BY STEVE DAMISH
Metro Editor
Love Flourishes
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Amalio and Paulette Giovanniello are reflected in a mirror in their Avon home recently as they look at their Sept. 29, 1945, wedding photo. Paulette has since been admitted to Brockton Hospital for cancer treatment.
MARC VASCONCELLOS/THE ENTERPRISE
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"Our sturdy daughter."
That's how Lucien and Adele Limousin had always thought of their youngest girl, the reserved Paulette.
She was petite and demur, but sturdy. After all, she had endured more in her 22 years than most do in a lifetime she had survived a world war.
In 1940, at the outset of the war, she dodged strafing fighter planes as she fled Paris on a bicycle, pedaling 500 miles to a safe haven with relatives in southern France.
When she returned home, she learned to avoid the Nazi troops she found occupying the City of Lights.
She suffered with the loss of her father, fear for her younger brother in the French Resistance, the scarcity of food, and her fading hopes of finding love.
Years of hardship and deprivation had made Paulette strong.
Still, as she rode the train from New York to Boston on March 25, 1946, the French girl felt unsettled.
Her husband, Amalio "Gio" Giovanniello, sat with her, holding her hand. But she remained a stranger in a foreign land, a place where she didn't speak the language and didn't understand the culture.
She had only Gio, the Italian-American GI from Brockton, with whom she had spent just nine days in the past 13 months.
Now, two days after arriving in New York and seeing Gio for the first time in six months, Paulette was about to meet his family his 10 siblings and his parents, Ersillia and Mickele, who only allowed Italian to be spoken in their Brockton home.
Gio described his family to the quiet, reserved Paulette as "very expressive."
World War II was over, but Paulette felt more struggles looming ahead. Soon, she would need to be the sturdy one again.
If Paulette's family was unhappy about her leaving Paris, Gio's family was just as unhappy about her coming to Brockton.
After all, she was the French girl Gio's family had heard so much about but had never met the one who stole their Gio's heart during the war in Europe, captivating him with all of those letters.
Gio's parents shook their heads in disbelief when he told them she had written more than 400 to him. Without them, they realized, the relationship would have never blossomed, and Gio would have returned home to marry a local Italian girl.
Paulette and Gio would have still met during the liberation of Paris in August 1944, but then Gio would have pushed on with his unit, perhaps never to return to the city.
He might never have seen the French girl again.
But the letters. She wrote him so many letters five or six a week. She emptied her heart to him, sent photographs won his love.
The French girl and her letters they were the reason Gio had neglected his family during the last year of the war, why he wasn't marrying an Italian girl, like his parents wanted.
Watching the unfamiliar countryside slide by as the train rolled north, Paulette squeezed Gio's hand. She wasn't just going to meet the Giovanniellos, she was going to move into their Otis Street home.
Gio had prepared an upstairs room in the house the couple would share with his parents, two of his brothers and a sister.
It would be the "expressive" Giovanniellos and the quiet but sturdy Paulette.
When Gio brought her in, the exuberant Giovanniellos enveloped Paulette in a blur of affection, overwhelming her in a cascade of hugs and kisses and Italian welcomes she didn't understand.
Paulette was at her new home.
The family soon gathered at the dinner table and plunged into a conversation Paulette had no way to join.
She had struggled to learn some English to write letters to Gio, but now, in the Giovanniellos' home, she would have to learn Italian.
"I never knew what they were talking about in his house," said Paulette. "His mother used to invite me to come down and join her and her friends for coffee, but I would just sit there and drink the coffee because I couldn't talk to them."
Early on, with Gio attending architecture school and working for his father managing several properties in the neighborhood, Paulette often retreated to her room and the sewing machine Gio had bought her.
She made dresses, studied Italian, and wrote more letters to her family in Paris.
The first year was the hardest, but 11 months later on March 1, 1947 their only child was born, a son. They named him Christian, after Paulette's younger brother, the Resistance fighter.
Paulette and Ersillia had little in common, but now they had a baby to care for together.
Paulette and Gio stayed with his family for another year, but by the time Christian started learning to talk, they had their own house, on Summer Street in Brockton.
They wouldn't speak Italian there. Instead, there was a little English.
But a lot of French.
Gio never wanted more than one child. Having had a son first, the combat veteran feared he might have only boys, and that one day they would have to leave and fight a war, as he had.
"I'll never forget what my mother went through with having her sons leave for war," said Gio. "It's a pain you have to live through to understand. I never wanted to go through that, and didn't want Paulette to have to go through that."
Gio excelled as an architect, and would eventually help design the Dana Farber Cancer Institute and Children's Hospital in Boston. As he learned the profession, Paulette raised Christian, established a dress-making business of her own in Brockton, and began tracking down other French war brides in the area through newspaper articles.
She found several, and helped form a war bride club that met weekly, a gathering at which the women, even the demure ones like Paulette, could speak their minds.
And speak them in French.
Paulette met a French girl who was an instructor at a Gloria Stevens studio in Stoughton and joined the class, becoming consumed by the fitness craze at the time.
She did aerobics daily, and soon bought a treadmill for the basement, walking two miles a day.
Paulette couldn't believe the quantity of food that was available in the United States; it had only been three years since she lived in occupied Paris, where milk was nonexistent, a piece of tainted meat was available once a month, if you were lucky, and every thing tasty or good was consumed by the German occupiers.
Living with Gio's mother, there were sumptuous meals and Sunday dinners that lasted five hours. Paulette had more clothing and food than she had dreamed possible.
But she hungered for the one thing that sustained her during the four years of Nazi occupation.
Her family.
Her mother, Adele, visited Paulette in Brockton just once, in 1957.
"She got along great with my parents, and she saw how much my family had grown to love Paulette by now," said Gio. "My father was a rigid disciplinarian, and it took a while for him and Paulette to grow close to each other. But eventually he loved her like a daughter maybe even more."
Life was good for Gio and Paulette. He had a burgeoning career, Paulette had friends who spoke her language and shared her culture, and the Giovanniello family continued to grow.
Their son Christian would marry and have three sons, one of whom he named Christian, although he goes by Chris.
Paulette and Gio now have three greatgrandchildren.
In an ironic twist, Gio's grandson, Chris, returned to Paulette's French roots, moving with his wife and two children in March to the alpine city of Grenoble, famous for the 1968 Winter Olympic Games.
Through the decades, Gio and Paulette have returned several times to France, not just to see Paulette's family, but for Gio to show his children the battlefields where he almost died, and the city where he found new life.
On June 6, 1994, the 50th anniversary of D-Day, President Bill Clinton and veterans of the battle gathered at a memorial at Omaha beach to remember those who fought.
Gio was honored to shake the president's hand, but not for himself. He felt he represented the thousands who couldn't be there, and whenever he reflects on the battle, he has the same reaction he had when he met the president.
He cries.
Gio doesn't like talking about D-Day, or the Battle of the Bulge. For him, combat has no cousins. Only members of the immediate family, the soldiers who fought, can understand it. And those who understand it, can't explain it.
Gio tried a few times, once talking to French elementary students when he traveled to Paris on various battle anniversaries, such as the Bulge.
He tried to explain what he had been through, what the students' forebearers had been through. But when he looked out at the classroom, he was as overcome as he had been shaking the president's hand.
He cried.
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Amalio and Paulette Giovanniello hold hands as they discuss their life. Paulette is wearing the ring Gio is unable to wear rings because of war wounds to his hands.
MARC VASCONCELLOS/THE ENTERPRISE
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Much of Gio and Paulette's Avon home reflects the war years and their enduring love.
The house itself, dressed in bright blue paint and adorned with French decorations, wouldn't be out of place in the Paris suburbs.
Gio, who designed the home, has made the basement a shrine to the invasion of Normandy and the Battle of the Bulge swastikas he pulled from a trench hang on one wall, a map of Normandy on the other, and, encased in glass, honors he received from the French government.
Gio has spent the last decade organizing the memorabilia, as well as his memoirs and "5,000 feet of film" he shot during trips back to Paris.
Upstairs is a shrine to Paulette. Photographs of her family and items from Paris are displayed in all the rooms.
But one piece of treasure is missing the letters, Gio's foxhole gold.
Ten years ago, while reorganizing her home, Paulette found the letters carefully bundled in Gio's bureau. In a decision Gio called "the worst of my life," he honored her request to take them to the back yard and burn them.
"We were getting old, and she didn't want other people to read them," Gio said. "So I did what she wanted. I've regretted it ever since."
Two years ago, Paulette began losing weight, and tests showed she had a malignant tumor in her abdomen. For the first time in her life, the sturdy Paulette had to be hospitalized.
"When my mother asked me why I had married a girl from France, I told her that every hundred years a woman like my wife comes along," Gio said, "and when she did, I was lucky enough to meet her. I believe strongly that I shouldn't be here today, especially with what I went through. It's because of my wife that I'm here, because of her and her letters that I survived the war.
"I'm convinced of it. She wasn't just writing me letters all that time, after all, she was giving me reasons to live. She was actually saving my life."
Paulette, 83, has been admitted to Brockton Hospital for treatment.
Gio spends every day, from 7:30 a.m. to 10 p.m., at her bedside.
Many days, Paulette is too fatigued to talk, so the old soldier does what he did 61 years ago, when an air raid alarm brought them together in the basement of her Paris apartment building:
He sits and stares and smiles at his beautiful French girl. This is la promesse eternelle.
And even now, Gio considers himself a lucky man.
"Hey, I'm in love," he said. "How many people can say that and really mean it? I can."
Metro Editor Steve Damish can be reached at sdamish@enterprisenews.com.
Copyright 2005 The Enterprise
