Mark T Sullivan, Best Selling Author
Mark Sullivan is the acclaimed author of Beneath a Scarlet Sky and 18 other novels, including the #1 New York Times bestselling Private series, which he writes with James Patterson.
Mark has received numerous awards for his writing, including the WHSmith Fresh Talent Award, and his works have been named a New York Times Notable Book and a Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year.
He grew up in Medfield, Massachusetts, and worked as a volunteer in the Peace Corps in Niger, West Africa.
An avid skier and adventurer, he lives with his wife in Bozeman, Montana, where he remains grateful for the miracle of every moment.
1. Can you tell us a little bit where you were at this point in your life? 3:23
2. When you heard about this story, when did you know that ... like what was it about this story that made you feel like this is worth the greatest story in the world to be told? 8:24
3. The forgotten war. 16:31
4. You got into journalism first? 19:08
5. How you go about crafting story? How do you develop these ideas? 23:25
5. What would you say are the elements of a good story. 29:07
6. What type of resistance did you face over the 10 year journey? 32:15
7. Tell us about the meeting when you first met with Leyers' daughter. 39:02
8. What have been some of the most memorable responses that you've gotten? 47:00
9. In what way did you feel fundamentally changed? 52:20
10. Do the one stars ever bother you? Do you ever go and read the one star reviews? 55:50
11. Did you say that this was going to be turned into a movie or no? Where are we on that? 59:30
Peter King: In this fifth episode of the PK Experience, I interview author Mark T. Sullivan. Now I ended up meeting Mark, I didn't know who he was ... I was at a business conference and we were at a dinner together and I ended up sitting next to him. Got to talking to him and Mark was telling me about this book he recently wrote called Beneath a Scarlet Sky, which if you haven't heard of it before, it's a novel. It's based on a true story World War II Italian man, young man, who ended up saving a lot of Jews from extermination and the incredible feats that he did in order to do that. As Mark was telling me this story, I was absolutely intrigued and fascinated by it, but what I'd come to understand was there's a story behind him writing this story which is just as fascinating and compelling. And it was the story of Mark and his life and how he really came to a watershed moment and was facing ... well, without giving too much away, it was a life and death moment. We'll just leave it at that.
And then how this book kind of came to be from that watershed moment. Truly, truly fascinating story. The book itself is getting rave reviews on Amazon, I'm looking at it right now. He's gotten over 13,200 five star reviews ... which, if you're on Amazon at all, you know that that many reviews in and of itself is amazing, but to have that many reviews and to have them be all five star is just absolutely incredible. I think that they're actually talking about turning this book into a movie, which would be amazing, I'd love to see it on the big screen. But without further ado, I'm gonna actually just turn it over to the interview because it's fascinating and I want to dive right into it. Enjoy it, leave a comment, let me know what you think. Thanks.
Mark, thank you for joining us today. Mark Sullivan, which by the way I have to ask you ... it's Mark T. Sullivan is it not?
Mark T Sullivan: It's both.
Peter King: Because Mark Sullivan is a powerful name, but Mark T. Sullivan is ... I mean that's Pulitzer Prize sounding. When did you start adding the T, is that an author thing or is that just something you decided to do at some point?
Mark T Sullivan: Well you know I was Mark T. Sullivan for a long time, then when I started working with Patterson I just dropped the T and I just left it at that.
Peter King: Gotcha. You have how many books out now?
Mark T Sullivan: 18.
Peter King: 18 books. That's quite an accomplishment. And right now, your latest book is your most successful book of all the books that you've written so far, is that correct?
Mark T Sullivan: I don't know about that, but it's certainly the one that's getting just a ton of attention at the moment. It's Beneath a Scarlet Sky, it's based on a true, untold story of World War II. It's a pretty amazing story, it took me 10 years to write.
Peter King: That's amazing. You and I connected a little over a week ago, we met at a conference, and you started to tell me about how the story came about. And what was so fascinating to me was sort of the behind the scenes story, and you go into it a little bit in the preface of the book. Can you tell us a little bit where you were at this point in your life, and how this story came to be ... because that to me is a story within the story.
Mark T Sullivan: You're breaking up there a little Peter, but I think I get the gist of it. Yeah, I was at the lowest point of my life the day I heard the story. My younger brother, he was my best friend ... had drunk himself to death. I'd written a draft of a novel that no one liked and no one wanted to represent. And I was involved in an ongoing business dispute that left me on the verge of personal bankruptcy. On a drive to a Costco on wintry afternoon in February of 2006, I realized I was worth more dead than alive. And considered driving into a bridge abutment so my wife and children could collect on the insurance. Thankfully I didn't do it, but I got to the Costco parking lot as rattled as I've ever been in my life. And I put my head on the steering wheel and I begged God and the universe for a story. One that I could get lost in and had purpose to.
The crazy thing is, that evening, three hours later, my wife forces me to go to a dinner party that I really did not want to attend, but we had canceled with these people several times. And I go to the dinner party and I hear the first snippets of the story, and I'm stunned because I say to myself, "Well it can't be true, we would have heard it before." But then I learned that the guy's alive, Pino Lella, in Italy and I came home. I told my wife I was gonna go to Italy to chase a 60 year old war story.
Peter King: Wow.
Mark T Sullivan: And she ... to her great credit, she said, "Bye."
Peter King: Oh man. You know, let me back up for a second though, because you ... at this point in your life, I mean obviously dealing with a family tragedy, did you not feel at that point though, with all the other books that you'd written that there was purpose behind them, or that you felt fulfilled by them? Or was it really more just family circumstance that caused that sort of moment in your life ... that milestone moment in your life?
Mark T Sullivan: My brother's death was the primary part, but you know I was at a point in my career where I'd gone through a lull ... when you're writers, you go through peaks and valleys, it's just what happens in terms of income and critical praise or whatever. And I'd taken in the chops a bunch right around that time. I'd had to fire a bunch of people that I was associated with in writing and I was being told that I'd never probably publish again under my own name. It was just a very depressing time for me. And really took me, again to the lowest point in my life. And yet now, today, I look back on that as one of the greatest days of my life.
Peter King: That's so amazing. In full transparency, where we met was at a Tony Robbins seminar ... and the perspective that you get sometimes on what you think maybe your darkest can potentially be lightest days. Out of curiosity, was that something that you'd gotten sort of in that personal development space, or was that something you'd kind of come to on your own?
Mark T Sullivan: I'd come to it on my own, realized ... I mean I knew ... I realized within a month, six weeks, that it was the greatest story I'd ever heard. And I knew it had given me purpose. I wanted to tell this man's story because when I went to Italy and spent the first three weeks with Pino Lella, I came back a fundamentally different person. You know I'd been active in personal development for 26, 27 years, and I'd sort of gotten off that train at that time in my life. Meeting Pino and learning what he had gone through, and understanding his perspective on life ... especially his understanding of how we deal with life's tragedies ... it changed me, it gave me a new perspective on life. You know not just tragedies, but how do you live day to day. And he taught me that, and I'm sure other people had tried to teach me that before.
It wasn't until that I heard it from somebody who was 78 and had gone through a lifetime and had managed to recover from seriously brutal things that happened to him in the last two years of World War II.
Peter King: When you heard about this story, when did you know that ... like what was it about this story that made you feel like this is worth the greatest story in the world to be told?
Mark T Sullivan: It was a story about a 17 year old boy who joins the Catholic underground, getting Jews out of Nazi occupied Italy, and he did it by working with priests in a school up in the Alps in Casa Alpina. And they would take the Jews up and over this mountain called the Groppera and over and into Switzerland, where it was neutral. And that in and of itself was an amazing story, especially when I went to the Groppera and I could see what it took. I mean Pino would typically try to downplay this stuff saying, "Oh, any competent Alpinist could have done it," but I'm a pretty confident Alpinist myself and when I saw what they went up ... you know, in street shoes most of the refugees, and the Jews trying to escape, I was stunned. There was that and then meeting him and listening to the story and realizing that there was much more to it, that he had become the driver to this mysterious General, who was the second most powerful German in Nazi-occupied Italy. And that he had become a spy inside the German high command.
I was blown away by it, but the more I talked to him, the more I realized that there was also this incredible spiritual story, you know how do we maintain our perspective and our belief in the basic goodness of life when horrible things happen to you? So it was a combination of all those three things. Plus when I realized when people didn't know much about the war in Italy, you know the focus was always on Germany, of France, or Russia, or what have you. It was just ... there were books written about it, but there was very little that I read that managed to summon up the emotional journey that Pino Lella had gone through. And that's what I really wanted to tell, was that emotional journey. Because he was devastated a number of times, when we were talking. It was interesting, I spent time with his ex-wife Yvonne who is also his best friend, and I must have been there almost three weeks and we went out to dinner, the three of us together.
And Pino, normally a very gregarious guy, just wonderful to be around, gentile, got great manners ... and he was very quiet. And he's not like that, he's very gregarious. Loves to talk and chat and his wife said, "Pino, what's the matter with you?" And she says, "You're so quiet." And he said, "Well, Yvonne, you've known me for nearly 40 years, how many times have you seen me cry?" And she said, "Cry? I've never seen you cry?" He looked over his shoulder at me ... I was in the back seat, and said, "Mark, you've known me for less than three weeks how many times have you seen me cry." And I said, "Oh 10, 12 times." And she was shocked about that because he had never opened up, he had buried this story. For necessarily so. It took a long time for me to figure out in my own mind that he had obviously suffered from PTSD and he had buried this story to be able to deal with it mentally. The more you find out about that, the more you find out just how common that is.
Peter King: Would you say that this is something that a lot of ... you know warriors, military veterans ... Would you say that that's you know, almost a cathartic thing for them as well, to share that story and to get that out. Is that a necessary process do you believe? Or not? If somebody knows somebody that's been through ... you know, obviously we're losing a lot of World War II veterans every day now, should these stories be out? Should they be telling these stories?
Mark T Sullivan: I think they should. You know 6,000 veterans die a day. 6,000 people who were in the war die a day. And so 6,000 stories vanish every day. If I hadn't gone to that dinner party and heard the first snippets of that story, Pino Lella's story never would have come to light. It would have died. The people within his family knew parts of it ... about Father Re and Casa Alpina and that he driven for the general, but they didn't know the specifics. He had never told them. It was cathartic for him, but it was also [inaudible 00:13:09] these stories. I spent an incredible amount of time going back and forth and over and over again, with him. Over stories that he would gloss it at first, try to downplay it at first, and it was only when I would go in again and again and again, that he began to reveal the true story. I don't know if he would have said it was a cathartic thing, it was brutal on him. It was brutal on me, it was the most emotional thing I had ever gone through. Being-
Peter King: Mark, did we lose you?
Mark T Sullivan: ... in with him and ... Can you hear me?
Peter King: Yeah, you cut out there for a second.
Mark T Sullivan: Okay. What was I saying? It was a brutal journey for him, emotionally, telling me this story. When I met him, when he picked me up at the airport the first time, he was bouncing all over the place. He was 78, 79 years old and drove like a maniac. I've never been in a car with anybody who can drive like that, ever. Scared the bejesus out of me, but by the end of that three weeks, he had physically and mentally aged, you know I could see it.
Peter King: Wow.
Mark T Sullivan: It was tough on him, you know. And it was tough on me. As I said, it was the most emotional thing I've ever done as a writer. To go through that experience.
Peter King: Now how has that affected his family ... as you said, his wife had known him for so long, didn't even know about this story. So how has that impacted his relationships with his own family? Do they embrace it? How has that changed anything?
Mark T Sullivan: Well that's the thing, because I was just over in Italy and I spent some time with Yvonne ... who is a friend of mine and I like her very much. And she said, "You know, it's in many ways like realizing that you lived with a stranger." That somebody held back this part of their life, and somebody that she didn't know. And I said to her, I said, "Do you remember when we had the conversation in the car about how many times he cried?" And she said, "I do remember it." I said, "You got mad at me. You were angry at me. That I heard the story and you had not." And I didn't know what to say. And I still don't know quite what to say. He needed to tell the story, I think because I was an independent third party, it was probably easier. But I also pushed him. You know when I went there I tried to write it as a journalist and tried to tell it from a pure historical point of view.
I realized that as the years when on that so many people had died and so many ... the Germans had burned so many documents, that I wasn't going to be able to get the kind of corroborative evidence that say, Laura Hillenbrand had in Unbroken ... but I still realized that the emotional arc of the story had to be told. And that's when I decided to tell it as a novel.
Peter King: Very interesting. You'd mentioned in the book too, that I guess in the Italian culture, that they really don't talk about the war much and how it's ... what do they call it? Like the forgotten war or something like that?
Mark T Sullivan: Yeah, that's what historians called it. You know they've called it the forgotten front because it's just never received the same sort of attention as D-Day, the battle for France, the entire western front, the eastern front ... Italy was sort of this forgotten place. And I lot of what I was told by talking to a lot of members ... former members of the Partisan Resistance, Pino, and other people was that they just didn't talk about it. And largely, they didn't talk about it because of the kind of savagery and retribution killing that went on in the past four or five days of the war. I remember talking to one guy and he said, "Yeah, I've never really talked about this. And I realized four or five years ago that I needed to, that people needed to know what had happened." And he actually went to high schools in Milan and kids laughed at him and said, "Well that never happened." It never happened because people don't talk about it, and because people don't talk about it, people won't remember. And that's a dangerous thing.
You know you want to understand what happened at that kind of point in history, so that we don't repeat it.
Peter King: Absolutely. I think to your credit, you went into this with a genuine desire to learn and passion about this story and also ... like you said ... I'm gathering from you a little bit that you sort of didn't take no for an answer kind of thing, when you went there and said, "This story really needs to be told." And I wonder if that ... you know for anybody that's listening to this that has maybe a grandfather or somebody that served in that war, that there's that desire there that we go there to truly understand what really happened. So like you said, it can be dangerous to not tell these stories.
Mark T Sullivan: Yes.
Peter King: So I think a lot of credit, absolutely, goes to you to help him open up and to share this story, that's quite remarkable. You grew up in Montana, is that correct?
Mark T Sullivan: No, I grew up outside of Boston. I've been in Montana for almost 20 years.
Peter King: Okay. And how did you get into ... you got into journalism first?
Mark T Sullivan: I did, I knew I wanted to be a writer from the time I was seven, it was just what I was gonna do, and you know ... I wrote off and on all the way through and I got to college and I was a writing and English major. When I graduated college I went into Peace Corp, because I wanted to have some kind of experience other than ... you know, growing up in suburbia, et cetera. It was there that I realized that I wanted to get a job where I was forced to write all the time. And so I went to the ... I came back after Peace Corp. and I applied to Northwestern's Medill School of Journalism and was accepted there. Went to school there and became a journalist and then an investigative journalist. That training, which was about 9, 10 years of my career, really set me up to be able to write, and to work as a novelist.
Peter King: You said that you knew at the age of seven ... whenever I talk to people and they say, "Oh I knew exactly ..." I spoke to a friend of my sister's not too long ago, and she said she wanted to be a Supreme Court Justice ... and she said, "I knew this ever since I was a little kid." And I said, "How do you ... how do you know that you want ... That's such an interesting path." Now writer is maybe a little bit more broad, but I'm always interested to hear when people say they knew at a very, very young age ... because I'm just fascinated by so many things, but you had a specific track. How did you know?
Mark T Sullivan: I got in a fistfight in Parochial school, when I was in second grade. And during the fight, a nun named Sister Mary Joseph, who was the vice principal ... and she was an honest to god six footer. She was a big woman, and she was wearing the habit. And she picked me up and hung me on a hook ... we used to have these tab things ... and I figured hell was to pay because my mother was her best friend. And I figured she was gonna tell my mother and oh my god I was gonna be in big trouble. And this was also a time when corporal punishment was also allowed in Parochial schools, so I figured at the very least I was gonna get a swatting. And instead she said, "Your penance ..." and this was the word she used, "is to enter the school wide writing contest, grades one through eight." And I have no idea why she said it, to this day.
But I was petrified so I went home and I didn't tell my mother what had happened, I just said, "I'm going upstairs to write a story for the short story contest." And I went up and I sat in my room and I was sweating and I had no idea what to write. And maybe half an hour, 40 minutes of just really being anxiety ridden and ... I was like, "I gotta find a story." And all of a sudden this rabbit went burning through our backyard with a dog chasing it and disappeared into the corn field across the street. And I went, "Okay, I'm gonna write about that." And so I did, I wrote this story about this rabbit getting chased all over by this dog, and the rabbit's just trying to make its way home ... Anyway, long story short, the story wins. And I had to read it in front of the whole school and the whole school loved it, and cheered and I was like, "Okay, I guess I know what I'm doing."
Peter King: So by threat of corporal punishment, it got beaten out of you, "You're gonna be a damn writer whether you like it or not." It's okay.
Mark T Sullivan: You know it seemed like everybody was surprised except for her. In fact, you know one of the teachers called up my parents and was like, "Did you help him write this?" And my father's like, "We had no idea what he was writing. We knew he was working on something, but we never saw it."
Peter King: So she saw a gift, apparently.
Mark T Sullivan: Yeah.
Peter King: Because that's a pretty specific consequence.
Mark T Sullivan: I know, right?
Peter King: I love story, I love the idea of ... when I think about story and really the ... as a tool to pass on lesson, as a tool to pass on visceral experience, story is so powerful. So how did you get in to ... or tell us a little about how you go about crafting story, and how you ... like what ... sort of like a bloodhound, what ideas do you stick on, how do you know where a good story goes? That's part of your journalistic I think background to sniff those out ... but how do you develop these ideas?
Mark T Sullivan: Well I mean first of all, a story's got to hit me, I mean at a gut level. I have to believe that whatever the premise or the kernel of it ... or the character is, is fascinating enough to me that almost immediately I would consider spending almost anywhere from 6 to 18 months, to 10 years writing a book. So it has to hit me within that kind of ... as you said, that reporter sensibility. I have a nose for story, I was naturally good at it, you know I think all good storytellers know when they hear one. You know, "That's pretty amazing, that's something I need to keep looking at." And then I'm always skeptical, I always try to shoot it down, because I'm always trying to convince myself that I can't spend this amount of time.
But if the story keeps nagging at me, I know that it's there and I'll set to work on it. Doesn't mean that I won't abandon it at some point, or put it down ... but I'm always looking for something that excites me. That makes me want to go in ... and it suggests a story that I would want to read, if that makes any sense.
Peter King: Oh absolutely.
Mark T Sullivan: Yeah, I mean ... Ann Rice, she wrote Interview with a Vampire and everything, I saw her interviewed by her son and one of the things that she counsels people is, write the book you want to read. That's the one you want to write. Not the one that you think is gonna sell or you know, have an effect ... write the one you want to read. And I think that's exactly dead on. If it's a story that I would want to read, if it's a story that fascinates me enough to start digging, then I usually have a pretty good sense that it's there. I'm always trying to write a one sentence description of it too, so that I understand what the story is ... and that one sentence description will often change, or modify during the course of it, as I find the real story. Because finding the real story is a process of revision. [inaudible 00:25:53] writing, did that work? Am I explaining this character in their full three dimensionality? Is this character human or inhuman? Is it someone we would recognize, even though they may be a negative person?
You know, people will often say, "Well how could you write that character?" Or, "How can you say that?" And I say, "I didn't say that, the character did." There's a difference right? You have to learn how to step back and understand that when you're writing well, characters are sort of on their own. They kind of speak to you. And if they're not speaking to you, you don't understand them enough. And so I'm always trying to understand the characters at a deep level ... and out of them usually the story comes. Certainly ... well I mean I had an outline right? I was able to follow certain facts that you know ... he left Milan after the bombing of his house in September of 1943, ends up at this Catholic boy's school, the priest Father Re is courageous ... he takes him and trains him on all these trails and routes, because he knows that they're going to begin getting Jews out of Italy.
Peter King: Wow that's amazing. The process to me kind of sounds like ... was it Michelangelo or Di Vinci where they would start to go to work on the block and they said they're chipping away everything that's not a part of the masterpiece. And then what's revealed is the masterpiece. It kind of makes me ... when you think about the character's already there, you're just trying to find out who he isn't or who she isn't, and then what's revealed. So you have to have a very I think ... fundamental understanding of humanity, do you not? To be a writer you have to ...
Mark T Sullivan: You'd better understand psychology. And you better be able to relate to people. If you're not open enough to understand people and listen to them and try to learn more and more and more about the human condition ... I don't think you're ever going to be very successful.
Peter King: Right. And also for yourself, I would imagine. To get your own filter out of the way so that you can truly see things as they are.
Mark T Sullivan: It's true, I mean the job of a novelist is to be a professional schizophrenic, that's how I just ... you do, you have to sit in a room by yourself and let various voices of people who aren't there speak through you. It's an odd way to make a living, I mean I love it. It's what I live to do, but you have to get your head around that. And you have to be constantly willing to challenge your own thoughts about characters and you do have to get rid of your own filter, because the way I look at life is fundamentally different than the way most of my characters look at life. It's interesting. I mean I can understand how people think. I can understand how people are affected by tragedy or some joyous event. I think I've gotten better and better at that, the longer I've been in the game.
Peter King: What would you say are the elements of ... not just of a good story, but of a great story? How does ... if somebody's a writer and they want to learn how to write better stories, or I'm in the marketing world and I want to communicate to prospects and certain things ... what are the components that make up an epic story.
Mark T Sullivan: I think some of the components are a character that we can sympathize with, a character who's going to grow in a gigantic arc ... because they are going to be constantly challenged to grow. We're not interested in stories about characters that are static. You know that people that begin on page one the same ... and end on page 450 the same person, because that's fundamentally uninteresting. And it's not true. Everybody changes every moment, whether or not they admit it to themselves. But the other thing is they have to be up against some monumental task. Or person. The antagonist, the worthy opponent. And that worthy opponent, for example, in Beneath a Scarlet Sky ... the first worthy opponent is the mountain itself. How does he manage to grow enough to be able to lead these people at 17 over the top of the Alps and into Switzerland. And then the worthy opponent after that becomes the general. General Leyer's ... he was this mysterious, powerful guy in Nazi occupied Germany. He did his best to burn his way out of history.
And so I had to ... what I could find, with the people I was able to interview, gave me an understanding of him. And he was a formidable person, absolutely formidable. One of his comments that Pino heard him say, that his ministers heard him say was that, "I did well before Adolf Hitler, I did well under Adolf Hitler, and I'll do well after Hitler." And so that kind of person, with that kind of world view if you will ... automatically forced Pino to become bigger, to challenge himself, to become a different person. And I think that's what we want to read. We always are interested in somebody who had to go beyond what we would believe a human is capable of. And that's how people become heroic. And I don't believe that people are born with heroic tendencies, I think heroism comes out of situations. It's when ordinary people are faced with situations that most people would crack and have a nervous breakdown under. They go on. They rise to the occasion.
And it's very often you know a quote, "small" person, a 17 year old boy in this case, who rises and becomes this phenomenal hero. And even though he doesn't ... he didn't consider himself ... and he still doesn't to this day. He doesn't consider himself a hero.
Peter King: That seems to be a common trait with a lot of survivors of battles. What type of resistance did you face over the 10 year journey? Did you face any resistance from any Nazi sympathizers or anybody that didn't want this story told?
Mark T Sullivan: Well the biggest resistance I faced was the lack of documentation, because in the last 10 years of the war ... 10 days of the war, in Italy and elsewhere ... this Organization Todt that the general ran in Italy, destroyed millions of documents. You know they burned them all over Italy. And so that was a challenge. And then there were people, historians that had written ... I think there was one book written about the Organization Todt, and it's largely an apology, because it totally sidesteps for example, the issue of slavery during World War II. The Germans ... people will often talk about all the great fortifications they built on the western wall, that Americans and British forces saw on D-Day. And those fortifications were built on slave labor. Slaves built them. And people didn't understand this. And so I ... you know in the book, you begin to understand how that happened. And there's a certain resistance ... they'll called them forced labor, the apologists. And I'm just going no, they're slaves man. They were taken against their will, they were brought you know, halfway across Europe.
And they were thrown into factories or on to construction lines. They had little Ps on them, if they came from Poland, E if they came from Eastern Europe, et cetera. And they wore ... many of them wore these gray, drab outfits, so I called them the gray men. There was that kind of issue, trying to find things. There was also ... Pino had buried the general's name in his mind. He always spoke of him as [Italian 00:34:19], my general ... but by the time that I had gotten to him, he had basically buried his name. He always thought his name was ... when he would think back, his name was Kaufmann, or Hoffman, or Harthman ... and so I spent three years looking for a Kaufmann or Hoffman and he wasn't there. It was only when I went to the German war archives in Berlin and in Friedrichsburg Germany working with a Fulbright Scholar that we started to find Leyers' name, associated with it said Hauptmann. Which he was a general, and Hauptmann in one sense in German means captain, like it's an actual rank.
But it also means, in another context, boss. And then Kaufmann, in German is ... it would be almost like a KAH, that H. And then Kaufmann ... I always thought it was K-A-U-F-M-A-N-N and what he was actually hearing ... and this is the Fulbright kid who explained this to me ... he was hearing K-O-P-F-M-A-N-N, which means headman in Germany ... another word for boss. And so what he was hearing was the German soldiers calling General Leyers the boss, which he was. There was only one person more powerful than him in Italy. And that was the Field Marshall. But the Field Marshall relied largely on Leyers, because Leyers was responsible for building things. Everything from machine gun nests to cannons to parts ... to whatever they needed, his job was to supply it. But once I found Leyers and was able to show Pino several pictures of him, he identified him and then I was off and going. But it was still like pulling teeth.
Part of the issue was that I don't speak Italian, I always had to have interpreters with me. I don't speak German, I had to have interpreters with me. And that took time and money. You know I would go for a while and I would raise funds for another trip, I went over four or five times over the course of 10 years, attempting to get it, get the story right. But at a certain point, so many people are going to have died, and so many of the documents had been destroyed ... at a certain point I said I had to write this as a novel. Because if you get ... in my mind, as a journalist, if I get one thing wrong, I've screwed it all up. As a novelist, my job is different, my job is to ... or at least the way I saw my job ... was to tell the story so that it had the same emotional impact that hearing it had on me the first time.
That obviously the story had had on him. And so I was constantly trying to write it as if you were sitting on Pino's shoulder. And that is the way the book is written. That's the thing that people really respond to, they felt like they were there, climbing the mountains with him. And part of that is because I'd gone and climbed those mountains. You know I've been up there, I've done it. I was also able to get inside Leyers' head through people had known him for 30 years after the war. Including his daughter. And using that, and my journalistic skills, you know I told the story as best and as clearly as I could. For example, there was no way that I could tell the story dramatically if I recounted 25 escapes over the Alps. So in the book you get two. And they're compressed, you know. Pino was caught in an avalanche during that era. He did ski a woman down off the mountain. Some people have said, "Well that's impossible. No one could do that."
And I said, "You've got to see the size of him and how powerful he was. And oh by the way, my son could do that." My son, who's a big dude and a great skier, he could throw somebody up on his back and ski them off. So it was those kinds of things, the characters became compressed, in order to give the full dramatic scope of the story ... so that's where it's fictional. You know I had to take the incident with skiing the woman off her back, combine it with the avalanche, combine it with this ... and then you get the full arc and certainly the emotional intensity of it.
Peter King: Tell us about the meeting when you first met with Leyers' daughter.
Mark T Sullivan: Yeah. That was intense. That was two and a half years ago now, three years ago. And I was working with this tremendous translator named Sylvia [Fritching 00:39:16], who was out of [Palone 00:39:17]. And Sylvia managed to track her down, because for years I never knew what happened to Leyers after ... he had been put in a POW camp and then he got released about 21 months after he was put in the camp. This must have been April of 1947, and I could never figure out why he was released because he was obviously a war criminal. Anyway, Fritching found Ingrid Brook, who was Leyers' daughter, living in the house that he lived in after the war. And she agreed to talk to me, but she was very, very ill. She ended up passing this past year. She was very ill, she was basically in her deathbed when I talked to her. And I said you know, "I found ... I know about your father through getting out of a POW camp," and I said, "Why was he in there?" And she looked at me and said, "He was going to be tried at Nuremberg."
Then she got really sick and coughing and stuff and couldn't go on, but she gave me permission to talk to his minister and his aide. And that's when the most remarkable stuff came out, because I was able to understand after, why he got out ... at least their explanation of why he got out. It was absolutely the most remarkable afternoon I've ever had as a journalist writer.
Peter King: Oh my gosh, I can't even begin to imagine the complexity and the dynamic of all of those relationships. And the impact that it may have on all of those people's lives.
Mark T Sullivan: They saw Leyers as a fundamentally good person. The minister and the aide never knew exactly what he was gonna be tried for, and it's my conjecture that it was slavery ... because he had taken slaves, over a million of them under his control in Italy. There were approximately 11 million of them all throughout the German system that were taken and put into forced labor, as they called it. It was only through discussing it with them and seeing that he had this other side, Leyers had sides that were redeemable. I mean he built a church, with his own money, after the war. You could argue that it was recompense, that it was a way of him dealing with what he had to do, but he became in those discussions ... even in my mind, he became that much more complex. I think I've answered it.
Peter King: Yeah, oh gosh, absolutely. I mean, for them to then have found out sort of the other side of the coin, in his behavior ... did that change ... like what did they say when your story kind of came out, have you talked to them since then?
Mark T Sullivan: No, I told them you know what I was gonna write ... that I believed that he was involved in slavery and they said that they believed he had testified against Albert Speer, who was Hitler's architect, the head of the Organization Todt ... and the only member of the inner circle to have escaped the hangman's noose. Speer was put in jail, in Spandau Prison for 20 years for taking slaves. And it was their contention that General Leyers had testified against him in private. You don't find mention of Leyers in any of the Nuremberg Trials. He's mentioned in a letter that was introduced into evidence in like the 1948 or 49 trial of the ... Krupp and Frick, which were the two big industrialists that benefited from Hitler's war machine. Like they were the industrialists that built the cannons, et cetera. And prior to Leyers going to Italy to become the head of the organization Todt, he was involved in munitions building, where he negotiated directly with Frick and Krupp. And he's mentioned in a letter but he never testifies. And all those documents are either gone or sealed.
Peter King: Oh my gosh, there's just a myriad amount of stories that are ... you know in a way this is sort of ... this is an incredible story in and of itself, but it really is representative of all the untold stories too. You know I mean, just how amazing this one story is and how much is missed and so many other people's lives.
Mark T Sullivan: It's true. I always talk ... there was a guy that was interested in doing a documentary about me and Pino and how I came to the story ... a lot of the stuff that we're talking about. And he's done documentaries on Holocaust survivors and he faced a lot of the same issues that I faced. Whereby people have gone through these horrific events will bury them. To the point where they even begin to question in their own mind, what happened to them. And that's certainly what happened to me with Pino. Because he would get confused and he would say things ... "I sometimes wonder if that really happened to me, or if it happened to someone else." I believe it's a way that people deal with psychological trauma right? You almost have to push it over there, that this couldn't have happened to me ... or if it did, I'm not going to think of it that way. I'm gonna think about it a different way ... for your own sanity.
Peter King: Absolutely.
Mark T Sullivan: You know so anyway. It's the kind of thing that happens to a lot of people, from what I've been able to tell. There are certain Holocaust victims that are dead on, and there are certain ones that are dead on in their memories and there are certain ones that experience such brutality and trauma that they couldn't manage to do it. They couldn't do it. There's a famous story about these women ... I think it was in Okinawa, I think they were all blind. No, I know what it was, sorry. I read about this the other day. It was in Cambodia during the Pol Pot regime. They're all these Cambodian women and Laotians that are walking around blind, and they've been tested and there's nothing wrong with their eyes. And the reason is that because they saw such horrors, they commanded their eyes to shut down.
Peter King: That's incredible.
Mark T Sullivan: Right?
Peter King: That's incredible.
Mark T Sullivan: Right.
Peter King: Just the-
Mark T Sullivan: And it's all true.
Peter King: ... massive disassociation for their own sanity, for their own survival really.
Mark T Sullivan: Exactly. For their own sanity they did this.
Peter King: Oh man. Thank you for following up on this kind of a story, and for the dedication, and purpose, and passion that you've brought to this. To navigate through all the different sort of forms of resistance that you found. Again, I'd be fascinating to watch a documentary on the story of the telling of the story, because I thinks there's something truly remarkable about your journey in this whole thing for sure. Tell us a little bit about ... you and I connected last week about some of the responses that you've got from the readers. What have been some of the most memorable responses that you've gotten?
Mark T Sullivan: I've gotten letters from people whose grandfather or father fought in World War II, in Italy ... Americans, and they say, you know my grandfather, my father refused to talk about it, never talked about it. And this helped me understand why. I got an amazing one from a woman whose father and mother were both Holocaust survivors, her mother came out of Germany on the Kinder train, which got young Jews out of Germany into Great Britain. And then her father escaped just before 1939 and went to Italy and lived in northern Italy, until he learned that the Nazis were coming, that they were invading. And a lot of other refugees stayed where they were, and were rounded up. And he took off and made his way to a camp, high in the Alps, and was guided over the top of the Alps into Switzerland. And she said, "You know he never talked about it. I knew he crossed the Alps, he said he went largely on his own but I couldn't figure out how that was possible. I knew he carried a crocheted blanket that his mother had made for him and that's how he stayed warm."
But she said, "Reading Pino's story, I really ... for the first time understood what my dad must have gone through." And you know that, to me, is just extraordinary that I could give somebody that kind of healing and greater understanding of why their father or grandfather, or grandmother or mother, was the way they were. Give you an example, another example. And this is in the book. A friend of mine that I grew up with's father, and I knew him well, I worked with him at Fenway Park. He had been in World War II, he'd been in the 10th Mountain Division, he fought in Italy. He was Italian, spoke fluent Italian, and never spoke about the war. Never. And after his death, my friend was up in his attic, digging around ... you know doing all the stuff that you do when a relative passes. And he finds a box and in it is a Silver Star for Valor from the Battle of Monte Casino, and no one knew. And it described his heroism. He never talked about it.
What I found over the years of just talking with people ... if people start boasting about war and what they did in it, it's usually bullshit. It really is. People who have actually seen combat and these types of things, they don't talk about it, they never want to talk about it. So that's one of the big things that I learned ... and that I was able to do with the book is that all sorts of people have written to me about various relatives and people ... my family got out of Italy another way, they made their way to Portugal. My aunt got to Switzerland with a smuggler. You know, I think for a lot of people because of the silence, that the story resonates with them. And plus, he's an amazing person and his perspective on life is phenomenal. I think his willingness to open up ... or unwillingness to open up, the fact that I forced him to, created such an emotional resonance that people are responding to it.
Peter King: I keep kind of going back to this with you and your story behind this too, because as Pino's wife said, we know these people ... you're living with a stranger, like you said. What advice do you have to anybody that might still have a relative alive that may have some of these stories that you found was effective in getting them to open up a little bit.
Mark T Sullivan: People deserve to know, people need to know what happened to you. And even if you find it somewhat humiliating or it's something you don't want to think about ... it's important that we recall these stories and we never forget. And that's what I did with Pino, I said, "People deserve to know what you did." Because again, he would always downplay stuff, "Oh I don't know about this," and, "It wasn't that big a deal." And it was a big deal, because as soon as you would get the details out of him, you'd realize the scope of what happened to him, it would be stunning. And I just said, "People need to know your story, they need to know about you." Because he changed me, his story changed me. It brought me back from Italy that first time a very different person. And I vowed to tell his story to as many people as I could. [inaudible 00:52:19] you, too.
Peter King: I meant to ask you earlier, in what way did you feel fundamentally changed?
Mark T Sullivan: Well I learned that even though we face tragedy, that every moment of life is a miracle. Every day is a miracle. And when you treat that as such, you realize that tomorrow can be a better day. That we have to have faith in the miraculous events of a life and we have to celebrate it. I think the worst thing you can do is take a tragedy and use it as an excuse for the rest of your life. I certainly don't look at my brother's death the same way that I did. I looked at it as a waste. And yet it's so profoundly ripped me apart that I was able to open up and talk to a 78 year old man and get him to open up. You know men don't talk, right? I was able to do that and I think it was because I was touched by tragedy. As he was.
Peter King: I was gonna ... I was thinking about that too, when you mentioned that his wife never got these stories, I mean how much of that was just one man coming to another man, sharing in the tragedy, and understanding things in a way that perhaps a woman who hasn't gone through similar tragedy may not be able to relate to.
Mark T Sullivan: Yeah I think there's something of that, you know he first, Pino first told the snippets of the story to a man relatively his age, Robert Dehlendorf who is an American businessman who happened to be in Italy 16 years ago and befriended Pino. And one night after they had known each other ... I don't know five or six days, they were same age, different parts of the war, and Bob says, "So Pino, what was World War II like for you?" And Pino hesitated and said, "Well, maybe it's time people know." And he just started telling the story and Bob was floored. I mean absolutely floored that the story had never come out. And he set out to try to document or write it. But you know he was a businessman, not a writer. But by him doing that basic work and hearing the basics of the story like you know, Casa Alpina, Father Re, the Groppera, the general, et cetera.
I was able to take that as a basic road map to look at it and try to ... "Okay is this right? Is this true? Is this right?" And we went through it, as I said, the first time for weeks you know to get it. We traveled all over northern Europe, went and saw the various locations so I would understand how it worked, and you know, I think the fact that Bob had sort of cracked the lid, it allowed me to take the lid wide open.
Peter King: Yeah, makes sense. Well I feel like I could sit and chat all day, I want to hear all the intricacies of the whole unfolding of this whole thing, but I know you need to run a little bit too. But I do want to ask you one final question, I was looking on Amazon, you have over 6200 feedback on the book, most of which are five stars. Do the one stars ever bother you? Do you ever go and read the one star reviews? Or just don't do it.
Mark T Sullivan: No, I read them. They never bother me.
Peter King: Yeah.
Mark T Sullivan: You know, I'm of the belief that greatness ... and I'm talking in terms of his story ... always brings out the haters. So if you get people who are hating on you, you know you're doing something right. And that's sort of an old journalist thing. If I had people screaming at me from both sides, I knew I had done my job correctly. So people come out ... and it's always interesting to me too, is that the one stars usually can't spell, or they have some irrational reaction to the story. And I just ... I usually start laughing. But what I try to focus on is that ... on a given day, 84 to 85% of the reviews have been five stars. They love it, they love the story, they love Pino. That's what I focus on. Is that I did something good. And it was ... my favorite three star review, I'll tell you that, and I think it's my favorite review of all of them.
And it happened relatively early on and it was from an Italian man. And he said something to the effect of, yes Mr. Sullivan is a very good writer, but let's face it, without the great Lella, he is nothing. He said, dead on. [inaudible 00:57:28] with that 100%. Without Pino Lella, you know this story would not have resonated. I could have written something to the best of my possible ability, but his story is what ... it's the magnet. It's what people are floored by.
Peter King: Well I can certainly appreciate that perspective. I would counter that a little bit by saying it takes somebody to understand this magnificent story, it takes somebody to track it down, it takes somebody to have the perseverance, it takes somebody to be the key to unlock all of this and to share it. And I think when you ... when I think about somebody approaching somebody that has these deep stories within them, your ability to almost confront them with ... this really isn't about you, this is a humanity issue. That we need to know what happened and it's important. I mean it takes a certain backbone to do that, so I again thank you for being a bulldog on this and staying on it for a fricking decade. So yes, I mean Pino is a quite worthy tale of course, but to track that down I think is very admirable. And I again thank you for that. And thank you again for your time Mark. This has been truly a very eye opening experience and like I said, I'd love to keep talking to you about it.
Mark T Sullivan: Well I appreciate it, and I appreciate those thoughts. I am proud of the fact that I never gave up. I am. There were times where I would throw up my hands, this is too difficult. But I had a genuine passion for the story. And I had a passion for the fact that people didn't know what had happened in Italy. Between those two things, it kept me with my nose down and willing this story into existence.
Peter King: Did you say that this was going to be turned into a movie or no? Where are we on that?
Mark T Sullivan: We are very, very close.
Peter King: Oh man, that's ... that is exciting, very, very exciting.
Mark T Sullivan: It is. You know Bob Dehlendorf and I, and Pino, always had this dream of seeing it up on a screen and it looks like it's gonna happen, so that's fantastic.
Peter King: Yeah, that's very exciting. Thanks again Mark. Very appreciative.
Mark T Sullivan: Thank you Peter, I appreciate it.
Peter King: Have a good day.
Mark T Sullivan: Cheers.
Peter King: Yeah.