The Righteous: The Unsung Heroes of the Holocaust (44 page)

IN JULY
1943, in a dramatic palace revolution in Rome, Mussolini was overthrown. Twenty years of Fascism were at an end. To forestall the new Italian government’s defection from the Axis, German troops entered Italy from the north, occupying Rome. The Italian government, having fled southward to avoid being seized by the Germans, informed the Allies on September 1 that it had accepted an armistice. Two days later, Allied forces, which had already conquered Sicily, landed south of Naples and began the long, hard struggle northward. Even as the German army imposed its occupation regime, SS experts arrived from Berlin, their task to secure the rapid deportation by train to Auschwitz of Jews in all areas of Italy that were under German military rule.

In Nonantola, the seventy-four Jewish children who had lived for the previous year untroubled at the Villa Emma were suddenly at risk. Determined to find the children sanctuary, Father Beccari went from door to door asking the villagers to hide them. Within a few hours, all of them were found homes. Among the villagers who hid Jews in Nonantola was Giuseppe Moreali; one of those whom he had saved later wrote of ‘this unique example in humanitarian behaviour’.
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Beccari also persuaded the initially reluctant rector of the Benedictine abbey to let the youngest children hide in the abbey. Within forty-eight hours the Villa Emma was empty.

German-controlled radio was warning each day that anyone hiding either partisans or Jews would be shot. ‘I just carried on as quietly as I could,’ Beccari later recalled. ‘I tried to receive as few people as possible and I kept the kids locked in.’
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Father Beccari’s young charges were hidden for five weeks, until forged documents could be made which allowed them to cross into Switzerland. ‘We made them ourselves,’ he recalled. ‘A town hall clerk gave us the cards. We stuck the pictures on and we made our seals from a bolt head.’ Before the children could set off, one of them, fifteen-year-old Salomon Papo, was taken to hospital, suffering from tuberculosis. While in hospital he was identified as Jewish—as he had been circumcised—and was deported to Auschwitz. The other seventy-three children made their way to Switzerland, and survived.
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IN OCTOBER
1943, having established their presence in Rome, the SS were determined to deport the city’s five thousand Jews to the death camps. In an attempt to forestall the deportation, the Vatican clergy opened the sanctuaries of the Vatican City to all ‘non-Aryans’ in need of refuge. Catholic clergymen throughout Rome acted with alacrity. At the Capuchin convent on the Via Siciliano, Father Benoit, under the name of Father Benedetti, saved large numbers of Jews by providing them with false identification papers. He was helped in doing this by members of the Swiss, Hungarian, Romanian and French Embassies in Rome, and also by a number of Italians, including Mario di Marco, a senior police official, who was later tortured by the Gestapo but did not disclose what he knew.
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By the morning of October 16, a total of 4,238 Jews had been given sanctuary in the many monasteries and convents in Rome. A further 477 Jews had been given shelter in the Vatican and its enclaves. Later that day, SS troops combed the houses and streets of Rome in search of Jews; all they found were taken, regardless of age, sex or state of health, to the Collegio Militare. As a result of the Church’s rapid rescue efforts, only 1,015—fewer than one-fifth—of Rome’s 5,730 Jews were seized that morning. Deported to Auschwitz, only ten of them survived.

The convent of Our Lady of Zion stood on a Roman hilltop. The Mother Superior, Virginie Badetti, and her close associate Sister Emilia Benedetti took in more than a hundred Jews. One of them, Ruth Weinberg, who was given shelter together with her uncle, recalled how the nuns ‘shared their slim rations, and gave up their own beds for the people they were protecting—though so many had been sheltered in the convent that many had to sleep on the floor’. When someone knocked on the door, she said, the nuns rang a special alarm bell that warned their ‘guests’ to hide.
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Also in Rome, Pietro Palazzini, who was later made a Cardinal, had, in the words of a Yad Vashem representative, ‘endangered his life’ and gone ‘above and beyond the call of duty to save Jews during the Holocaust’.
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On October 18 the Gestapo in Rome protested to the Gestapo chief in Berlin about the frustration of its designs against the Jews of Rome: ‘The behaviour of the Italian people was outright passive resistance which in many individual cases amounted to active assistance. In one case, for example, the police came upon the home of a Fascist in a black shirt and with identity papers which without doubt had already been used one hour earlier in a Jewish home as someone claiming them as his own. As the German police were breaking into some homes, attempts to hide Jews were observed, and it is believed that in many cases they were successful.’ The report went on to protest: ‘The anti-Semitic section of the population was nowhere to be seen during the action, only a great mass of people who in some individual cases even tried to cut off the police from the Jews.’
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PROFESSOR UMBERTO FRANCHETTI
was an Italian Jew, a distinguished physician, who, when the Germans occupied Florence, moved with his family to their country home, Il Bigallo, on the outskirts of the city. One of his three daughters, Luisa, then aged fifteen, later recalled how, on 6 November 1943, while her parents were in Florence for the day, ‘a Jewish friend informed my mother that Jews had been arrested that same morning in the city. My parents hurried back to Il Bigallo, and summoned the peasant—a Catholic named Matassini—who worked the farm attached to our home; they told him that we were in danger, and asked for his help. Matassini found us a house some distance away, occupied by one single woman, where we would be able to stay through the night. Additionally, he made arrangements for another peasant to take us even farther away, into the mountains, the following morning. We realized that with the winter coming we would need additional supplies, and so after arriving at the house walked back to Il Bigallo to gather blankets and heavier clothing.’

Luisa added: ‘Within fifteen minutes of our arriving back at Il Bigallo, Matassini rushed in to tell us that German soldiers were at the villa of the Barone Franchetti, which was only twenty minutes away by foot. There were no telephones in the homes of the peasants of the area. The information had been passed by word of mouth with extreme haste, as its importance was quickly grasped: the Barone had been arrested. He was not Jewish and it took only a short time until he was released; what seemed quite clear was that the Germans had been looking for my father and stumbled upon the Barone’s villa by error. We fled into the woods immediately, gathered our winter gear, and returned to the house where we were to spend the night. The next morning we left.’

On the advice of Father Achille, a Franciscan priest whom Professor Franchetti had known before the war, the Franchetti family went to the mountains, to the Valle Santa. ‘After three difficult days during which he struggled with deep snow,’ Luisa recalled, her father succeeded in renting a small house in Giampereta, ‘from Mr Ciuccoli, a good friend of Father Achille. It was a most primitive and humble place, with no running water and no toilet. The money that my father gave to Mr Ciuccoli covered the provision of wood for heating and cooking as well as the rent. There was a fireplace in the kitchen that provided all the heat we had in the house. We would carry water from the fountain located in the centre of the village, and do our laundry there as well.’

Giampereta was no more than a hamlet of some twenty houses, set close together, and a church. ‘The priest would come once a week, from a nearby village,’ Luisa remembered. ‘There were no shops, no pharmacy, no police station, and no main road. There was a one-room school (without toilet or heating) and a club where men would meet to listen to the news over the radio and buy wine.’ The family’s cover story was ‘that we had left Florence because of the aerial bombings (the first one in Florence had been on 25 September 1943), but it was obvious that a more serious reason had brought us to such a far away place and such a simple house. No questions were asked.’

Luisa remembered the day when her father returned home ‘after having gone to see Mr Ciuccoli to pay the monthly rent. He reported that Mr Ciuccoli had told him that if my father could not pay the rent, there was no need for him to do so, and if we should have no means to buy food we would be invited to his table and the table of all the other Giampereta families—each day being the guests of another family in turn.’

Such good deeds took place all over German-occupied Italy. There were also other deeds, less noble. Not far from Giampereta, Luisa later learned, ‘in a place called Rimbocchi, a young couple, Florentine Jews, had been hiding with their two-year-old daughter in the house of a local peasant. He kept requesting more and more money from them and telling them that the Germans would come and arrest them. He so frightened them that they suffocated their small daughter and took their own lives.’

The Ciuccoli family continued to shelter the Franchettis, even when searches for Jews intensified, and the SS came to the valley, searching for Italian partisans. Luisa’s family were constantly reassured that they would not be asked to leave. The Ciuccolis ‘were surely aware of the risks they incurred by allowing us to stay, and yet they protected us’. Nor was there any question ‘but that the whole village was involved. In a village as small as Giampereta, it would have been impossible for the Ciuccoli family to give us assistance unless all the villagers were prepared to accept us as well.’
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Adriana Luzzati was in hiding with her family in the countryside outside Asti. ‘Not only were our own lives in great danger,’ she later recalled, ‘but also the lives of those who gave us hospitality, because they risked being shot if the Germans had found us with them.’
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In Milan, when six hundred Jews were seized and deported by train to Auschwitz, more than six thousand were given shelter in Christian homes and survived. In the village of Valle Stura, not far from the border with France, between forty and fifty Jews were given refuge by the local villagers.
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Near Varese, thirty-year-old Giuliana Basevi and her mother, Emma de Angelis Basevi, from Turin, were given refuge in a convent for almost a year. When the Germans came to the convent, the nuns insisted that there were no Jews among them. Giuliana’s father, arrested in Verona in November 1944, was taken to Bolzano and then deported to Flossenbürg concentration camp, where he died a few months before liberation.
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In Turin, Cardinal Fossati asked the Villata family, who lived in the town of Monchalieri, to hide the Szwajcer family, Jewish refugees from central Europe. They did so, and in spring 1944 hid, in the house next door, a baby boy born to the Szwajcers while they were in hiding. There could be no guarantee of survival: when another Jewish refugee, Alfred Spietz, who was also being hidden in Moncalieri, decided one day to go for a walk in the village, he was captured by Italian Fascists and deported to Auschwitz, where he perished.
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In Modena, the Mitrani-Andreoli family gave shelter to Zdenko Bergl, a twelve-year-old Jewish boy from Croatia who had escaped across the border into Italy. The local church authorities provided him with false papers. A year later he moved on to Florence, where Neila Fussi and her family gave him a safe haven.
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In the Adriatic resort town of Bellaria, Ezio Giorgetti provided shelter in his boarding house to thirty-eight Jews. ‘After the Germans occupied the place and ordered the evacuation of the whole quarter where the house was situated,’ one of the Jews, Dr Ziga Neumann, a refugee from Zagreb, later recalled, ‘it was Ezio who looked for another place and organized the transfer to another place in the town with all the risks involved. When here again the same happened Ezio went to the village in the vicinity and eventually found a big farm in the hills above the town of Pesaro, at a small place called Nuovo. Ezio undertook all the financial obligations towards the owners of the farm for our lodging and food. Without his help and courage we would not have been able to escape to that place. After some time the Germans ordered the farm to be converted into a military hospital and we had again to flee before the Nazis. It was again Ezio who helped us to save our lives. He used his good personal connections with some peasants in the hills further on to accept and hide us in the more remote small village of Pugliano Vecchio. Here we remained until September 1944 when the Allied Forces liberated the area and we could descend from the hills to Pesaro where we were received by the Allied troops stationed there.

‘During all the time Ezio was always available for advice and active help. Despite the rigid control of the Germans he would visit us at the distant places of our hiding in the hills and would care for everything.’
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The Herczog family, father, mother and two children, were living in Trieste, having been expelled by the Italians from Fiume, where they had lived between the wars. Dr Bela Adalberto Herczog, a medical doctor, had been born in Hungary in 1901, a citizen of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. On 3 September 1943 German troops entered Trieste, and the family decided to flee. One of the children, eleven-year-old Dora, later recalled: ‘The first stage of our escape was a big village called Pieris, not far from Trieste. In this village lived with her family our former maid, Maria de Luisa, who had lived in our house and was very fond of us, until she too had been forced to leave because of the same racial laws. We remained in Pieris for about three months in the house of relatives of Maria, until we felt that it was too dangerous to live near the city.’