Marino de Medici was 11 in the summer of 1944 when he was strafed by a World War II U.S fighter as he rode his bike along a country road on his way to school. He and his family were subsequently driven from their home on the Adriatic Coast on a farm near Montefiore Conca in the Romagna region in search of someplace safe from German soldiers and bombings.

“As an 11-year-old kid, I was skirting death every day,” he recalled. Recently reliving this experience for a short book he wrote, de Medici, 87, hopes to demonstrate what it means to live with the expectation of death and the hope for a better life.