Mark Sullivan

Goldmine Reads

This book summary and analysis was created for individuals who want to extract the essential contents and are too busy to go through the full version. This book is not intended to replace the original book. Instead, we highly encourage you to buy the full version.

Pino Lella is an Italian teenage boy who spends his days doing what typical teenagers do: frolicking with friends and fawning over girls. As the destruction of war courses through the city of Milan, Pino loses his family home to the Allied bombs and is obliged to help Jews escape by traversing the Alps. Later on, he falls in love with a beautiful woman named Anna in whom he finds solace from the horrors of the war.

Pino’s safety is his parents’ top priority, so between being assigned to the frontlines or joining the Nazis, Pino’s parents choose the latter. He is forced by his parents to enlist in the German army. After being injured in combat, Pino is recruited as the interpreter and personal driver for General Hans Leyers, Hitler’s left hand who was assigned to oversee the Nazi operations in Italy. The General is among the Third Reich’s most enigmatic and formidable commanding officers.

Pino’s position provides him an opportunity to gather information from the German High Command and pass it onto the Allied forces. Working as a spy for the resistance, Pino endures the Nazis’ oppression and their atrocities by the strength he finds in his love for Anna and in his hope for a future in which the war is over and they are finally free.

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