Pino's story: from playing for Juve to starving in a concentration camp
His name was Giuseppe, but everyone called him was Pino. He was 21 years old and could score straight from the corner flag. His father, Italo, had raced alongside famed cyclist Sante Girardengo, even winning a leg of the Giro d'Italia, from Firenze to Viareggio.
His wife, Virginia, was there to meet him at the finish line. "What are you doing here? You belong at home!" he shouted, pushing Virginia away and driving her to tears. His mistress must have been nearby. Pino's brother, Sergio, inherited the cycling bug, and could always be found every day at Turin's Motovelodromo... even though he was supposed to be still in school. One day, his parents received a call: "Your son must be really ill, we haven't seen him in months!". The bike ended up in the cellar, along with Sergio's dreams.
Pino's sister, Adilia, was also busy, only it was rejecting a handsome boy's advances. His name was Gerbi... and he would, one day, become president of Torino. She, however, loved a certain Ezio, a poet and a passionate Juventino from Montecatini. Her heart won over reason. Women were different back then. Meanwhile, Pino kept bending them in from the corner. Only this time, he was doing it for Juventus' reserves. He'd done well enough to attract the attention of two senators like Giampiero Boniperti and Carletto Parola, who encouraged him to keep plugging away. The boy wasn't bad, they said, and he could go places. Fate, it seems, could be cruelly ironic, as he ended up in Greece... but as a sailor in the Italian Navy.
The big players had managed to avoid the draft... unlike Pino, who ended up working as a radio operator aboard an Italian destroyer. When Italy signed an armistice with the allies, Germany stabbed her in the back, attacking and sinking Pino's ship.
After a long journey full of trials and tribulations, Pino reached a concentration camp in Poland. He had to make do with hard bread and potato peel for lunch, and spent his time between his "meals" digging trenches whose use wasn't clear to anyone. The snow fell costantly, with the temperatures inside the dormitories falling to freezing. It was like living inside a fridge.
And to think that, comparatively speaking, it wasn't the worst of the lot: the camp commander allowing the prisoners some respite, and letting Pino to organize football games. Imagine that: a bunch of skeletal players chasing after a ball, though maybe ghosts would be more accurate. Still, it was better than nothing.
One night, three of them managed to run away. Desperation can make a man do unbelievable things, like opening a gap in barbed wire with nothing more than one's hands and teeth. At dawn they split up, wishing each other good luck. Pino was, probably, the luckiest of the three. He was found in a barn in the middle of nowhere by a farmer, whose husband had been shot by the advancing Germans, leaving her to care for their one-year-old son.
Pino quickly became the man of the house, and went from eating potato peel to cultivating them. Come the spring, the bombs stopped falling from the sky. The war was over. With Turin still in his heart, it took Pino an Odyssey of a journey on freighter trains to make it back to Italy. Italo and Virginia heard the doorbell go, and couldn't quite recognize the emaciated tramp who stood in front of them. Rapturous celebrations would follow, with the family finally united after years of agony.
By then, of course, Juventus were already great. Boniperti and Parola were the foundation of a Bianconeri team that only the Great Torino could beat. The concentration camp had, however, drained Pino of both his physical and mental energy, and he had to work to earn a living anyway, further separating him from his dream return. Who knows, maybe he'd even forgotten how to stick it in straight from the corner flag. Either way, his only contact with football was playing for Orbassano, a tiny club by comparison. Nobody believed Pino when he said that he'd played for Juventus, and some assumed that the camps had turned a screw or two loose. He could, of course, have put an end to all the speculation by producing the picture of him between Giampiero and Carletto, but he never did. Forget glass half full, his dreams were nothing more than a pile of shattered glass, left in a remote corner of his own memory.
Dedicated to my father, Giuseppe Bernardini
on Holocaust Memorial Day
Marco Bernardini, translated by Edo Dalmonte (@edodalmonte)
