Changing sides
The 20th century was the bloodiest in human history, wars hot and cold killing tens of millions of people. World War I, billed as the war to end all wars, didn’t. All its participants are gone now. It is little remembered. World War II made no such assertion, and though it finished over seven decades ago, it has yet to be forgotten.
Its elderly survivors still talk about it and films keep it alive. Hitler, not the Kaiser, is the chief villain. Tojo and Mussolini are significantly less so. Germany, Japan and Italy were the enemies; the UK, US and USSR, the Allies. The bad guys vs. the good guys.
It was more complicated than that, of course. For a while, the US and Italy were on the Axis side, then sided with the Allies. Mussolini was overthrown in a military coup, then reinstated by Hitler in a smaller Italy named the Salo Republic. Germany invaded Italy.
In The Girl From Venice, Yank author Martin Cruz Smith leaves the reader in no doubt that the German occupation forces, particularly the SS, harshly mistreated the turncoat Italians. Thousands were sent to Germany as slave labourers, Jews to death camps. Il Duce’s Fascists assisted the Nazis in every way. Partisans, mainly local Communists, were the Resistance fighters. They gunned collaborationists, Fascists and Wehrmacht with equanimity, regardless of the reprisals. A good many were trigger-happy.
The protagonist is Cenzo, a fisherman in Venice who is a painter in his spare time. A hero of the Abyssinian War, he tries to live down being one of the pilots who dropped poison gas on the spear-carrying natives. Finding a girl on the run from the SS, he decides to protect her.
Giulia is Jewish and his life is forfeited if she’s caught. His acquaintances are in all strata of society, and from their conversations we learn what makes them tick. He finds a plane and it is used to carry Il Duce’s gold. However, the craft crashes. Can it be recovered from the sea?
Famed for penning Gorky Park, about Cold War Russia, whether The Girl From Venice, about Hot War Italy, proves as popular remains to be seen. The hero-fisherman-painter isn’t altogether believable, but the other characters ring true. Have a look-see.