A GI's Story from Borgovecchio

By CPL. Paul E. Deutschman, a U.S. soldier in a small Sardinian town, 1944.

There were two little girls, sisters obviously, who stood shyly (with a studied shyness, but I didn't suspect it), hand in hand at the edge of my own particular crowd of followers. They were perhaps 7 and 9 years old and were knowingly beautiful children, with the kind of unself-conscious beauty that is accustomed to being stared at and with the feminine wisdom of the ages written on their faces. Their dainty dresses were so clean and their whole appearances so shining and wholesome that they appeared like two little strangers in the town.

One of the sisters, the elder, winked at me and smiled winningly. When she saw my returning smile, she came up to me and took my hand in her tiny paw, never to release it. So there I was--with a little Italian beauty at either hand, promenading rather aimlessly, I thought, down the street, terribly and proudly conscious of the appreciative smiles we drew from passers-by and the pretty picture I made as one of America's ambassadors of goodwill in uniform.

But a moment later the procession halted . I found that they had led me to the doorway of the little store that sold what passed for ice cream-- a sugarless, flavorless, almost tasteless sherbet in an ersatz brown cone. Disillusioned, I got the point and bought cones all around-- for the two little sisters and for the 9 or 10 other kids trailing behind us who were also somehow part of the general strategy.

But I felt a little better a half-hour later when I saw the two little girls , with the same sweet studied smiles, leading another unsuspecting GI down the street to the same ice-cream store.

This was a mere oasis in a desert of misery. It was the one opportunity you had during all your time in Borgovecchio to indulge in the tattered "kids will be kids, all over the world" platitude, to see any similarity between the children of this Sardinian town and the children of American towns. It made your skin creep to think that on the Continent things will be worse, in France and Poland and Czechoslovakia and in the ghettos of Germany.