A shell fragment took away part of his skull and doctors gave him six years to live—he lived eighty-four with a steel plate in his head, carrying inside war stories he told only once, under a pergola in Abruzzo, when he finally found the courage to open doors that had stayed closed for decades.
Pina Di Ciaccio had survived a minefield, Nazi soldiers, and years of hunger, but at thirty-two she faced a different kind of battle: marriage not for love, but to avoid living "under the sister-in-law."
After Armando's story, it's time for his wife, my grandmother Pina. From a harsh childhood of labor, to a youth that could have ended in illness, or with that Nazi pistol pointed at her heart. Or in the minefield she crossed alone.
EYES TO SEE 