The Courage To Remember

Chapter 1

The Farm and the War in Poland

The newspaper ink stained Stefano’s fingers before he finished the first line: Germany had invaded Poland. He stood by the kitchen table on the Clemente farm, sixteen and still in the work clothes he’d worn in the pigpen, the smell of manure on his sleeves. Outside, pigs shifted and grunted in the muddy yard, the wind pressing the screen door with the dry, restless sound of late summer. His mother moved between stove and sink. His father sat beneath the window, head lowered, listening to the radio. It spoke of armies, borders, cities Stefano had known only from maps. Poland seemed impossibly far, separated from the farm by an ocean, by languages he did not speak, by the ordinary duties waiting before supper. Yet the words on the paper made that distance feel fragile. His father reached for the sheet. “Give it here.” Stefano passed it across the table. “They invaded Poland.” “I heard.” “What happens now?” His father folded the paper once, carefully. “The governments will decide what happens now.” The answer settled over the room without satisfying him. His mother set a plate near the stove. The radio continued in a low crackle, describing a war that had begun beyond the fields. Stefano looked out at the farm: the barn roof needing repair, a fence leaning toward the road, land running flat beneath a pale sky with no hill or town to break the view. He had been born there in 1924, raised among Italian relatives, feed sacks, winter chores, and the steady heat of the pigs. He knew how to mend a gate and lift a struggling animal; he knew the smell of wet straw and the feel of frozen metal against his palms. He did not know how to become the person he imagined beyond that place. That evening, after work, he returned to the paper. The kitchen had grown quiet: his father in bed, his mother drying dishes. Stefano flattened the page with both hands and read the report again, though the words were the same. “Why do you keep looking at it?” his mother asked. “I want to understand.” “It is across the ocean.” “That doesn’t mean it isn’t real.” She draped the dishcloth over the sink. “No one here can do anything about it.” Stefano lowered his eyes. “Maybe someone can.” His mother studied him; for a momentthe seat of his pants. “You’ve been somewhere else for a week.” Stefano wiped his hands on his trousers. “I’m thinking.” “Thinking won’t keep the roof from leaking.” His father’s voice was practical, patient. Stefano wanted to tell him about the faces beneath the headlines, the mothers clutching children, the men whose plans were shattered, but the words felt too large for the kitchen. Instead he said, “I want to see.” His father’s jaw tightened. “See what? Trouble?” “I want to see what’s happening. To understand it.” His father went back to his tasks without answering, and the silence pressed like the summer heat. In the following weeks, Stefano stole moments wherever he could: lingering by the grocery window to catch the paper’s headlines, eavesdropping on radio broadcasts at the feed mill, piecing together reports that were often vague or contradictory. Each fragment made the world beyond the farm more present: soldiers moving, towns emptied, families fleeing. The images settled in him, as if settling into a different, growing shape he had not expected. Friends joked that he listened to the news like a lover waiting for a letter. His mother fretted that the talk would make him restless. His father said nothing, but his shoulders seemed heavier. Work continued: fences mended, troughs filled, pigs fed. The farm’s demands were relentless and immediate. Still, Stefano’s mind kept traveling farther, mapping routes and names, imagining how to go. One evening, as dusk thinned the light, a neighbor passing through stopped to speak with his father about recruits leaving for the city, and someone mentioned enlistment, travel, papers. A name was given of a man organizing transport for those heading to join causes beyond the province. Stefano listened, heart tightening and loosening at once. After the neighbor left, he waited until his parents were occupied with supper and quietly asked for the name. They exchanged looks: his mother’s concern, his father’s reluctant resignation. “If you go,” his father said finally, “you must be sure. There’s no turning back without a cost.” Stefano understood the warning: not only the danger of travel and war, but the cost of leaving family and the only life he had known. Yet the thought of remaining felt like a slow surrender to a life planned by habit rather than choice. That night