Mark Sullivan · 2017 · survival
Mark Sullivan's 2017 bestseller, from interviews with Pino Lella in his eighties. A Milanese teenager is sent to a mountain school when the bombs come, guides Jewish refugees over the Alps into Switzerland, and is then made personal driver to Hitler's left hand in Italy at eighteen - and spies on him. How much is verifiable is disputed.
- 1Milan
9 June 1943, and a seventeen-year-old obsessed with music, food and girls comes out of a cinema into an Allied raid - and within weeks the family home is rubble and his parents have decided the boys are safer in the mountains.
- 2Casa Alpina
Father Luigi Re's Catholic boys' school high above Madesimo, where Pino is older than the other pupils and is told to climb the Alps every day on a route the priest prescribes - which turns out not to have been for his health.
- 3Val di Lei
The crossings: Jewish families and downed Allied airmen taken over the passes into Switzerland by a boy of seventeen with no training, in weather that kills people - and one detailed ascent that reads like a thriller.
- 4Modena
Conscription. His parents make him enlist with the Germans rather than face the Russian front, so he reports to the station in an Organization Todt uniform - and loses fingers in an explosion soon after.
- 5Milan
In a German field hospital he helps with a broken-down Daimler-Benz and its passenger turns out to be Major General Hans Leyers - and an eighteen-year-old becomes personal driver to Hitler's left hand in Italy, and starts spying.
- 6Lake Como
The endgame: Leyers moving gold into Switzerland, the deportations, and the roads north crowded with Germans and Fascists trying to get out - and Mussolini's own flight along this lake, which ends at Giulino di Mezzegra.
- 7Lake Maggiore
Pino Lella was still living on the lake in his nineties, able to see north to the Alps he guided people over - and Sullivan found him there in 2006, seventy years after everything in this book happened.