When the bugler plays “The Last Post,” and we all fall silent at 11 a.m. next Wednesday, we pause for a moment in our busy lives to give a thought to soldiers young and old who lost their lives so we may continue to enjoy peace and prosperity.

For most gathered around the cenotaphs in Confederation Park and South Burnaby, war remains an abstract idea, something read about in history books or in the newspaper, maybe seen in a movie.

Because of the sacrifices of those soldiers, we’ve never known the terror of bombs falling from the sky through the night, or the countryside razed by tanks. We’ve never cowered in basements for nights on end, fearing every thump from above means your hiding place has been compromised.

Vincenzo DeSiena has.

War within a war

The Burnaby man was 12 years old when his family survived the Battle of Monte Cassino, one of the bloodiest standoffs between German and Allied forces during the Second World War. The battle, for key ridges and valleys south of Rome, comprised four major assaults from January to May 1944.

Tens of thousands of soldiers perished, almost 300,000 casualties in total, including civilians.

So many died, in fact, that soldiers who survived took to calling the river that snaked through the Rapido Valley the “Bloody River.” Thousands of tons of bombs laid waste to towns and villages, the verdant farmland, and the historic abbey atop Monte Cassino that was founded in 524 AD.

Historians have called those months a “mini war within WWII;” they compare the human suffering to that inflicted in the siege of Stalingrad.

When Vincenzo recalls his childhood on his grandfather’s farm, his round, beefy face lights up, smoothing the creases that come from 79 years of hard living, including raising a family and working for the railway. Times were tough in central Italy in the 1930s, money was tight. But neighbours helped neighbours. And as long as the crops of fruit and vegetables were good, his family enjoyed a good life.

He remembers playing a game in the fields that was like a combination of golf and baseball, hitting a stick into a hole and then running to a “base” to score points.

“Sometimes the mud came up to your knees,” he laughs.

A tense co-existence

He remembers sneaking away to school for the first time. He was so proud he told his grandfather who responded, “oh very good my grandson, now you can do four hours of school in the morning, then you can do four hours of work on the farm in the afternoon.”

But dark clouds were gathering.

About 15 or 20 young men left the town to go fight with Italian troops in the Spanish Civil War.

Some didn’t come back.

Vincenzo was taught in school how to march “like a little Mussolini,” Italy’s fascist dictator who was preparing for the coming conflict in Europe by aligning himself with Germany.

He heard the adults talking about war, but he really didn’t understand it.

German soldiers appeared in the nearby village.

For the most part, they tolerated each other’s existence.

But as the tide of the war started to turn, relations with the occupying troops grew short. Vincenzo remembers being sent to the butcher shop with another boy to run an errand where they ran into a German soldier who demanded they hoist a 22-litre jug filled with water.

The two slight boys could barely budge the container, let alone lift it. The soldier grew increasingly irate. He kicked Vincenzo, and the boy got scared. He spied the row of knives by the butcher’s block, and desperate thoughts flashed through his brain.

Just then, another soldier showed up to defuse the situation.

Residents rounded up

Early one morning, German soldiers pounded on the door of his grandfather’s farmhouse.

They were rounding up everyone in the area and loading them onto trucks. They weren’t given time to pack suitcases, leaving only with the clothes they wore. They were transported about 50 kilometres to a train depot, where they were crammed into boxcars. They were being sent north where it would be safer, they were told.

But the journey felt anything but safe, says Vincenzo, as American and British planes dropped bombs all around.

“I was afraid,” says Vincenzo. “I was really scared because I didn’t know what was going to happen.”

When one bomb landed particularly close to the train, causing it to stop, Vincenzo’s family, as well as his uncle and his family, seized the opportunity to flee into the night. They hid out in a nearby farm for a month.

An uncle managed to track them down and the decision was made to make their way back to the only home they’d ever known. The group of about 25 to 30 people hiked for six nights, hiding in the bushes and ditches by day. For food, they relied on wild fruit or scavenged pears and apples they found on farms along the way. For warmth they hunkered down with straw they scoured from barns. To protect his feet, Vincenzo used a piece of string to tie on some pieces of tire rubber he’d found.

Hidden away for months

At one point the group reached a main road that was being heavily patrolled by German soldiers. To continue their journey, they’d have to cross that road. For three hours they cowered in the ditch, ducking into the weeds and bushes every time they heard a truck approach.

Finally, when the coast was clear, they scurried across in groups of four or five.

Incredibly, the whole family reached the farmhouse safely. But they were hardly safe.

Three rooms at the back part of the house had been destroyed by a shell. The men gathered heavy stones to reinforce the basement and that’s where they lived for the next three months, as the Battle for Monte Cassino raged all around them.

It was a tedious, yet frightening existence. Their crops had been ruined, their livestock stolen by the occupying soldiers, so they had to rely on stored grain, potatoes and corn for food. But they couldn’t cook because the smoke would give away their hiding place.

Afraid of being discovered, they stayed in the basement all day. To keep the youngest children quiet, their mothers gave them cloth dipped in sweetened water to suck on. At night, the adults skulked out to surrounding farms to supplement their diet with whatever they could scavenge.

“We managed,” says Vincenzo.

The tide turns

Sometimes Vincenzo and his cousins climbed into the trees or surrounding hills to watch the explosions and tracer bullets shooting across the night sky in the distance. Once, a crippled fighter plane or bomber crashed into the ground not too far away, and the concussion knocked him into the straw.

By late May, the German troops had been blasted back out of the Liri valley. When American soldiers stumbled upon their basement bunker, Vincenzo says they were amazed to find people still alive. Vincenzo himself was surprised to see so many of his neighbours had also returned and survived.

But the farmland that provided their livelihood had been destroyed, the soil poisoned by so much gunpowder, the fields littered with so many unexploded shells and buried mines it was too dangerous to plow.

Vincenzo, his brother and three sisters were sent to the southern region of Calabria for about a year.

A family’s fierce determination

After the war, there was much sickness, says Vincenzo. Two of his cousins died from illness. He got malaria. His uncle nursed him back to health with a home brewed concoction of hot peppers and mulled wine.

Vincenzo doesn’t know yet whether he’ll attend Remembrance Day ceremonies on Wednesday—he’s been feeling a bit under the weather lately. But he’ll remember the 50 or 60 young men from his little area of central Italy who died in the war, including a favourite cousin, who always looked out for him, who was run over by a tank. He’ll also remember the American soldiers who liberated his family from their basement hideout.

“The soldiers fight not just for me or for you, they fight for everybody,” says Vincenzo. “Most of them, they had no choice, they had to do it. They’ve got to do what they’ve got to do.”

Of all his many memories, what he remember most is his family’s fierce determination to survive.

v2