SURVIVAL

The book tells my story of surviving the war through the harsh winter of 1943 in the mountains under atrocious conditions while being persecuted by the Germans. It is the story of the struggle against all odds in the aftermath, to try to help the family survive and to get an autodidactic education while working as a young boy, and the story after my marriage and immigration to the United States at the age of 21 where my struggle continued for many years, working full time  and going to College. The story is about twenty years of survival, from 1943 when I was ten, to 1963 when I graduated from Brooklyn College with a Bachelor Degree in Physics. At that time,  my wife Maria and I had two girls, Angela and Anna, who were seven and three years old respectively. From that point on, our lives changed dramatically as I was able to get good jobs and move from a survival mode to a reasonably affluent mode. I also continued graduate school for seven years in the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn while working.  

 If someone had told me in 1943 that I was going to survive the war and then some day to be able to go to the United States and live a rewarding and highly productive life, I would have said that it was a fantasy and a dream. It is a testament to the human spirit that transcends the adversities and nuances of life when the going is hard, and puts a new vitality in your heart and a new face to your future. You know early enough that you are the skipper of your destiny, the only one that can steer the course to a dream island or to a shipwreck. After my graduation, I felt good with new vigor, sure that there was a brighter future. To take a similitude from Dante, it is like a flower that straightens its stem and opens its petals to a warm and bright sun in the morning, after being  folded on itself in a freezing night:                        

“ ...Quali fioretti dal notturno gelo                ...as little flowers in a freezing night
chinati e chiusi, poi che ''l sol li ''mbianca      withered and folded , and as the sun shines
si drizzan tutti aperti in loro stelo,                  they straighten up and open their petals,

tal mi fec''io di mia virtude stanca,                   Similarly, my tired spirit glowed again,
 e tanto buono ardire al cor mi corse,             and so much confidence came to my heart,
ch''i'' cominciai come persona franca:”           that I started to act again as a free person.

Dante, Devine Comedy, Inferno II, 127-132       

The main reason I wrote the book is to tell my story to my children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren so they have an opportunity to know the origin and tribulation and finally the success in this land of one of their ancestors who came to the United States seeking a new life. To tell them about the adverse conditions and hardship people of prior generations had to endure and overcome to just survive, always hopeful that things would get better, and always determined to fight and work hard to improve their plight. Another important and selfish reason to write the book is to remain a little longer in the memory of the descendant generations who care to read the book. Beyond those personal reasons, I wrote the book as a historical document of the treacherous life of civilians who were displaced by the war and left languishing out of their homes, sheltered in caves and mountainsides in the middle of a rigid winter without food and clothing: healthy adults, sick people, children, pregnant women, old and crippled people who needed everyday care. To cope with that ominous and precarious situation, it required every ounce of courage, strength, faith, and the God-given innate instinct to survive. Because you are fighting every day for your life, not to be a casualty of war, of starvation, of freezing, of sickness, or lethal  physical abuse by the military. It is a detailed story of several hundreds families who were forced by the Germans to evacuate the village of Cansano (Abbruzzo) in November 11, 1943 to live in the mountainous countryside in the middle of an atrocious war for several months, without food and shelter – except improvised stone and wooden huts covered with tree branches – a story that was never told before in such details, which exposes the raw existence o