age. I no longer played with the doll I had been given on my tenth birthday, which I insisted on bringing to the safety of Maderno. I would wash it, comb it and leave it sitting on a chair for days on end: I considered it an ornament, a trifle, it was no longer my child, the world of fables where imagination could become reality had ended with the war.

In short, I was bored at Maderno until I met Jean-Pierre.

He was the son of friends of my parents’ who had left Paris for Milan because of the racial persecutions; they had also evacuated to Maderno and had settled in a hotel. Jean-Pierre, who was three years my elder, already spoke fluent Italian; after having attended the Jewish school at Milan for a few months, he too, was “unemployed” at Madero. We became close friends.

There was a recreation room with a ping-pong table in jean-Pierre’s hotel, and that game filled many an idle hour. I became so good at it that I often beat my friend, who would then sulk until I accepted a return match. At times we would play with the toys another child had abandoned in the recreation room. There, isolated from the adult world, it was as if the exuberance of our young age would emerge – no longer suffocated by the anguish of the war and suppressed by a way of life wherein happiness was out of place – as though to make up for lost time. We laughed immoderately and would immensely enjoy ourselves playing with a tricycle, a rocking horse or an electric train as thought we were young children. Then suddenly we would both become serious again and go back to being too old for our years.

The movies were also a means of getting through the long, tedious winter afternoons. The cinema was at Toscolano, a village about half an hour’s walk from Maderno, and though it could sit plenty of people in both the stalls and the gallery it was always so full that we would often have to stand through most of the film. One day Jean-Pierre invited me to go to the movies with him that evening. My parents were in Milan and I could tell my sister that I was going to the hotel to play ping-pong. I accepted, as the idea of going out at night with my friend made me feel quite grown-up. Jean-Pierre, in fact, always teased me about such a child, and it would vex me to catch him looking at the fourteen of fifteen-year-old girls. Jean-Pierre picked me up early so as to get there in good time. I remember I being a war movie, so much the fashion then, where the main themes were love and death, and though it was not really suitable for our ages we couldn’t help being fascinated by it because the subject was so topical. I was so exited that I couldn’t really follow the picture. At a certain stage of the movie I closed my eyes and imagined I was a Red Cross nurse assisting Jean-Pierre who was wounded. The sound of a loud bomb shook me from my reverie and brought me back to the reality of the film, and immediately my thoughts went to the bombings in Milan and to my parents who perhaps were in danger. My eyes filled with tears but I tried hard to hide my emotion from Jean-Pierre. When we left the cinema the night was pitch-dark because of the blackout and the cloudy sky, which had covered all its stars. Jean-Pierre’s presence and our flashlight were not enough; I was frightened and I wanted my parents near. Jean-Pierre talked on about the movie but I could not listen; I was terrified at the idea of outlaws lying in wait who would jump out at us from the side of the road. I walked close to Jean-Pierre and decided that being out in the light of the day is much more pleasant. The next day, after months of having ignored it, I played with my doll: I wanted to remain a child.

At the beginning of the New Year our parents decided to send us to private lessons so that we, too, could occupy our time studying. Jean-Pierre took Latin lessons, and I studied grammar. Initially we were enthusiastic about the idea of being able to leave home with our texts and notebooks under our arms and we bought new elastic binders, then the latest fashion, to keep them together. However, we soon became aware that this surrogate for school was not enough. Our young and pretty teacher knew little more than we did and Jean-Pierre was almost in love with her, which made me jealous. On the other hand, our love of studying was kept alive through these private lessons and with the coming of spring we were able to take long bicycle rides to and from our teacher’s house, which was quite far away.

Our bicycles – especially when the days lengthened and the air became increasingly warmer – were our loyal companions. With our bicycle rides we recaptured the light earthiness that our youth gave us the right to feel, as though we owned the world, our world, which was a mixture of fantasy and reality. Jean-Pierre was always changing itinerary; he loved seeing new places in the hills or on the lake, almost as though he foresaw that time allotted him for discoveries would be brief. But I preferred going back to familiar places, as one prefers the company of friends to that of strangers.

There was a small beach on the lake, shaped like a semicircle, with a particularly beautiful reef in the middle; the facets of the rock under the light of the sun gave off the most beautiful reflections and made it seem like an enormous jewel set in the shore. We came to this place for almost a month on end when, because of a fall I had taken, we had to limit ourselves to this brief excursion; as I could not move my knee, Jean-Pierre would take me with him on the cross-bar of his bike. It was here that Jean-Pierre gave me lessons on Zionism with an enthusiasm partly due to his fourteen years of age and partly derived from his family’s tradition: both his father and his uncle had been much involved in the Palestine question. It was here, through the pamphlets and pictures

Brought by Jean-Pierre, that I began to learn the history and geography of the land, which had belonged to our ancestors. Many years later, when I visited Israel, I felt as thought I had already been there. Jean-Pierre and I decided that after the war we would go and help built our Nation. We were under the illusion, then, that a state could be born out of peace and not out of bloodshed. And even if war would be necessary, it would be a just war, for a noble cause, to give shelter to so many Jews scattered throughout the world. We were too young to doubt the existence of just wars.

This peaceful life was to come to an end with the Badoglio armistice: pouring down from the Brenner Pass, the Germans invaded Italy.

I recalled pages of my history book that narrated the story of the barbarian invasion of Italy. But there was nothing barbarian about these German soldiers: they were all rather young, some of them only adolescents. To me the tanks looked barbarian, with their enormous wheels and the monotonous mechanical sound of their ruthless procession. The road that unwinds along the lake, accustomed as it was to the weight of bicycles, the odd bus and car then seemed on the verge of giving way under the weight of the tanks. The pleasant landscape of Lake Garda shore took on an unusual, sinister aspect; it had become a theatre of war. It seemed as if the hand of an unseen director had dropped the curtain on a first, serene and idyllic act and had hurried to prepare the scenery in the same place for a second, tragic and lugubrious act, much to the surprise of the spectators, Jean-Pierre and I were amongst the spectators, watching, stupefied. 

                                                                                                                                                                             (Suitepage 25)

A few tanks had halted in the square. An officer threw a packet of cigarettes to some boys near us, and a bar of chocolate in my direction. I was about to throw it back but fortunately Jean-Pierre held my arm. A gesture of that kind with the Germans would have been very dangerous for us who were not only Italian, but Jews. The chocolate burned in my hand – we decided to throw it in the lake: the persecutions toward the Jews had kindled in me a fire of hatred mixed with contempt.

The bar of chocolate fell into the lake with a splash leaving concentric circles on the surface of the water. Then all was before and the limpid, smooth lake went back to reflecting the rays of the sun, I felt humiliated for not knowing how to avenge the Jews that had been killed. Jean-Pierre explained to me that one day we would have our own nation and the humiliation of not being able to defend ourselves would come to an end. He would himself become a courageous soldier of the State of Israel, but in this particular moment courage was sterile and useless. I shook my head – that day seemed too far off to me.

The Germans set up their head quarters at Salo and it became increasingly dangerous for us Jews to remain in the area. Our families decided to leave. Jean-Pierre's was the first to go and he came to say goodbye. That last afternoon together we did not visit the place where so many happy hours had been spent but we picked our way up a narrow lane that rose towards the hills. Jean-Pierre told me that after the end of the war he and his family would go back to Paris – only then would he be able to write to me. He was full of hope and plans for the future. On the contrary, I only felt a weight in my heart – I wanted to say so many things but could not find the words. It was as though the wall of silence was to separate us for so long a time had already begun to divide us. How often since then have I regretted not having said all that I felt within me, regretted having put off to an uncertain future things that could only have been said in that brief space of time destiny had granted us. But we cannot go back, and this turns bitter all regrets. Then I tried to appear calm and to say goodbye almost coldly.

I spent another week in Maderno and every afternoon went to the narrow lane on the hill with the sadness in my heart of one who brings flowers to the grave of a loved one.

We then went to live in a little mountain village above Luino, Bosco Valtravaglia : the news reached us there that some Jews had been arrested at Gardone and thrown into the lake at night with stones tied to their necks. I though of the bar of chocolate of the Germans and splash it made as it fell into the lake and it seemed to me a symbol. I imagined the normally calm waters rippled in protest against the absurd massacre. Then everything had certainly been as before and the next day that closed sea of liquid blue, competing with the sky to achieve a deeper colour, harboured in its profundity lives unjustly destroyed. Lake Garda possessed a tradition of beauty and serenity to defend, a tradition that went back to the days of Catullus and that would surely not be broken by human folly. It was not indifference it revealed, but a will to overcome man's ferocity through its own natural harmony.

We remain in the secluded village of Bosco Valtravaglia for a number of months. The house was large and I had a room all to myself. It was then that I began dreaming that Jean-Pierre's family had been arrested while attempting to cross the Swiss border and that Jean-Pierre, who had managed to escape, had come to live with us. It wasn't clear how he could have come to us as he didn't know our address but in the world of subconscious the law of rationality are not respected. The dream became recurrent; it became a nightmare, perhaps because I wanted to share it with no one. We were soon forced to leave Italy and take refuge in Switzerland. There, too, I lived on the shores of a lake, at Locarno, on Lake Maggiore, and though the landscape was very similar to that lake Garda, I could not bring myself to love it. I felt a stranger in a foreign country and each day was a long wait for the war to end.

Often my mind went back to the shores of the Lake Garda, to that period of my life in which my childhood had withdraw itself too soon to give way to the many experiences of adolescence, and it was now just a memory I could turn to in moments of unhappiness. I was almost always alone: my school friends could not fill the void left by Jean-Pierre.   

After the liberation, Jean-Pierre's elder brother, free from the Buchenwald camp, came to see us in Milan. He had been caught together with his whole family while attempting to reach Switzerland. He was the only survivor. I remembered the dream that had obsessed me at Bosco Valtravaglia and I realized that our subconscious not only has the power to perceive things that happen miles away but can also modify the events according to our own wishes: everything would be so beautiful if one could live one's dreams and dream life.

If you hadn't died I would have remembered you less, busy as I was with the joys of restored peace and the taking up of our normal lives. Your death transformed the tenderness I had felt to heartache and our friendship became almost sacred because nothing could be added to it or taken away from it – it had become eternal.

I would have liked to know how you spend your last days, but the only certainty I had, was knowing that you were a handful of ashes in one of the many Nazi crematoriums. I wondered if you had been sent to a concentration camp for some weeks or if you had been eliminated immediately because you were too young to work; if you had entered the gas chamber with strangers, companions of misfortune, or if you had been allowed to stay by your mother and bring the known light of her loving eyes to the unknown darkness. I wondered if you had remembered me, if you had though of one of the days spent together from sunrise to sunset – of our lives fused in a mosaic of thoughts and impressions – and if the memory of all this helped you to feel less alone or if it only increased the bitterness of the last moments, reminding you of the happiness you had to give up for ever. These and other questions remained unanswered, unsatisfied and in waiting, and they filled my mind with memory of you.

Thus, at the age of thirteen I had become acquainted with the thin grey veil of melancholy that covers things as though to dress them in mourning for the loss of a beloved person: I had become acquainted with that subtle, inner anguish which takes possession of one when the desire to see this person clashes against the abyss of the unknown and the mystery that makes it impossible for ever. At times, Jean-Pierre, I wanted you near me still, but I was forced to accept the absurdity of our human condition if I wanted to go on living. And I wanted to live.

I gave myself up to the pleasures and common interests of youth; around me everything smiled and invited me to dance to the various music of life. But when I became too dazzled I would seek out the austere and sombre peace that comes of burial grounds and think of you, without not even a grave.

Three years later the State of Israel was founded: it saddened me that you would never know that your Israel – the Israel you spoke of so ardently, whose borders you traced with pebbles on the shores of Lake Garda – had become reality. You and all the others have not died in vain; much to contrary, without realizing it you were the first soldiers of our small army and it is you who keep alive to this day the courage it needs. We have already had to fight many bloody wars and we, too, have our dead and our young disabled. That world of peace that we dreamed of as children, when war was omnipresent in our lives, is an illusion. I have lost faith. "What does it matter?" you would have replied, with that professorial attitude you assumed with me, taking advantage of your three-year seniority. "To achieve happiness the individual must not think of himself but of a reality that transcends him and to wish he must sacrifice all things: to me, this reality is Israel".

Adieu, Jean-Pierre. I wanted to remember you with these few pages of mine, to tell you that you have always been alive in the artificial paradise of memories, which alone truly exist because it is destined to die with us, as all things will, in this incomprehensible world.

N.B.

Original title : Sulle rive del Lago di garda, translated by Rita Di Giuseppe Trivellate, courtesy : La Rassegna Mensile di Israele

Nora Menascé, Milano, born from Rhodeslis parents, studied at Milano University (literature department). She published, in Italian, poems, tales, critics and translation. Nora Menascé was also a song compositor (words and music). Amongst other she wrote : Rodi, l’isola dei miei sogni (Rhodes, Island of my dreams) and L’Ebreo Errante ( The wandering Jew) dedicated to Israel. Nora Menascé lived in Milano and specialised in the Spanish spoken in Rhodes.

This contribution recalls her blessed memory.

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