Free The Lost Catacomb by Shifra Hochberg

thirteen
men whose families would never know for certain how or where they had perished — remain anonymous
to this very day.
    Once a year, on March 24 th , municipal officials in
Rome honor the dead — 335
innocent victims murdered by the Germans on the orders of Obersturmbannf ü hrer Herbert
Kappler as retribution for a partisan attack on a group of SS soldiers on the
Via Rassella in the heart of Rome in 1944.   Ironically, the so-called German soldiers who had been killed by the Resistenza were actually troops from the southern Tyrol area, a section of Austria that
had at one time been annexed to Italy, a fact that was conveniently ignored by
the SS.
    In a typical Nazi revision of mathematics and the logic of
accountability, Kappler had ordered that ten people be killed for every dead
German.    Massive retaliation
and collective responsibility — those
were the keystones of Nazi policy.   Kappler ’ s
victims, seventy-nine of them Jewish, were taken without prior warning from
where they languished in Regina Coeli prison and the torture cells of Gestapo
headquarters at the Villa Wolkonsky, many of them already the victims of bad
luck, denuncia , and the random misfortunes of war.
    The name of the prison, “ Queen of Heaven, ” which had once been a monastery, was an ironic
misnomer, for conditions there were fearsome and harsh.   But even it was preferable to the fate
that awaited the victims of the massacre.   For those among them who were Catholic, the Queen of Heaven, the Holy
Virgin, would not intervene to save them, and for their Jewish compatriots
there would be no salvation either.
    Under the efficient command of Hauptsturmf ü hrer Theodor
Dannecker, who had been handpicked to implement Kappler ’ s orders, the prisoners were chained together in
groups of three and taken deep into the caves, where they were given the Nazi “ pill, ” the final cure for all
ailments and ills — a
bullet in the head or neck — and
left to die. Assisting in this hideously conceived enterprise were Hauptsturmf ü hrer Erik Priebke
and Standartenf ü hrer Karl Hass.
    The reprisal was carried out at exactly 3:30 PM, on March 24,
one day, to the minute, after the partisan attack on the Via Rassella had taken
place.   With typical German
precision, exactly sixty seconds were allotted for the execution of each
victim.   The bodies were then piled
on top of each other in layers and the entrance to the caves carefully
dynamited to destroy all evidence of the carnage.   And so this monstrous Nazi secret was
safe for a while.
    Now that Nicola was actually here, she felt a surprising
twinge of guilt over her lack of effort to see the caves on any of her previous
visits to Rome.   It was as if she
had somehow failed to come up to the mark, to some sort of collective or
universally acknowledged standard of empathy that should have been there as
part of her innate moral, and even emotional, awareness.
    She saw with unexpected clarity and an unsettling sense of
personal failure that each time she had passed the Ardeatine Caves and told
herself that she would visit them some day — but not now — that she had failed to acknowledge, on the
simplest and most conscious of levels, the legacy of pain that had produced this
memorial to the dead — pain
to which she should have felt some sort of link simply because her grandmother
was Italian, even if she knew nothing at all about Elena's past.
    What was the point, Nicola thought, of all her academic
pursuits if their only goals were career advancement and what she now perceived
to be perhaps nothing more than self-indulgent intellectual gratification?
    What was the point of all her knowledge about frescoes and
catacombs if there were no lesson, moral or spiritual, to be learned from them,
no deeply felt connection between the relics of the past and the people who had
created them — not
merely as cultural artifacts, but as evidence of the existential meaning of
their lives and