The Righteous: The Unsung Heroes of the Holocaust (45 page)

The de Luisas again helped the Herczog family by arranging for them to stay with distant relatives in the small village of San Lorenzo, near Friuli. Their new landlords, Dora recalled, were a middle-aged peasant couple without children, Giovanni and Speranza Chiesa. ‘The man was an old Fascist, the foremost representative of the Fascist party in the village, who had no idea of the Jewish problem. To our father it was important to let him know that we were Jews and that it was forbidden, and therefore dangerous, to help us. Nevertheless, this family assisted us with all their heart, with loyalty and concern for our problems until the end of the war.’

Dr Herczog worked as a general practitioner in the village. Being the only physician in the area, Dora recalled, he was repaid with farm products. ‘He relied on his intuition on the nature of human beings; more than once he told unfamiliar people whom he trusted that we were Jews, luckily without dire consequences. We were in need of fake papers: once our father was called to another village nearby to visit an important local official, who was of course one of the chiefs of the Fascist party in the place. My father after the consultation disclosed our secret and asked him for help: within half an hour he received fake documents for the whole family.’

There was a bizarre moment ‘when the local German Command asked my father to replace their doctor who was going on vacation for a week. My father could not refuse and so he spent that week from morning to evening in the company of German officers. He, who could speak German fluently, pretended not to understand a word, and used an interpreter.’

Dora recalled how, one morning, a woman whom the Herczogs did not know came to the village, and told them she had been sent by a family friend, Margherita Grunwald, who had been arrested by the Germans in Venice. The woman was a worker in the prison where Margherita Grunwald was being held. In her belongings the Germans found a photograph of the four Herczogs. ‘Brutal questioning followed in order to obtain our address, which our friend knew exactly, having visited us some months earlier. When the brave lady feared she would be unable to resist torture, she had asked the prison worker to come to us and to urge us to flee. In exchange she had given her a precious ring she had managed to hide, instructing her to show us the ring as a proof of her telling the truth. After the war we sadly learnt that Mrs Grunwald had perished in the concentration camp of Ravensbrück.’

The Herczog family was at grave risk. ‘The danger for us of being seized could have been immediate,’ Dora recalled. ‘My parents and the landlords consulted with a couple of neighbours called Masutti (both of them school teachers), and they proposed to send us to Udine to their relatives. Therefore the nephew of our landlords, Elio Chiesa, took us immediately on his horse driven cart to Udine.’

In Udine the Herczog family was hidden safely. Eventually they learned, as Dora recalled, ‘that nobody had been looking for us in San Lorenzo, and that the Chiesas would be happy to have us back again with them. In February 1945 our friend Elio Chiesa took us on his cart back to San Lorenzo, and I remember that we had the feeling of coming home. On April 25 we were freed by the Italian partisans’ uprising. It turned out that Giovanni Chiesa had been put on the lists of the Fascists to be killed by the partisans in revenge for his previous actions. He was saved because of his activities in our favour.’
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Don Beniamino Schivo was rector of the seminary in Città di Castello. With his help a Jewish refugee, Ursula Korn Selig—born in Breslau and educated in Potsdam before fleeing Germany with her parents—was sent for safety to the Benedictine convent, ‘where the nuns loved me. One of them, my philosophy teacher, introduced me to her family from Naples. They became my second family.’ Later her father and mother joined her. ‘We had no freedom, and little to eat, but I had the Monsignor and the nuns.’

When the Germans came to Città di Castello, Ursula and her parents were arrested and taken to the SS in Perugia, the last stage before deportation to Auschwitz, ‘But the prisons were full,’ Ursula recalled, ‘and they returned us to Città di Castello. We knew we had to run away, so the Monsignor and the Bishop prepared our escape. Monsignor Schivo and another young priest took off their clerical garb and marched us during the night for eight hours up into the mountains to a summer residence of the Salesian nuns. We broke down the door to the church and entered. There was no food, no beds, and we had only what we were wearing. The caretaker knew about us and every second night he brought us some soup, but we were slowly going mad.’

In due course the Germans arrived, ‘and we were hidden in an oven for three months, and the Monsignor hid my father in another place. We had to run again. My mother and I joined the partisans in the woods. Città di Castello was in the German defence line and was mined. We were hidden in the Convent of the Sacred Heart and dressed as nuns per order of Monsignor Schivo. As the Allies advanced, there were terrible bombardments and fighting. We were locked in a room and only the Mother Superior knew. Finally, one day, 22 July 1944, all was quiet, no fighting—the Eighth British Army had liberated the town. We were free…’
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In Azzanello di Pasiano, in north-eastern Italy, Alessandro and Luisa Wiel took in Marcello Morpurgo and his family, and provided them with false documents and new identities.
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In Cuorgné, the villagers provided several dozen refugees from Yugoslavia with lodgings and furnishings. On the day before the German occupation an Alpine guide, Gimmy Troglia—later a Partisan commander—took them all to Switzerland.
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In the remote village of Canale d’Alba, in Piedmont, Matteo Raimondo, a ‘sturdy farmer’, his wife Marietta, his son Beppe and his daughter Juccia protected five Italian Jews from Genoa: Giuseppe Levi, his wife Bettina, and their three children, Ida, Elia and Pia. Betrayal was always a danger, as the Germans offered rewards to those who would reveal Jews in hiding. ‘Everybody in the village knew of our being Jews,’ writes Elia Levi, who was ten at the time. ‘Our fate would have been concluded, and we would have appeared as a few lines in the book of Memory.’ One evening, at the end of September 1943, Beppe Raimondo, Matteo’s oldest son, ‘a strong fellow then in his early twenties’, told the Levi family ‘to get ready early the following morning with a minimum luggage: he had thought of everything, where to bring us and how. They had simply guessed that by ourselves we were unable to find a way out, and decided they could not wait idly for our end to happen. In their mind it was a pity we were so inadequate and helpless to care for ourselves in those dangerous times: therefore they decided to act out of pure altruism and not without real danger for themselves.’

Elia Levi’s account continued: ‘Beppe had secured the help of a friend with a small car and brought us to his uncle’s orphanage, in a very small village not very far off, but where nobody, hopefully, knew us as Jews. In the meantime the Fascists had come to their house, at least once, looking for the Jews to deport: the Raimondo family told them they knew nothing of our whereabouts. We stayed, under an alias, in the parsonage of the uncle priest for a few months until Beppe decided that the place was unsafe, and so he transferred us to a lonely farmhouse belonging to one of his cousins, again in a radius of a few tens of kilometers. We felt that the Raimondo family was still protecting us throughout the whole period: Juccia used to come over to us now and again, riding on her bicycle, to bring us money and news. We stayed there and in the area, with a deal of good luck, until the end of April 1945, when, after the end of the war and the collapse of Nazi Germany, we could finally go back first to Canale, then to Genova.’

Many years later, as Elia Levi recalled, ‘we learnt of yet another honest deed of this generous family of friends: before going into the hiding, our Mother had entrusted to Marietta a box containing cash, money and family jewels, asking her to keep it for us. But, as she understood the dangers ahead, we told her that should we not come back, that is should we be deported, she should keep all of it. It goes without saying that the box, which had been buried somewhere in the property, was returned to our Mother after the war as the most natural thing.’
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Reflecting on the family’s experience, Elia Levi wrote: ‘For us the striking thing is that the Raimondo family, who hardly knew us, being simply our landlords, got involved at great risk to themselves and saved our lives. We can presume that at the end of our stay, in the isolated farmhouses where we found refuge (in the surroundings of Ceresole d’Alba) at least some of the simple farmers around knew or suspected that we were Jews (just by observing our way of life and our improbable cover-story), without running to denounce us.’ This, Elia Levi added, ‘is not exceptional. In a small book relating a different rescue experience, the author, Aldo Zargani, reports that the villagers used to call, in their local dialect, the place where the family lived, “the house of the hidden Jews”.’
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In southern Italy, in San Giovanni Rotondo, Father Pio Abresch hid a Jewish refugee from Hungary, Gyorgy Pogany, whose mother had been deported from Hungary to Auschwitz and killed. Mother and son had both converted to Roman Catholicism, and Gyorgy was a priest; but, under the Nazi racial laws and perceptions, both were Jewish. The local Italians knew of Gyorgy’s Jewish origins, but did not disclose this information.
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In Assisi, the birthplace of St Francis, two clergymen saved the lives of three hundred Jews. The first was the senior clergyman in the city, Bishop Nicolini; the second was the Abbot of the Franciscan monastery, Father Rufino Niccaci. At the bishop’s request, Father Niccaci took care of the Jews, provided many of them with false identity papers, and, on one occasion, when German searches came too close, helped them escape disguised as monks. Such was his devotion to the well-being of the refugees that at one point Assisi could boast ‘the only convent in the world with a kosher kitchen’.
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The hub of rescue efforts was Father Niccaci’s monastery, San Damiano. Every few days, he later recalled, ‘I would visit the Abbeys of Vallingegno and San Benedetto, the Hermitage, Montefalco, Gubbio, Spello. All the monasteries and churches in Assisi and the surrounding countryside were filled with Jews disguised as monks or nuns, or hiding behind the double grilles of the Enclosure, or living with false papers in the pilgrims’ guesthouses attached to these houses.’

In Perugia, Father Federico Don Vincenti was the ‘Father Guardian’, as Father Niccaci called him, of more than a hundred Jews in hiding, some in the church’s outhouse, others in private homes.

On 26 February 1944 the Gestapo entered the quiet precincts of the convent of the Poor Clares of San Quirico, in Assisi, where many Jews were hiding. Father Niccaci, having been forewarned of the raid, had arranged for the Jews to leave the convent through a secret tunnel, along which he followed them, even as the Germans were searching the room from which the tunnel led: ‘After a while all sounds faded behind me. I had to stoop or crouch down, groping with my hands to find my way. Occasionally, I could hear panting or would bump into someone. Finally I discerned the outline of a man’s bowed back and a small sliver of light ahead told me I was nearing the end of the passage. A moment later I crawled out in a barren, wintry field, where part of my Jewish flock awaited me in the huge shadows of the ancient, gnarled olive trees. I turned my head. In the pale moonlight I could see silhouettes of many men already climbing the steep ground, disappearing among the rocks and undergrowth, making for the forest of Monte Subasio as we had planned.’

Those who remained ‘were the elderly who were unable to climb, and they waited for me to take them to San Damiano. I knew that at this very moment other groups of Jews who had left their monasteries at the sound of the warning bells were making for the same destination, where they hoped the twenty guerrillas could offer them some protection and where they might hide in the almost impenetrable forest or find refuge with peasants. “Come, my children,” I said to men twice my age. And I began to lead my group down to San Damiano, so that they could join the other Jews hiding there in monks’ habits.’
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Leah Halevy, who reached Assisi with her parents in December 1943, having escaped the round-ups in Trieste, later recalled: ‘We were placed in the Convent of Stigmatique Nuns—under the protection of the ad hoc self-appointed Christian Committee to save Jews. Among those, the most prominent part was played by Father Guardian Rufino Niccaci, who was thirty-two at the time, and in charge of Convent St Damiano. For the entire period until Assisi was rescued by the Allies on 16 June 1944, Father Rufino was bringing us unobtainable food, kept warning us about any possible German searches and finally managed to provide us all with false identity cards with Christian names. He did all this at peril of his own life and our family was only one of many, who were saved in convents of Assisi and even in private houses thanks to the intervention of Father Rufino. What is most remarkable is that as no Jews ever lived permanently in Assisi, Father Rufino had never met Jews before.’
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BY THE END
of 2001, a total of 295 Italians—including whole families—had been recognized as Righteous Among the Nations at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem.
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Typical of such families were the Avondets, living in the remote mountain village of Luserna San Giovanni, north of Turin, who took in a Jewish family, the Vitales, whom they had known before the war while holidaying in the Avondets’ mountain home. ‘We went there with just two suitcases,’ Ada Vitale, then aged twenty, recalled, ‘and we lived there twenty months. They gave us everything. We were known in the village, everyone knew that we were Jewish.’ In the valley were many other people from Turin, non-Jews, escaping from the Allied bombing. ‘Just one word, somebody could just have made the Germans a promise, but they never sold themselves, they never betrayed us, or the other Jewish families who were nearby. Why? Because they themselves had been liberated in 1848, and therefore they felt morally bound to those who were living through persecution.’