It wasn’t until after my grandmother had been dead for some weeks that I discovered her full story on the floor of my garage.
I’d been very close to her, and I’d heard the story before (or so I thought). She was 16 when she left Italy and came to America to visit her aunt and uncle for a few months. World War II broke out, and she couldn’t go home until forty years later when the Americans had decimated her village and her family.
That’s all she would tell me for my 9th-grade family history project, so I figured that was it. If it wasn’t, she’d tell me, probably while making her famous pizzelles.
A few weeks after her funeral in my senior year of high school, I went to the garage to sort through the boxes of her things we’d been sent from her home in Ohio.
I came across photo albums from the forties, fifties, and sixties (including one of a guy on a horse, apparently one of her many boyfriends, come to pick her up for their date). There was nothing before 1939 when she came over. This makes sense to me now, but at the time, I really wondered why she didn’t have a single photo from Italy. We just had the one of her coming off the boat, looking tired and hungry.
I figured she hadn’t thought of bringing a photo with her if she was just staying for a few months. Nevertheless, I googled her right there on the floor of my garage.
That’s where it started. I found her Ohio obituary. And I realized I had never really known my grandmother at all.
This is the real story of my grandmother, the accidental refugee.
She was born in 1923, not in 1919 like I’d thought. She was the oldest of six children, not four. She had three younger siblings I’d never heard of, all of whom had died before her. She was named Vittoria, after her mother who died giving birth to her.
Her father, Niccolo Cerretano (after whom she gave my dad the middle name Nicholas, which gave me my name, Nicolette), had a German friend who warned him of the coming Nazi invasion.
Side note: I have a whole theory about this friend and how he could know that information and why he would pass it on to an Italian, and basically that theory is that he was a spy for the resistance, which is probably not true, but I like to think it is.
Anyway, according to the obituary, my great-grandfather sent my grandmother away to escape the war. Niccolo probably believed he and the other children would follow, but they never did. I don’t think my grandmother ever knew her father’s true intentions. If she did, she never mentioned it.
According to my grandmother, the Nazi Gestapo arrived at Niccolo’s house after she left, demanding his property. Luckily, Niccolo’s German friend was present and told them that Niccolo was a Nazi sympathizer. The Nazis left his property and his family to be destroyed by the Americans.
Not that I’m bitter about it.
After my grandmother arrived, the war broke out in America. (She always said it was “a week” after she came, but I think it was more like a few months.) She realized she couldn’t go home and decided to get a job as a seamstress making American uniforms. She went to night school to learn English, and before she died, gave me the book with which she learned. It’s pretty cool, super old, and complete with illustrations.
At her job, she met my grandfather’s sister, who introduced her to my grandfather, and the rest is living history.