Beneath a Scarlet Sky

Beneath a Scarlet Sky is a historical novel by Mark T. Sullivan, inspired by the true story of Pino Lella, a Milanese teenager living through the final years of the Second World War. When Allied bombing destroys his family's home in 1943, seventeen-year-old Pino is sent into the mountains, where he joins a network smuggling Jewish refugees across the Alps into neutral Switzerland — dangerous crossings he undertakes again and again.

To keep him from conscription to the Russian front, Pino's parents push him to enlist in the German army instead. He is assigned as the personal driver to a senior German general in occupied Milan, a posting that puts him inside the machinery of the occupation. From there he begins passing what he overhears to the Allied resistance, while falling for Anna, an older widow, and witnessing the deprivations and atrocities of the war's last months.

Sullivan drew the novel from interviews with the real Pino Lella, following him from the summer of 1943 through the war's end in 1945.