PROVIDENCE — As an Italian teenager during World War II, Pino Lella rescued countless lives from the Nazis.
As an elderly man with an incredible story to tell, Lella saved the life of Mark Sullivan, a former journalist and author who hit rock bottom in 2006.
“We went through an experience together that I have never been through with another human being,” said Sullivan, a Massachusetts native who 12 years ago was near bankruptcy and involved in a protracted business dispute.
At the time, Sullivan had also recently lost a brother to alcoholism. While driving into a Costco parking lot, he considered driving off a bridge.
“I didn’t do it, but I was as rattled as I had ever been in my life,” said Sullivan, who recalled putting his head on the steering wheel and saying, “God, you got to help me. I need a story that counts, that matters, that has a purpose to it.”
Later that day, at his wife’s urging, Sullivan attended a friend’s dinner party. It was there that he overheard a stranger talking about the story of Pino Lella.
“Hearing it changed my life. It completely changed my life,” said Sullivan, a Montana resident who traveled to Italy and spent six weeks with Lella, who was then 78 years old and still mentally sharp.
Their time together resulted in “Beneath a Scarlet Sky,” Sullivan’s best-selling historical novel that dramatizes Lella’s story as a teenage hero who helped countless Jews to escape through an underground railroad across the Italian Alps.
Sullivan will discuss the real-life stories behind the book at a joint Catholic-Jewish event on Oct. 6 at Temple Emanu-El at 99 Taft Ave., in Providence. The event, which is scheduled to begin at 7:30 p.m., will be co-sponsored by the Church of the Holy Name of Jesus and Temple Emanu-El.
Father Joseph Santos, pastor of Church of the Holy Name of Jesus Parish, which is co-sponsoring the talk, said Sullivan’s sister, who is a parishioner at his church, gave him a copy of the book, which he read in one week.
“It’s an enthralling story,” Father Santos said. “It’s not the perfect, beautiful, compact story that you would want, but it is reality. That is the one thing that really struck me. The realism of this man’s life, literally, comes bleeding through the pages. It’s a book I would recommend to almost anybody who wants to read about real life, and what it means to do the best you can with what God gives you to work with.”
Sullivan, who has spoken before several Jewish audiences, said the story he tells is universal. The Rhode Island talk will be the first time that he will present his book in a forum co-sponsored by a Catholic organization.
“The fact that it’s bringing both religions together just makes me very happy,” said Sullivan, who spent weeks listening to Lella recount his story in painstaking detail. For nine years, Sullivan also interviewed historians and Holocaust experts, and dug through war archives in Germany, Italy, the United States and Great Britain.
“I came back from Italy a different person,” Sullivan said. “I vowed to tell the story to as many people as possible. I just didn’t expect it was going to take me 10 years to write it.”
The novel — which has sold more than 1 million copies and will be made into a film starring actor Tom Holland of Spider-Man fame — recounts Lella’s experiences while helping Jews escape through the Alps, and later as a spy after being conscripted into the German Army.
Lella, who was code-named “Observer” in the Italian Resistance, became the personal driver for Adolf Hitler’s left-hand man in Italy and one of the Third Reich’s most powerful commanders.
Lella, who is still alive and regularly communicates with Sullivan, persevered through traumatic wartime experiences, surviving the horrors of the Nazi occupation only to suffer his biggest loss just as the war was won.
“He buried a lot of things, which is not surprising given what he went through,” Sullivan said. “He definitely suffered through PTSD.”
Hearing directly from Lella on how he dealt with those tragedies helped Sullivan to attain some perspective on the misfortunes in his own life.
“They’re part of your life,” Sullivan said. “Unless you’re lucky, these pivotal changes in your life are almost always a tragedy, but it’s about the meaning that you ascribe to them.
“I came back from Italy, moved, inspired, transformed and I wanted other people to have that experience,” said Sullivan, who added that the most rewarding thing for him since writing the book has been the letters from people who were in deep despair or suicidal and said the book changed their lives.
“I told the story as I best understood it,” said Sullivan, who explained that he wrote Lella’s story as a novel because the Nazis destroyed too many documents and some of the people involved in the story have long been dead.
“Novels can bring a story alive in a way that non-fiction cannot,” Sullivan said. “And I wanted people to experience it as if they lived it, and in that, I think I was successful.”
