The Truth Beneath a Scarlet Sky: A Study on the Real Accounts of Pino Lella, and those on 'Beneath a Scarlet Sky'

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Sullivan wrote that Lella once described himself as more of a coward than a hero during one of their earliest meetings, but Lella says this massive retelling of his life story has given him some perspective on his fateful actions more than 70 years ago. This place. How clean the air is. And the smells. No burning. No bomb stench. It seems so . . . I don’t know. Innocent?”

Whole families found refuge in the hospital, including the Jewish Tedesco family, who later told the world about Dr. Borromeo’s bravery and kindness. Claudio and Luciana Tedesco, their parents and their grandmother all found refuge within the hospital walls. In May 1944, German forces raided the hospital. The Tedescos recalled how doctors instructed them to cough loudly whenever Germans were near. Tragically, the Nazis arrested six Polish Jews who were hiding on a hospital balcony, but the rest of the Jewish “patients” were left untouched. Pino’s cousin, Licia Albanese, fled to America before the invasion, and spent the rest of her long career as a soprano singing leads at the New York Metropolitan Opera under the direction of Arturo Toscanini. She died in 2014. Toward the end, Pino is given the chance to execute Major General Leyers. He doesn’t take it. Why do you think that is?The obligations of the non-fiction writer and the novelists are different. The former must hew to the documented facts and eye-witness accounts. The latter should dig for a deeper, emotional truth. I’m sorry,” Pino said. “I really am. Your mama’s a great lady. She puts up with your papa, so she’s like a saint, and they say saints get their reward in heaven.” Holland headlines Beneath a Scarlet Sky as Pino Lella, an Italian teenager who’s simply going about his life under the specter of the World War II; a conflagration into which his country was thrown due to fascist leader Mussolini’s alliance with Nazi Germany. That is, until the war claims his family’s home and word of the Nazi atrocities incites Pino to join an underground railroad to help Jews escape over the Alps. However, with his conscription number soon likely to be called, Pino’s parents enlist him as a German soldier, hoping to keep him out of combat. Yet, Pino, at age 18, gets injured, anyway. The fateful occurrence sends him to another assignment as the personal driver of Adolph Hitler himself; a fortuitous position for his clandestine Resistance endeavors, since it makes him the proverbial fly… err, spider on the wall who listens to the elite of the Axis powers. Mrs. Napolitano is a pregnant Italian Jew who successfully escapes over the mountain pass in the dead of winter, in one of the most dramatic passages in the book. She almost dies along the way. If you were in her shoes, do you think you’d be brave enough to attempt the trek? What does it mean to be brave in the face of death?

Speer was ultimately sentenced to twenty years in Spandau Prison for taking slaves. The minister and Leyers’ aide also claimed that Leyers had presented prosecutors with evidence that he’d helped Jews and Catholics who’d been in mortal danger in Italy under Nazi occupation. The truth is a little more complicated. Mashbir, Sidney (1953). I Was an American Spy. California: Horizon Productions. pp.347–348. ISBN 978-0-9903349-9-6. Karl Ludvigsen/Mario Andretti. Alberto Ascari: Ferrari's First Double World Champion Haynes Manuals Inc.. 2000 978–1859606803. It’s hard to underestimate Leyers’ power. His formal title was Generalbevollmächtigter fur Reichsminister für Rüstung und Kriegsproduktion für Italien. It translates as ‘Plenipotentiary to the Reich Minister for Armaments and War Production in Italy.’In my experience older Italians don’t talk freely about the war. To younger generations it’s as if it never happened. One old partisan fighter I interviewed told me that when he reluctantly went to a high school in Milan recently at the request of a history teacher to talk about the war, the students laughed at him. They said the things he’d seen could never have happened. He won three more consecutive races to start the 1953 season, giving him nine straight championship wins (not counting Indy) before his streak ended when he finished fourth in France, although it was a close fourth as the race was highly competitive. He earned two more wins later in the year to give himself a second consecutive World Championship, already becoming Formula One's first two-time champion. [3] [4] [16] [17] A street in Rome (in the Esposizione Universale Roma area) is named in his honour, while both the Autodromo Nazionale Monza and Autodromo Oscar Alfredo Gálvez have chicanes named after him. In 1992, he was inducted into the International Motorsports Hall of Fame. [27] The British supercar manufacturer Ascari Cars is named in his honour. I think that worked in my favor to a certain extent. WWII Italy felt overlooked and unexamined, which made it even more exciting for me as I worked on the book. I realized very early on, for example, that in addition to Pino’s story I could tell the broader history of the fight for what Winston Churchill called “the soft underbelly of Europe.”

Q: Despite some tolerated revenge killings in the immediate aftermath of the war, Italian authorities conducted relatively few trials of collaborators. General Leyers, who by his own admission sat at the left hand of the Fuhrer, and who was arguably the second-most powerful man in Italy during the last two years of World War II, was among those never prosecuted. Explain the “Missing Italian Nuremberg,” and how General Leyers literally got away with murder.Khan was a SOE agent and became the first female wireless operator to be sent into occupied France to aid the French Resistance during the war. Mother Maria Agnese knew her activities could have deadly consequences if Nazis ever realized her convent was sheltering Jews. She never told the other nuns the identities of their guests, only calling them “homeless refugees” and explaining that they needed hospitality and aid. Several Jewish families hid in the convent. The convent had a kindergarten which some of the Jewish children attended.

During that time, and apart from the details of his war story, Pino taught me about life and his values and the many, many joys he’d been blessed with after handing over General Leyers to U.S. Paratroopers on the last day of the war. It made me realize how much I’d put in jeopardy even thinking about suicide. Pino was raised fluent in Italian, French, and English. He’d also lived in California for more than thirty years, so there was no need for an interpreter. A: It did take me an awful a long time to dig up the details that surrounded Pino’s story. Remember I was trying to write this as non-fiction, and I wanted to nail the factual narrative. He was Italy’s greatest athlete: a two time winner of the Giro d’Italia, Italy’s greatest cycling race, who’d also won the Tour de France in 1938. Yet when Gino Bartali, an Italian Catholic from the region of Tuscany, returned home from the Tour de France as Italy’s greatest hero, he pointedly refused to dedicate his victory to Italy’s Fascist leader, Benito Mussolini. Mussolini had recently stripped Jews in Italy of their citizenship and forbade them from working in the government and in many other professions. Bartali disagreed with Mussolini’s racism, and courted reprisals by snubbing Il Duce as the wartime leader was known. He was denied racing opportunities, and considered persona non grata for his anti-Fascist stance.Autodromo Nazionale di Monza – History". The Formula One DataBase. F1db.com. 6 April 2005. Archived from the original on 2 October 2009 . Retrieved 17 September 2009. In the end, Lella estimates that “Beneath a Scarlet Sky” is “80 to 90 percent true,” and says he is thrilled with the book and its launch, which started out small and has slowly gathered steam, selling hundreds of thousands of copies in multiple languages. Perhaps most impressive, it was recently optioned by Hollywood for feature-film treatment. Current “Spider-Man” star Tom Holland has been tapped to play young Lella, and famed mogul Amy Pascal (“The Post”) is producing. Pino looked up the hill and saw his father tuning his violin and Mr. Beltramini standing there, sheet music in his hand. The golden light of sunset radiated off both men and the crowd around them. U.S. Army Major Frank Knebel returned to California and became a newspaper publisher. When he died he left behind cryptic notes about wanting to write an account of “great intrigue” that unfolded in Milan in the last days of the war. He never did.