Ten Devils: The Legend of Escaped Prisoners Hunting Their Executioners

Spring 1945. As the war in Italy crumbled under the weight of German defeat and partisan uprisings, a dark event shook the mountains of the Tuscan-Emilian Apennines. At dawn on April 17, in the woods above a small village between the provinces of Modena and Lucca, a farmer searching for a lost goat found the body of a German officer hanging from a centuries-old chestnut tree.

The corpse swayed gently in the cold morning wind, its boots still shiny from the dry mud of the military roads. Its face was savagely flayed, as if someone had attempted to erase its identity before it even realized its fate. On its chest, carved with a blade or perhaps burned with a hot iron, was a number: 10. The news reached the German garrison in Pavullo within hours. Initially, it was thought to be a peasant vendetta to settle scores, perhaps the work of a particularly merciless partisan band.

But two days later, along a mule track leading to an ancient, abandoned monastery, two more bodies were found. They were Wehrmacht soldiers, lying back to back around the remains of a dead fire. Their jackets were riddled with bullets fired at point-blank range, but it wasn’t death that worried those who discovered them. The same mark appeared on both sides: 10. There were no political leaflets, no partisan flags, no slogans against the Reich, just the dead and that number. The German command in the area entrusted the case to Major Otto Reinart, a veteran of the Eastern Front, a tough and prudent man, little inclined to superstition.

Reinart read the reports in silence, one after the other. Then he stopped in front of his office window, from which he could see the damp rooftops of the village and, beyond, the black line of mountains. “This isn’t the usual partisan work,” he finally said in a low voice. The lieutenant beside him didn’t dare answer. “The partisans attack bridges, convoys, telephone lines; they kill out of necessity.” Reinart placed the file on his desk. “This is personal.”

That same evening, an anonymous letter arrived. It had been slipped under the command door in a mud-stained envelope, without a stamp or return address. The text was brief, written in halting, almost ungrammatical German, as if the writer had learned the enemy’s language only to use it against him. It simply said: “We’ve returned for the account.” At the bottom of the page was a signature: the 10th. From that moment, in the barracks, at the checkpoints, and even among the men of the fascist republican militias, a new unease began to spread. It wasn’t the usual fear of ambushes, nor the dread of Allied bombings or partisan roundups. It was something different, more ancient and cold. Someone hidden in those mountains wasn’t fighting for victory; they were fighting for revenge, and they had only just begun.

A year earlier, far from the woods where the Germans would begin dying one by one, the world, for some men, had stopped behind barbed wire. During the summer of 1944, in the arid hills between Emilia and Tuscany, there was a place that on German military maps appeared to be a simple transit camp, but which was in reality a slow, methodical machine of annihilation. It stood next to the remains of an old stone quarry, surrounded by earthworks, watchtowers, and double electrified fences. From afar, it looked like a gray, open sore in the Italian countryside. Up close, it was worse: mud, dust, overflowing latrines, rotting wooden huts, and the acrid smell of sweat, coagulated blood, mold, and burnt soup. Everything inside had lost its name. The men were no longer men, but numbers. The days were not days, but a succession of shouted orders, sudden shots, rushes to forced labor, exhausting toil and sleepless nights.

The prisoners came from every region of Italy. There were partisans captured during roundups, soldiers who had disbanded after September 8th, those refusing to sign up for the Social Republic’s draft, farmers accused of providing bread or shelter to rebels, students found with clandestine leaflets, priests, smugglers, Jews, workers suspected of sabotage. The Germans mixed them together intentionally, convinced that hunger, fear, and mistrust would do the rest, and they were often right. In the camp, one quickly learned that desperation wears one down faster than chains. Those who entered with a face, a voice, and a story ended up retaining only their own shadows. At dawn, even before the sun had warmed the quarry’s stones, sirens shattered the survivors’ sleep. The prisoners staggered out of the barracks, pale, swollen with fever, or hollowed out by dysentery, and were lined up in the square for roll call. A badly placed cap, a look deemed insolent or a delay of a few seconds were enough for the truncheon blows to be unleashed.

The German guards alternated with local fascist militiamen, men who spoke the same language as the prisoners, but who seemed to have forgotten all brotherhood. Some beat them out of fanaticism, others out of fear, still others for the pure pleasure of feeling like masters in a world that was crumbling. The dogs, thin and nervous, growled at the slightest movement. The watchtowers dominated everything. No corner was truly dark, no silence was truly safe. During the day, the prisoners were sent to work in the quarry, in the warehouses, in makeshift workshops, or along the military roads. They broke rocks until their hands were broken, dragged crates of ammunition, loaded trucks, dug trenches that might never be used. They returned in the evening hunched, covered in white dust, with red eyes and shattered shoulders. The ration was water tainted with potato peelings, yet it was enough to spark fights, silent and petty exchanges, and hushed betrayals. Hunger was a law stronger than any ideology. Those who did not learn to bend, to pretend, to observe and remain silent, died early.

In one of the huts closest to the north side of the fence, where the wind swept through the loosely fastened boards and in winter took your breath away like a blade, slept men who until a few months earlier would never have shared a table, much less a prison. The only thing that united them was their having survived long enough to understand how the camp functioned and the even rarer fact that they had not allowed themselves to be completely broken. Each of them bore a different burden. Some had lost their families, some their homeland, some their faith, some the faces they had had before the war. They spoke little, but they saw everything.

In that place, learning to look was more important than eating. The quietest of them all was a former sergeant in the royal army, a mountain man who had been a forest ranger before the conflict and knew the crests, gorges, and paths of the Apennines like others know the rooms of their own homes. In the camp, he moved with ferocious economy, like a hunted animal. He wasted no words, no gestures, no hatred. The guards had learned to distrust his cold, motionless eyes, because they were the eyes of someone who remembered everything and forgave nothing.

Beside him slept a former provincial professor, his fingers broken during an interrogation. The Germans had ruined his right hand, but not his mind. He continued to observe the changes, counting the steps, memorizing faces, voices, habits, and schedules, as if his brain had become the only place his captors could not enter. A little further away was an elderly man, gaunt from hunger but still equipped with precise hands, who had once worked with explosives and machinery in the ports of the south. He was one of those who spoke little and thought in terms of weights, pressures, triggers, and times.

In the field, he repaired tools and pretended to be useless, but anyone who looked closely would have said he hadn’t given up. Another, born in the alleys of Naples, had the quick, ambiguous smile of someone who grew up stealing necessities before he could even read. He knew how to pick a lock, get into anything, exchange a piece of bread for information, and information for a chance. The guards treated him like a harmless fool: it was their biggest mistake.

In the same hut, there was also a man who had once been a priest. He had an emaciated face, a soft voice, and the eyes of someone who had seen too much pain to continue speaking lightly of mercy. He hardly prayed anymore, but he was still able to hold others together when cold, hunger, or fear forced them to yield. Next to him slept a blacksmith with immense shoulders, his hands deformed by work and the abuse he had endured. Even though malnourished, he seemed built to bend iron and break bones. Then there was a boy who had studied medicine for only two years, long enough to know how to bandage a wound, stop a hemorrhage, or recognize a fatal fever. In the camp, the sick died quickly, but when he could, he intervened with dirty rags, stolen water, and a ferocious tenacity that seemed more adult than his face. Among them was a man capable of modifying his voice, his intonation, and even assuming the postures of a seasoned actor. In another era, he would have graced a stage; here, instead, he used his talent to mimic distant commands, distract guards, and briefly transform himself into someone no one expected. Yet another, raised among the woods and mules, knew how to find water, distinguish good herbs from poisonous ones, read the sky, and determine how far a storm was coming.

From the outside, they were just objects, debris piled up in a barracks. Looking closely, they were fragments of something that wasn’t yet dead. For weeks, the camp swallowed them up in days without anything seeming to change. Yet, beneath that surface of forced obedience, something was already shifting. An almost imperceptible gesture was enough: a piece of electrical wire stolen from the workshop, a guard observed too long, a key glimpsed on the wrong belt, a map glimpsed on a desk, a shift change that always started three minutes late. The camp wanted to reduce the men to exhausted beasts. Instead, in that barracks on the north side, some of them were being taught to become knives. No one could have said then exactly when it happened among those prisoners. Perhaps the moment they stopped thinking only of tomorrow, perhaps when they realized that surviving was no longer enough. Or maybe it was born in silence, without a word, in an exchange of glances during yet another roll call, while a guard beat an old man until he fell in the mud and no one could intervene.

In that place, pity was punished, anger was stifled, and hope was mocked. Only one thing remained that the jailers could not yet completely erase: memory. And it was memory itself, more than hunger and pain, that made that camp dangerous, because every name shouted, every kick, every blow to the back of the head, every face glimpsed in the dirty light of the turrets was guarded by someone. And sooner or later, one of them thought, staring at the barbed wire silhouetted against the red evening sky, the day would come when all those debts would be collected. There were ten of them, but in the camp no one truly saw them as a group. At first glance, they seemed simply men consumed by hunger, dust, and beatings, thrown into the same hut by chance and the cruelty of war. Only those who observed carefully would understand that something different was developing among them, something the Germans had not foreseen and that the fascists of the garrison could not have stopped in time.

The first was Matteo Valli, a former sergeant in the royal army born in a mountain village above Pistoia. Before the war, he had been a forest ranger and knew the Apennines like his own body: the windswept ridges, the hidden ravines, the chestnut groves where you could disappear even in broad daylight. He was a wiry, tough man, with a gaunt face and two eyes that always seemed to measure distances, exits, and dangers. In camp, he spoke little and listened a lot. The guards thought he was broken; in reality, he was learning every noise in the compound, every shift change, every mistake of his jailers. The others had already begun to recognize in him what in wartime counts more than rank: a leader. The second was Ettore Benassi, an elementary school teacher from Reggio Emilia, arrested for hiding a young draft dodger in the rectory. During the interrogation, they had broken two fingers on his right hand, but they had not succeeded in shattering his memory. Ettore remembered everything: faces, accents, routes, numbers, times, nicknames, even the way a guard adjusted his belt before climbing into the turret. He had a gentle, almost fragile air, and perhaps that was precisely why the Germans neglected him. No one would have imagined that this taciturn master was redrawing the camp in his head according to a map as precise as a military chart.

The third was Salvatore Locascio, a Sicilian from Augusta, a dockworker and gunpowder magazine man. Before the war, he had worked in docks, warehouses, and naval workshops. He knew explosives as intimately as others know bread. He was already older than the others, and hunger had dried his face to the point of resembling an old sailor who had accidentally fallen ashore, but his hands never trembled. In the field, he repaired tools, dragged crates, and lowered his eyes when officers passed. He kept thinking to himself in terms of fuses, friction, pressure, and minimum charges. To many, he seemed like a man at the end; in reality, he was simply waiting for the right material. The fourth was Nino Esposito, a Neapolitan from the Spanish Quarter, a pickpocket, con man, day-labor smuggler, and professional liar. If the war hadn’t barred his way, he probably would have ended up in prison anyway, but for far less noble reasons. He had a friendly face, slender hands, a sly smile, and an almost supernatural talent for disappearing where no one would think to look. He could open locks and take objects from pockets, talk to anyone, and understand in a matter of minutes what drove a man: fear, vanity, hunger, or stupidity. The guards laughed at his jokes and often left him too close to the gates, warehouses, and kitchens. Every time that happened, Nino took something away. Sometimes it was a piece of wire, sometimes information, sometimes a possibility.

The fifth was Don Luca Ferretti, former parish priest of a village perched on a hill outside Modena. He had hidden Jews, sheltered wounded partisans, and issued stern warnings to the fascists until someone reported him. He had entered the camp with his back straight and a rosary around his neck. Nothing of the rosary remained, and very little of the straight back, but he retained an austere form of authority that did not rely on force. He did not preach and almost never promised miracles. Yet, when someone collapsed, when fear turned to hysteria or desperation led to betrayal, his deep voice was enough to bring them back into line. He had lost many illusions, perhaps even peace with God, but not the conviction that evil must be faced and called by its name. The sixth was Bruno Rinaldi, a blacksmith from Ferrara, a massive man even after months of hardship, with hands so large they seemed designed to squeeze fate’s neck. He had been arrested for punching a militia sergeant who demanded horses, iron, and obedience from an already starving village. Bruno was neither cultured nor subtle, nor inclined to conversation, but he understood metal, fatigue, and anger. In the workshop, they had him repair broken hinges, blades, and tools. Every time he touched a piece of iron, he examined it as if wondering what other form it could take: a point, a hook, a blade, a pin to be used as a weapon. In the camp, his strength was a threat; outside, it would become something much worse.

The seventh was Carlo Berti, a medical student in Bologna. Just twenty years old, his gaze had already grown adult because of the war. He had been arrested during a university raid with clandestine flyers hidden in the lining of his jacket and the names of the couriers he had memorized. In the camp, he did what he could to treat the sick with nothing: strips of cloth washed in dirty water, bent spoons, improvised stitches, stolen infusions, and steady hands. He hadn’t yet finished his studies, but he already possessed the gift no textbook teaches: the ability to work while others trembled. He looked at the wounds without turning away, the fever without pity, and the pain without rhetoric. He was the youngest, but no one there treated him like a boy. The eighth was Aldo Guidi, an actor from a Florentine company, arrested after reciting satirical verses against the Germans in front of the wrong people. He had an expressive face, a flexible voice, and a body that could change its appearance like a change of clothes. He could appear as a clerk, a peasant, a soldier, a beggar, a frightened Serb, or a drunken man. And in each of these guises there was something convincing and dangerous. In the camp, his talent had become a silent weapon. He mimicked the guards’ orders from afar, repeated their accents, studied their cadences and intonations. The others teased him, calling him a “comedian,” but they knew full well that the day he needed to deceive someone to live an extra hour, Aldo would be worth as much as a rifle.