It might seem simple, sitting on the couch with Netflix on and your belly full, to envision the heroics you’d accomplish if war broke out in your homeland: You’d join the armed forces, or whatever constituted the resistance. You’d break the chains of your oppressors, just like Star Wars, or go rogue, living off your wits and aiding the forces of good, just like Mad Max. Of course you would. Of course you would.
But life isn’t a Hollywood movie, and as the real stories of World War II are lost to living memory, it takes someone with a sharp eye and an emotionally perceptive heart to bring the nuance of enduring an occupation into focus. Italian author Sacha Naspini has done so triumphantly in his second novel to be translated into English, The Bishop’s Villa. Naspini is from Grosseto, a town in southern Tuscany that holds a dubious distinction: It was Europe’s only Catholic diocese to have been rented out by its bishop as a prison camp during the Holocaust. For eight months toward the end of the war in the European theater, the Roccatederighi seminary housed about 100 Jews, many of whom were sent on to Auschwitz.
The Bishop’s Villa’s fictional protagonist, who stands in for everyman, is a cobbler in Grosseto named René. It’s not his war; he’s just trying to keep his head down and make it through, like most of the townsfolk. But when his friend (and unrequited love) Anna flees to join the resistance, his relationship with her lands him in hot water with the local collaborators, and he finds himself an unwilling “guest” at the bishop’s villa. Though he’s beaten and interrogated, René holds out hope. “What,” he reflects, “can you do to a man who looks at you calmly when you threaten him with death? You can chew his bones clean, but you can’t touch his soul, which means you will never win.”
René’s gut-wrenching story of survival caroms between moments of unexpected kindness and unfathomable cruelty as the final days of the war play out. Naspini is to be commended for helping us to recall a story that played out thousands of times across a continent, a scenario that we dare not forget lest it be repeated.