Heartbreak and Valor Beneath a Scarlet Sky


In Mark Sullivan's Beneath a Scarlet Sky, Pino Lella is a teenager on the cusp of manhood in Milan, Italy, as Hitler and the Nazis are murdering Jews there during World War II. 

Frightened by the increased violence in the city, Pino’s parents send him to live with a priest outside the city, where Pino begins guiding Jews to safety through treacherous mountain passes into Switzerland. When his parents force Pino to join the German SS as a way to keep safe from Hitler’s increasing hostilities, he becomes a spy.

Driving General Hans Leyers, Hitler’s main weapons man in Italy for the last two years of the war, Mimo provides valuable information to the Allied forces and partisans. At the same time, he struggles to compartmentalize the atrocities he sees General Leyers inflict. He is reminded by his uncle that he can’t save every Jew, but that his spy work is saving many more than he sees harmed.

Pino Lella’s story is a true one, and the author worked with the man himself to tell this forgotten tale. Pino’s experiences seem so insane, as he expertly drives Leyers and himself to safety when under attack by an Allied warplane, or when he sees his girlfriend murdered by firing line, that the reader wonders if this is all made up. 

The strength in Beneath a Scarlet Sky is in the material itself. The author thrives when Pino is in action, traversing the snowy Italian Alps in the dark of night, or running from an angry mob determined to kill Pino. Sullivan had a lot to work with, and he did a serviceable job of moving Pino across the page from one horrible, fascinating moment to the next. Sullivan however doesn’t linger too long in moments, and misses opportunities to build tensions or grapple with the horrors of war. In these ways, the book can seem to be on the surface of a world that could use more excavation.

Pino’s story needed to be told and Sullivan should be applauded for taking the time to do it. The end of the book provides a nice summary of his work as a researcher, and updates us on the characters’ lives after the war. Sullivan is wise to save this to the end, giving him room in the majority of the work to stretch his fiction-writing muscles.

Thanks to Kelly McNeill for recommending Beneath a Scarlet Sky. This book was not on my reading list, but during a recent lunch date with Kelly, who’d just read the full draft of my book, One Little Bolshevik, she recommended Beneath a Scarlet Sky. She thought I would find similarities. It is hard for me to find books like mine. This one wasn’t exactly the same, not about a little boy adopted by Nazis the way my father was, but, it felt familiar, and made me feel a little bit of community.

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