Naples '44 by Norman Lewis Page B

in a few days’ time to arrest anybody who doesn’t please him’. More seriously, he is charged with carrying on a personal vendetta against a famous partisan, Giovanni Albano, whom he arrested on an allegedly trumped-up charge soon after the Allies’ arrival, and whom he has since been doing his best to have interned.
    We really have too much on our plates to have to bother with this kind of thing, but the story of how we rewarded those who shed their blood for us in the ‘heroic four days’ of the partisan uprising at the end of September has to be prevented from becoming a legend, so today, with extreme reluctance, I took myself off to Torrito to see Albano and hear from him his story of what had happened.
    Torrito seems to have had some pretensions to grandeur before falling into its present misery. All the houses in the main street had balconies. There was a small garden with a few palms in the little square, a school, a club, and three or four once-imposing mansions – now largely ruined. At the crossroads of the main street and the Aversa highway, on September 30, there took place a massacre conducted by the Germans. Twenty-four persons including a woman, a monk, and three boys in their teens, all the human beings the SS, who were in a hurry, could discover in the neighbouring houses, were lined up against the wall and shot. The massacre was a reprisal for the action of the partisans under Albano’s leadership in the nearby village of Palo di Orta. I found the whole population of Torrito to be in mourning.
    I was admitted with some caution to Albano’s presence by a woman of his household, and found him a haggard, haunted man who spokevery quietly, as if in fear of being overheard. His story of September 30 was that on that day the Germans were beginning their withdrawal from the area when a message reached Torrito that the Germans were at Palo di Orta, whereupon Albano and the twenty partisans he commanded had gone there to engage them. In the fighting which ensued, he and his partisans had captured two prisoners, six cars and a motorcycle, and taken them back to Torrito. Here he sent for Marshal Benvenuto to demand his support in case of reprisals. But the Marshal ignored the summons. Albano then turned over the two German prisoners to the Marshal’s safekeeping, but Benvenuto, washing his hands of the whole enterprise, not only released the two men but provided them with civilian clothes to lessen the likelihood of their recapture. Unfortunately, as it turned out, they were unable to find their way back to their unit. When the German tanks reached Torrito the two uniforms were discovered and, under the assumption the wearers had been killed, the massacre was ordered. Two days later, when the Allies arrived, Benvenuto arrested Albano on what sounded to me like the extraordinary charge of criminal collaboration with the Germans, and produced several witnesses in support of these charges. He was sent to prison, and had been released on bail to await trial.
    There seemed to be little material for an epic of the Resistance in this. Since Albano made no claim at any time to have actually killed Germans, it was to be supposed that he had not, and the two captured prisoners had been promptly released. On the other hand the charge of criminal collaboration seemed a strange one, so my first move was to visit the senior police officer for the area at Afragola, for a second opinion as to the true facts of the case. The marshall at Afragola was contemptuous of Albano’s reputation as a folk-hero, describing him as a ‘foreigner’ from Sicily, and a member of the Sicilian Mafia. I then pressed for copies of statements made by witnesses in the case, and these were produced; one by a Luigi Pascarella, and another by a woman named Anna Consomata.

December 20
    I checked Pascarella and Consomata in the dossier section of the Questura, and found that they both had records: Pascarella