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Villa del Archimedes

Partanna, Sicily

1215 25 February 1943

I do not want to die that way, Professor Arturo Rossi thought as he looked through the doorway at the far end of the tiled hallway. It’s utterly terrible…inhuman.

His light olive skin paler than usual, the tall, slight fifty-five-year-old felt himself swaying, faint from all he had seen.

The bruised, disfigured bodies of four men lay strapped to battered wooden gurneys inside the room. The ancient villa on the hillside overlooking the Mediterranean Sea had six such rooms off of the common hall, three on either side, each of cold coarse stone with the windows to the outside boarded over. More than thirty men also lay bound to gurneys in the other rooms, lit by harsh light—alive, but barely.

A warm hand gently gripped Rossi’s left upper arm, steadying him, and he turned to look at his soft-spoken old friend from the University of Palermo.

Dr. Giuseppe Napoli, his wild mane of white hair flowing, had brought Rossi here to witness with his own eyes the unspeakable acts that were being committed by the German Schutzstaffel—the SS.

Rossi had followed the elderly physician’s stooped walk down the hallway in shocked silence. He had glanced through the staggered doorways and noticed that the condition of the men worsened room to room, from mildly sedated with no obvious illness to grave with astonishing symptoms.

And then they had come to this last room, with its horrid stench of death.

It was the worst of all.

The torsos were mostly covered by dirty gray sweat-and blood-stained gowns, the arms and legs exposed, and the wrists and ankles secured to the gurneys by worn-leather straps. All the bodies bore some sort of rash. The legs on a couple also showed small open wounds—infected and festering—while the arms and legs of the others were spotted with blisters filled with dark fluid.

Rossi noticed that the smell of rotting flesh was made worse—if that was possible—by the unemptied tin buckets hanging beneath the gurneys. These held what had been the contents of the men’s bowels, which with all Teutonic efficiency had passed through a hole fashioned in the gurneys for unattended evacuation.

Rossi quickly turned away from the doorway. His throat contracted, and he felt his eyes moisten, then a tear slip down his right cheek.

It was clear that these men—all Sicilians, as his friend had warned him—suffered greatly in their final weeks and days. Yet the contorted faces of the dead suggested that not even death had brought them any real peace.

Rossi realized that what disturbed him—beyond the obvious outrage at such atrocities against his fellow man—was that foreigners could come in and inflict such terrible things upon Sicilians in their own country in a villa named for Archimedes, perhaps the greatest of all Sicilians.

And that they could do it with what appeared to be absolute impunity.

But how can anything be done about something no one knows—or admits—is happening?

The villa, built by the Normans nine centuries earlier, overlooked the sea a little more than ten kilometers up the coast from Palermo’s Quattro Canti quarter—the “four corners” city center—and the Norman-built Royal Palace, as well as the University of Palermo.

Far enough away so that any screams or gunshots or whatever would be lost to the blowing winds. And the secret remains safe….

“So now you know,” Napoli whispered.

Rossi looked at his friend, who held a cotton handkerchief over his nose and mouth. Rossi could see in his eyes genuine sadness and more than a little fear.

Rossi nodded softly and risked another glance around the cold, hard room.

“The Germans have brought yellow fever here,” the doctor continued. “They use these human hosts to keep the virus alive…and, I think, to serve as an example of what they are capable of doing. I fear that this is just the beginning. I hear the Germans are experimenting elsewhere with other unorthodox methods—worse ones that also could be brought here.”

Rossi had heard such stories, too, when he had visited the University of Rome. Quietly told, they described what was happening in the concentration camps run by the SS. Humans treated worse than laboratory rats. Bodies dissected without benefit of anesthesia. Legs and arms and torsos collected and stacked dispassionately, like so many cords of firewood.

The stories recounted conditions and acts so horrific, it was said, that German soldiers had to be bribed with bonuses of cigarettes and salamis and schnapps in order for them to agree to serve there.

And now, here in Sicily, this outrage of using humans—Sicilians—to keep alive a deadly virus strain.