As a brief reminder, the American National Archives (NARA) hold up to 1.5 million documents produced during the investigations of the Allied Screening Commission (ASC), tasked to reward Italians who had sheltered Allied escapers after the Armistice in September 1943. Aside from the fascinating administrative documents, there are close to 80,000 files each relating to an individual whose assistance ranged from providing a few meals to hiding the ragged young men who turned up at their door for up to 18 months.
These files contain many personal testimonies from both the escapers and their saviours, the content of which can be extraordinarily emotional, especially for the prisoners’ descendants when coming across a letter urging the ASC to hurry up with a monetary compensation, or their Italian counterparts discovering the shaky signature of their Italian forebear (many of whom were functionally illiterate).
It has been a long-term goal of the Trust to persuade NARA to make these far more accessible, something that has now been achieved with the initiation of a digitisation project for the whole archive, which the Trust is part-funding at the cost of £250,000. The trustees consider that this is justified by the huge historical significance of the source material.
The Trust is now receiving reports almost weekly from researchers, both Italian and other nationalities, who are making wonderful discoveries, often after a hopeless search of many years’ duration.
Italian Massimo Piacentini from Piedmont has unearthed a file relating to Fontanellato:
“In the village of Magherno, not far from my home, I discovered that another fallen man lived. This is Eligio Zucca, a guard on duty in the Fontanellato camp. He was among the few who did not flee, but he remained loyal to the camp commander Eugenio Vicedomini, allowing the PoWs to escape in time before the Germans arrived [see L’Orizzonte del Campo, by Marco Minardi, published by MSMT as Bugle Call to Freedom]. He too was deported to Germany like his commander and never returned. His story was told to me by his niece Mrs. Albertini Carelli from Magherno. As you can see, also thanks to the new documents put online by Nara, new stories of forgotten Helpers are always coming out.”
And perhaps the most exciting, because it is so personal to Trust members, is the story of Marco Ercoli, from Smerillo in southern Marche, and his search for the American escapers sheltered by his grandmother.
Letizia del Gobbo was a sharecropper in the village of Smerillo, widowed with six children. Only the intervention of the local priest saved her from eviction by her landlord (given she no longer had enough manpower to maximise production); thus Letizia was still in place after the Armistice and able to play her part in sheltering, feeding and clothing several escapers.
Her grandson, Marco, remembers one of the Americans making a return visit to Smerillo in the 1990s, but the only information he still had was a photograph and the knowledge that his name was “Beo”. Both Dennis Hill, of the Camp 59 Survivors website, and Anne Copley of MSMT made efforts to find out more, with Dennis suggesting that “Beo” was in fact an Italianisation of the American pronunciation of “Bill”.
During the Trust commemorations in September 2023, Marco told his story to the 100 or so participants, and Dennis confirmed that he would continue to try and find the elusive “Beo”.
And so, in March 2024 Dennis uncovered Letizia’s file in the NARA Archives, having been able to search the Index of Helpers online. It contains moving letters from those sheltered by her, including one from Sgt Micheal Rotunno of the 18th Infantry 1st Division which reads:
“Dated 17 June 1944.
Kindly treat this family with respect. They’ve treated all prisoners of war with all their heart, and 14 other soldiers have been eating at this house. Please see that their [sic] taken care of. Even if it comes out of my pay. They’ve taken care of me for nine months. The whole town has treated prisoners of war fine.”
A very fine recommendation for Letizia, who had paid medical and other bills for her escapers. And another letter finally provided Marco with Beo’s true identity – he was Staff Sergeant William Fleischauer from Delaware. His experiences in Italy led to him becoming a Baptist minister. By the power of Facebook we are now in contact with William’s family who are keen to hear more. So, thanks to the opening-up of NARA records, a reunion can take now place between two families whose past is so dramatically intertwined. Marco himself describes what these discoveries mean to him:
“I want to sincerely thank the MSM Trust for giving me the opportunity, through Dennis’s crucial research work, to read the precious information stored in NARA’s archives which unveiled a mystery that had been present in my family for decades. As you are aware, I have always known that during the Second World War my grandmother Letizia Galiè Del Gobbo (Litì in local dialect) hosted and helped two Americans, Beo and Michele. They were former prisoners of the PG 59 prison camp at Servigliano in the Marche region, located not very far from Smerillo, a small town where my grandmother, widowed for some years, lived in 1943 with her six children – three boys and three girls.
Imagine how I felt when I saw my grandmother’s signature, uncertain and trembling, on some documents preserved by NARA, what profound emotion moved me when I read Michele’s words thanking my grandmother for everything she had done, and how enormously surprised I was to find that two other American ex-prisoners had also been helped by grandmother Litì.
On the web I then found the tombs of Michele, Beo and his wife, but Dennis, thanks to the information in the NARA archives, hopes to connect with some relatives who are still alive.
The only strong regret that slightly tarnishes the great joy of this discovery that had eluded me for years is that I will not be able to share it with my father who passed away on July 25th last year, nor with any other relative who witnessed those times and had the opportunity to get to know the Americans who were my grandmother’s guests.
Thank you, thank you, thank you, from the bottom of my heart.”
The full story of Marco’s search for Beo can be found on Dennis Hill’s website entitled “A Haven in Smerillo” https://camp59survivors.com/2020/08/02/a-haven-in-smerillo/.
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