10 May 2022

     Lower Tuscany. I’ve finished work on the second book in my Leah Contarini Mystery and am ready to send it to the press, happy to let them take over. 

 Today, for a break, I decided on research for the next book. S. and I drove the back roads of the thick forests on the border with Lazio, bumping over narrow dirt roads through the high hills. We were looking for the Grotto degli Ebrei, the “Cave of the Jews.”  This is the cave where our friend, Elena, and her family hid from the Germans during Germany’s occupation of Italy in World War II. Elena was 9 when, in November of 1943, she and her family, left their home and went west and north to the farm of gentile friends. Each month they moved to another farm, sometimes barely ahead of the Facists or the Germans, and finally ended in what came to be called the Cave of the Jews in the same forest where we drove today. 

     The forests of this area of Tuscany are like jungles: chestnut, oak, maple, hornbeams crowd each other, thick as grass, and the ground cover of tangled vines, thorny bushes, giant stands of Scotch Broom, overgrown wild roses, and wild raspberry bushes twist together in tight, impenetrable  knots. 

     Like some other local Jewish families fortunate enough to escape in time, Elena’s family was sustained by courageous peasants/farmers who put their lives on the line to protect Jewish families from the German soldiers combing the area to kill or round up Jews for the camps.  

     We stopped at a house deep in the hills and talked to a man who was eating lunch with his family. “The cave is difficult to find,” he explained. “I could take you, but I have to work on my tractor today. It’s hard to find.”

     So, today didn’t work out, but another day it might, and the story of that nine-year-old girl begins to take shape in my mind.