From Sand and Ash

by Amy Harmon

“Angelo, Saint George lived more than fifteen hundred years ago. Yet we are still talking about him. I think that makes him immortal . . . don’t you?”

Loving someone and then losing them would be much worse than not having them at all.

“My babbo says you don’t have to go to a synagogue to talk to God.”

“No freedom-loving Jew can support an ideology that uses force and intimidation to gain followers.”

“I know it is Shabbat, and of course Eva knows the prayers! I am a Jew. I will always be a Jew. Eva is a Jew. She will always be a Jew. Not because we go to the synagogue. Not because we observe holidays. It is our heritage. It is who we are, who we will always be.”

funny, isn’t it? I never really thought about being Jewish until I started to be persecuted for it.

Camillo Rosselli worried, puffing on his pipe, wondering what the future would hold for the two young people who had always loved the other but didn’t belong together.

We would rather die together than be separated from our loved ones.”

“Become a priest. Just like you’ve always planned. And if worse comes to worst, use your connections to hide us. I need you to save our family, Angelo.”

rejected infant will often die, even if its basic needs are met. A rejected child will spend his whole life trying to please everyone else, and never please himself. A rejected woman will often cheat, just to feel desirable. A rejected man will rarely try again, no matter how lonely he is. A rejected people will convince themselves they deserve it, if only to make sense of a senseless world.

“Even if you didn’t become a priest . . . she is a Jew, Angelo.”

He reassured me I would be cared for and taught. He told me that because of my leg, physical work, the kind he did, wouldn’t be an option for me, and the church was the best place for me. ‘It will be hard for you to provide for a family, Angelo. Your duty is to be able to provide for yourself and not be a burden to others,’” Angelo quoted softly.

Felix Adler had stepped into his closet, closed the door, and calmly killed himself.

she tugged on a loose thread hanging from the sleeve of his cassock and tore it free. She held the little string between her fingers, smoothing it over and over. When he left for Rome the next morning, the string from his cassock was tied around the piece of fabric from Felix’s shirt and pinned to her blouse.

Camillo had been sent to Auschwitz. And that was all they knew.

“I remove it because of fear. A better man would fight for his God. But I am not that man. It shames me to say, I am not that man.”

Jewish children were hidden in Catholic schools, Jewish mothers were wearing Catholic veils, and Jewish men were becoming monks—albeit temporarily—and learning Catholic prayers in order to stay alive, and no one was trying to convert them.

“Remember what I told you, Nonno. No resistance. If the Germans show up at your door, give them what they want. You need only worry about yourselves. Camillo wouldn’t want you and Nonna to be harmed protecting his possessions. The only thing he would care about is Eva, and I will keep her safe. I promise.”

“We love you, Eva,” she said firmly. “We have lived good lives. We have been happy. Don’t worry about us. We have each other, and we will be fine. Someday the war will be over and we will be together again. And you will play for me, yes?”

That’s what happened when you said good-bye to someone, watched them board a train, and they never came home. Somewhere, inside, you always believed they would come back.

Vespers at six. You are expected to attend.” “But . . . I am not Catholic,” Eva protested. “You are now.”

My faith is being drowned by my fear for you. You aren’t the only one who has lost their family. Your family is my family, Eva. I’ve lost them too!

“Try instead to picture our Lord. Instead of seeing Eva, you should see our Lord. Our Lord was a Jew too, Angelo.” The monsignor’s voice was pleading, trying to redirect his focus to a safer place. “Yes. He was. And if he were on earth today, the Germans would arrest him too. They would arrest his mother. They would arrest the apostles. They would load them all aboard a northbound train, traveling for days without a place to sit. They would make them stand in their waste, no water, no food. And when they finally arrived at their destination, they would work them to death or gas them immediately.”

“Here is the difference, Monsignor. Jesus gave himself willingly. He could have saved himself. But he was God. And he chose. Eva is just a girl. She wasn’t given a choice. The Jewish people have been stripped of choice. They have been stripped of liberty. They have been stripped of dignity. And they cannot save themselves.”

Does it matter what we call him? Does it matter how we pray, if our devotion is pure, if our love for him leads us to love and serve and forgive and be better? I guess it does. Sadly, it does. Because my prayers could get me killed.

“I have always been yours, Angelo,” she said, echoing the very words he’d thought while he prayed. She was his. “But you have never been mine.”

She told him he would have the love of a beautiful woman who would bear him many sons. I informed her he was going to be a priest. She predicted he would be a hero to many. I told her he was already a hero to me. “You will slay dragons,” she predicted grandly, ignoring me. But Angelo grew very still, and his hand tightened around mine. “You will slay dragons, but not before they slay you,” she hissed. And Angelo bolted from his chair, dragging me from the tent.

“When this war is over, I will be yours, first, last, and always. And you will be mine.” “Eva Bianco?” She smiled with trembling lips. “Eva Bianco. In truth.”

“You are going to die. Do you understand?” he spat. “We’re all going to die, Captain, eventually. If I were you, I would kill me now. Because if I live, I will tell the world who you are and what you’ve done,”

The hungry children suffered the most, or maybe that wasn’t true. When children suffer, the ones who love them suffer even more, helpless to alleviate their agony.

“I am a man who was so impressed by the thought of immortality, of being a martyr or a saint, that I didn’t realize that by becoming a priest I was depriving myself of the very thing I sought. Our immortality comes through our children and their children. Through our roots and our branches. The family is immortality. And Hitler has destroyed not just branches and roots, but entire family trees, forests! All of them, gone. Eva was the only Rosselli left, the only Adler left.”

I want to teach history so that the world doesn’t have to repeat her mistakes.