Sisters in Resistance by Tilar J. Mazzeo

Author:Tilar J. Mazzeo [Mazzeo, Tilar J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781538735268
Publisher: GrandCentral
Published: 2022-06-21T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 11

Refuge in Switzerland

January 14, 1944–January 27, 1944

Emilio was being held in the notorious San Vittore Prison in Milan, routinely used as a staging point for transports to the death camps at Auschwitz and the site of gruesome abuses. Hilde knew it. But, when the heavy door to his cell opened with a creak, Hilde still gasped at her first sight of Emilio. His bloodied, broken face was unrecognizable. He struggled to lift himself from the floor. Hilde had cried a lot in the past few days, and she started crying again at what they had done to Emilio.

She sat with Emilio in the cell and explained to him that she was a German spy and needed his cooperation to save him. Emilio would need to agree to be smuggled across the border into Switzerland. In exchange for his life, he would need to agree that, once in neutral territory, he would pass to Edda the Gestapo’s warning: If she spoke of Galeazzo’s diaries or made any effort to have them published, German intelligence would liquidate her and the children. When Hilde explained that the bargain was, in effect, his help in terrorizing Edda into silence and suppressing Galeazzo’s testimony of war crimes, Emilio gallantly and stubbornly refused. He wanted no part of that mission. He would not do anything that would harm Edda, he insisted, and he had no interest in helping the Germans. Hilde pleaded with him. The Germans would kill him. Emilio just looked at her through eyes half swollen shut with bruises.

Hilde put her head in her hands. She “said that she didn’t care what I did,” Emilio said then. She told him that “she only wanted to get me out of prison and into Switzerland because she felt personally responsible for my life since I had been arrested because she turned the letters in too soon.” For her to save him, he had to accept his role in the German mission. He could do whatever he wanted once he was safely in Switzerland. Finally, Emilio agreed that he would pass to Edda the message. It had dawned on him that Edda’s life was already in danger from the Gestapo. And if that was the case, someone did need to warn her.

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