The long,dangerous WWII Polish diaspora to Italy, Gothic Line - Part 2; a simple twist of fate turns potential tradedy into a love story for a Jewish refugee that fought in the Polish Army in Italy

``The further backwards you can look, the further forward you can see,'' Winston Churchill on the need to know history. By Joe Kirwin When Leone Singer escaped Austria and Hitler's Jewish genocide the ever changing national borders in central Europe confused a bureaucratic in the city of Trieste. As a result he issued iin 1938 an identity card that determined Leone's nationality as stateless and, most important, it omitted his Jewish heritage. As a result he was able to begin a new life in Italy. But eventually the Fascist government caught up with him and had him arrested in mid 1943 - but not as a Jew but as a stateless refugee. When Mussolini was arrested and Italy signed an armistice in September of 1943 with the Allied countries, Italian police released Leone Singer and others at the prison and told them to flee before the Nazis arrived. Leone Singer and several others escaped to a small fishing village east of Rome on the Adriatic Sea and paid a fisherman to take them over the night to the port town of Ancona where the Polish army was preparing for the Gothic Line offensive. Leone Singer joined the Polish Army. In February when the fighting against the Nazis halted along the Senio River and the devastating news of the Yalta Conference arrived Leone Singer was able to convince bureaucrats in Rome that he had residency rights thanks to the faulty info on his 1938 residency card. Working In that Rome bureaucratic office was a former partisan from the Justice and Liberty group named Fortunata Romeo. Shortly thereafter, she and Leone would fall in love and son Enrico Singer was born in 1947. Enrico would go on to become a prominent Italian journalist where he served as a foreign correspondent in different European capitals until retiring 15 years ago. He tells the family story of tragedy (his grandparents were killed in the Holocaust) as well as luck, love and now dismay as refugees are scapegoated and war is raging in Ukraine where his family descended.