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…’30
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.31 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.32
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.’33
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”.’34
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.35
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’.36
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.’37
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.’38
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.39 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.’
Michel and Leontina Avondet knew they could face reprisals. So, too, did their daughter Silvia and their relatives Maria and Alfredo Comba, who helped in the deception. None of them had any intention of betraying their guests. When a neighbour, frightened that the fugitives might be betrayed by someone in the village, expressed his fears that reprisals might affect the whole village, the Vitales offered to try to find somewhere else, and leave. ‘The Avondets knew very well that if they had been discovered they would have been shot, and the house burned down. As they lived in a small terrace, all the houses would have been destroyed.’ But Michel Avondet was adamant: “You stop here. Don’t worry. We’ll organize everything.”’ Ada Vitale commented: ‘Their solidarity helped us morally and physically.’40
In the village of Gandino—a village which was also the Nazi regional headquarters—a local Italian official, Giovanni Servalli, issued false papers to the Löwi family, refugees from Germany. These papers enabled them to change their names to those common in the region: Mariem Löwi became Maria Loverina, her daughter Marina took the surname Carnazzi and her brother became Gilberto Carnazzi.
Marina’s father, Leopold (Lipa) Löwi, had been in Belgium when war came; in 1942 he was caught in a round-up there and deported to Auschwitz. He did not survive the war. Marina was six years old when she reached Gandino; her brother was nine. Among those who gave them refuge were a teacher, Vincenzo Rudelli, and his wife Candida, parents of two grown daughters who offered them refuge in a mountain village. The Rudellis also gave refuge to five or six other Jewish families—in addition to several partisans whom they were sheltering.
Marina Löwi also recalled that Umberto Palomba, an Italian who had left Milan to avoid the Allied bombing, ‘befriended us and forewarned us of Nazi house searches, some of which we encountered, and round-ups’. At those times he ‘gave us sanctuary in his house’.41
Marina Löwi and her brother were eventually taken in by the Sisters of Maria Bambina in Gazzaniga, and looked after by the nuns in the boarding school they ran in the village. The Mother Superior and the local priest were the only ones to know that the two ‘Carnazzi’ children were Jewish—as indeed were several others in the school.42
IN JULY 1944, on the German-occupied island of Rhodes, on the second and third day of the internment of the Jews of the island, food was sent into their place of incarceration by local Italians distressed by the hardships imposed upon their fellow islanders. It is said on the island that the imam of the mosque went to see the rabbi, and offered to bury the synagogue’s Scrolls of the Law in the mosque garden. This was done, and the rabbi retrieved them safely after the war.43
Also on Rhodes, an Italian teacher from Sardinia, Girolamo Sotgiu, who was teaching literature at the local lycée, did what he could to help the Jews when the deportation was ordered. ‘He started by disguising himself as a porter,’ Albert Amato recalled, ‘in order to bring some food and some comfort (with the news that there had been an attempt to kill Hitler) to the men already herded together. Secondly, he told my wife that our little daughter, Lina, then eight years old, should not go to the concentration point and he risked his life taking her and hiding her with him. Thirdly he managed to find a horse carriage (the island was under blockade and there was no petrol for the cars nor feed for the horses) and took my mother to interview the Turkish Consul in a nearby village where the consulate had been transferred, owing to the bombing of the port and the town by the Allies.’44
The Turkish Consul, Selahattin Ulkumen, provided protective documents, in all, for fifty-two Jews on Rhodes (and nearby Kos) who had been born on the islands before 1912, when they were part of the Turkish Ottoman Empire. All fifty-two were saved.45 After the war, Girolamo Sotgiu returned to his native Sardinia.
IN THE ITALIAN port of Fiume, which was under German control until the final months of the war, the Germans arrested a senior Italian police officer, Giovanni Palatucci. He had helped more than five hundred Jewish refugees who had reached Italy from Croatia, by giving them ‘Aryan’ papers and sending them to safety in southern Italy.46 Palatucci was sent to Dachau, where he perished.47
Chapter 16
Hungary
IT WAS NOT until March 1944, with the German military occupation, that the Holocaust came to Hungary, which at that time—including the areas of Czechoslovakia and Romania which Hungary had annexed in 1940—had a Jewish population of three-quarters of a million. The Hungarian Regent, Admiral Horthy, Germany’s military ally but never a slavish adherent of the Nazi racial policies, had twice refused Hitler’s personal request to deport Hungary’s Jews to Germany. Without the German military occupation there would have been no deportations to Auschwitz. In August 1941, however, when Hungarian troops were fighting alongside German troops on the Eastern Front against the Soviet Union, Horthy had agreed to send twenty thousand Jewish slave labourers to German-occupied Russia. Most of them were from the eastern regions of Czechoslovakia annexed by Hungary the previous year; more than fifteen thousand of them were handed over to the SS and killed, eleven thousand of them in a single day of slaughter at Kamenets Podolsk in August 1941, when several thousand local Jews were also murdered.
One of those who managed to escape that carnage, Tibor Hegedus, later wrote that he and the twenty-seven who escaped with him owed their survival to their Hungarian commanding officer, a major, ‘who gave all the twenty-eight people who escaped the massacre a paper, stamped by the German Commander as well, saying that we were Hungarians, and could return to Hungary. Of course the majority of these people were Jews, and he knew it. There was a Russian lady teacher who helped three of us to hide in her flat until we received the abovementioned paper. The Hungarian soldiers were also helpful, giving food to us. The day of the massacre they were ordered to remain in their barracks, and the killings were done by German soldiers only.’1
Barna Kiss was a Hungarian officer in charge of one of the slave labour units. He had 214 Jews under his command. As they marched eastward towards the Russian front, his orders were to work them to death. Instead, he looked after them, ensured they were able to bathe their feet each day, and provided medical help for those who fell sick. The majority of them survived.2
Throughout 1942 and 1943 the Jews of Hungary were untouched by the deportations and killings that were taking place in countries all around them. Indeed, several thousand Polish and Slovak Jews managed to escape deportation to Auschwitz by fleeing southwards and finding refuge in Hungary. But within a few days of German forces entering Hungary Adolf Eichmann arrived in Budapest with a special SS Commando of ‘experts’, determined to deport all of Hungary’s Jews without delay. The first stage of this operation was to order all Jews to leave their homes and move into specially designated ghettos, often located in brickworks or factories or a run-down pa
rt of the town. The historian of the Jews of Bonyhad, Leslie Blau—who had earlier been taken away from the town to serve as a forced labourer—has described how, in a gesture of sympathy for the incarcerated Jews, a number of local Gypsies threw freshly baked bread over the ghetto fence. The leaders of the local Catholic, Evangelical and Reform churches also tried to help. But the final stage, when it came, in Bonyhad as in all Hungarian towns and villages outside Budapest, was swift and cruel: deportation to Auschwitz, and the destruction of a whole community.3
In the town of Kassa a nun, Ida Peterfy, hid several of her Jewish friends and their families, and organized a network of like-minded Hungarians to hide others.4 In Miskolc, Sandor Kopacsi—later one of the leaders of the 1956 Hungarian revolt against Communist rule—hid seven Jews in the cellar of a house that he had rented, saving them from deportation.5 In Munkacs, a Roman Catholic couple, Jozsef and Margit Strausz, saved a Jewish boy, Amos Rubin, from deportation. ‘I only wore my Star of David for twelve days,’ he later wrote, before being taken by his parents to his new home. The neighbours were told that he was a relative who had come from a small town. ‘One day Mr Strausz told me that the Germans had issued a decree in town that whoever was found hiding a Jew in his house would be severely punished. If found harbouring a Jew, he faced the possibility of death, his family would be killed, or at the very least he would lose his job. However, Mr Strausz comforted me and assured me that everything would end well.’6
The Righteous: The Unsung Heroes of the Holocaust Page 39