1980s

ELIO TOAFF: “(…) I have to say that if the Italians had been anti-Semites you would not speak to me today because there would have been no more Jews.”

NICOLA CARACCIOLO: “In the Eichmann trial it was said that all Jews in Italy, as you also say, owe their lives to Italians.”

TOAFF: “There is no doubt. Look, we must also make the necessary exceptions because someone made the racial laws, someone applied them. But it is evident that there are different ways to apply them. If you think that there have been Italian police officers who have been deported for helping Jews escape their fate, you obviously realize that…”

CARACCIOLO: “Officers of the Social Republic.”

TOAFF: “Of course, even from the Ministry of the Interior, there were officials who were imprisoned and then deported. Of course, there were also those who, for 5000 lire, denounced a family of Jews who ended up in a concentration camp. But that was the exception, while the rule was this one.”

CARACCIOLO: “It can be said that those who denounced, more than anti-Semites were criminals, people who would report anyone.”

TOAFF: “They were criminals. There’s no doubt, there’s no doubt, because, you see, there were also fascists, people enrolled [to the Party], who saved Jews. Because at a certain moment the humanity of the Italians had the upper hand over what was the political ideology.”

CARACCIOLO: “So, for you to be both Jewish and Italian does not create difficulties.”

TOAFF: “No, none.”

EMILIO FOA’: “(…) We felt a certain solidarity, we were not marginalized, we were marginalized by the State, by the government indeed, to be more precise. We were marginalized by the regime, we were not marginalized by the population.”

DON LIBERO RAGANELLA: “Here at the [Rome’s neighborhood] San Lorenzo there has never been the problem of Jews, because Jews at San Lorenzo were just like all the others.”

LEONARDO DELL’ARICCIA: “We have always been helped, when there was a day when there was retaliation and there were arrests we were warned, people who hosted us in their homes … there are no words to praise, let’s say, all the population, all the people of the neighborhood.”

CARACCIOLO: “And Don Libero?”

LEONARDO DELL’ARICCIA: “As for don Libero we don’t even have to say how he behaved with us and with everyone. I think a second Don Libero will not come around.”

CARACCIOLO: “So you have a debt of gratitude.”

LEONARDO DELL’ARICCIA: “Of everything, of everything, of gratitude.”

DON LIBERO RAGANELLA: “That’s why he offers me coffee.”

NARRATOR: “(…) Out of about 42000 Italian Jews 6000 were killed, but over 36000 were saved and each of them thanks to the fact that one or more Italians hid him, protected him, found a way, despite the rationing, to let him have food. Primo Levi, author of fundamental books on the subject, such as ‘If this is a man’ and ‘The drowned and the saved’, he too owes his life to an Italian, to a mason.”

PRIMO LEVI: “This man was a man of few words, he did not say many words, neither then nor later, but from that day on, he brought me a cup of soup every day, which was essential because it served to compensate for the deficit in calories. The feeding of the camp was insufficient, so that one died of starvation in a few months and this soup was just enough to make up for what was missing. It was a strange soup, once I found a sparrow wing with all the feathers in it, another time some plum stones, another time even a clipping from the Turin newspaper ‘La Stampa’. I later learned that he used to make made a kind of collection, went around his cabin mates, collected kitchen scraps, the things that they themselves stole around, collected everything and brought it to me.”

CARACCIOLO: “And wasn’t it forbidden to bring this…”

PRIMO LEVI: “Of course it was forbidden, it was forbidden to have contacts, to talk… they were forbidden to talk to us and I warned him that he risked, risked coming to the concentration camp.”

CARACCIOLO: “Did he know what the concentration camp was?”

PRIMO LEVI: “Yes, of course, he was in contact with us every day. He did not see the concentration camp, he saw us. He saw people extremely feeble, thin and full of sores, weakened. He realized it very well. And I said to him: ‘Be aware that you risk talking to me’ and he said: ‘I don’t care at all’. Still, we agreed on a plan: he was to bring me my mess tin not in my hand, he hid it for me in a certain place and I went to get it, so they wouldn’t see us together. He did this from June until December. He invariably brought me this tin mess of soup every day. As soon as I returned in October, I immediately looked for him, found him and found a man in very bad condition. He was an extremely sensitive man even if he hardly ever spoke and the things he had seen in Auschwitz – Assuìs as he called it – had struck him, had, how to say, deeply hurt him and he no longer wanted to live. He said: ‘In a world like this it is not worth living and I drink for… I prefer to be drunk than sober’. So much that he used to sleep, get drunk and sleep outdoors, and he caught pneumonia. I had him hospitalized in Savigliano, in the hospital, but they didn’t give him wine and he ran away and then they found him dying in a canal, where he was sleeping drunk. He, who was not a veteran from Auschwitz, died of the veterans’ disease.”

NARRATOR: “Then the liberation. It is due to numerous acts of human solidarity and piety such as these that the Jews never felt separated from the rest of the nation. It is also due to the Resistance, in which they, with extraordinary commitment, returned to fight for Italy. But this is another story.”

NARRATOR: “(…)Mussolini visits Hitler, at Klessheim Castle, near Salzburg.”

NARRATOR OF THE HISTORICAL ORIGINAL FOOTAGE: “The guest is received by the head of the presidential chancellery, State Minister Meißner. Hitler takes Mussolini to the apartment intended for him.”

NARRATOR: “But what did Mussolini want? How can such a contradictory policy be explained? Such an ambiguous figure, persecutor and protector at the same time, what did it mean? Originally the Duce was not anti-Semitic, he became one in 1938 for a series of reasons among which, in all likelihood, opportunism prevails. For his foreign policy he thought he needed the friendship of Germany, and since Hitler hated Jews so much he would persecute them too. However, the idea of genocide was very distant from him. His subordinates protected the Jews from extermination and the Duce must have known something of this action. These are not isolated episodes, not a single Italian command during the war collaborated with the Nazis against the Jews. In Yugoslavia, on one occasion, a fake anti-partisan roundup was even set up to allow the Italian troops to enter the German zone of occupation and to return back, taking with them the Jews of a Croatian town. It is at least unlikely that Mussolini was ignorant of everything. At this point we cannot explain, only describe. Mussolini let it be done, this seems the most logical conclusion, provided that everything happened on the sly. It goes without saying that when, after September 8, 1943, the Germans took power in Italy and began to deport the Jews, Mussolini did not oppose or protest.”

CARACCIOLO: “Here, Professor, is a great deal known that ordinary people, let’s put it this way, peasants, simple soldiers, workers, traders helped the Jews?”

CARPI: “You see, there are – we can say – two levels: there is the level of simple people – I am talking about the occupied countries, that is, Italian soldiers who were in Croatia or France, soldiers or officers – who spontaneously tried to help these people without knowing exactly why, just because they were persecuted people, because they were innocent and persecuted, not as Jews or non-Jews; the other level, that is perhaps the most important or in any case has another importance, is the level of help that both the Italian diplomats and some military commands have given in an organized, more or less planned manner.”

CARACCIOLO: “If you allow me, I have a personal memory of this.”

CARPI: “Tell me.”

CARACCCIOLO: “In short, as a young man, during the Algerian war, I was a journalist there. At the time of the revolt of the French extremists against De Gaulle in ’62, [of] the O.A.S., we Italian journalists in Algiers had a De Gaulle police chief named Goldenberg…”

CARPI: “Goldenberg.”

CARACCIOLO: “… who helped us a lot just as Italian journalists. At a certain moment I asked him the reason for this and he told me that [when] he was 14 years old – he was from a Jewish family – he was in the Grenoble station to be taken to Germany, to Auschwitz. An Italian officer whom he did not know saw him, saw this boy there, took pity on him and let him out, saved him.”

CARPI: “Of these episodes here in Israel there are thousands of people: one was hidden under the bed of an Italian officer, one was brought from Krakow to Italy, children, orphans, found like this on the street, in the streets of some small village in Galicia or Poland and saved and then taken to Italy and who then participated in the partisan struggle.”

CARACCIOLO: “So you mean, Professor, that the Italians behaved better than all the others in Europe, in that tragic moment?”

CARPI: “I would say yes. In any case, the Italians have shown that even in a period of darkness, a period in which I would almost say civilization has dimmed, the sun of civilization has dimmed over most European countries… at that moment the attitude of most Italians – and not only in Italy, this is the interesting point –”

CARACCIOLO: “Also the Italians in France, Greece, Croatia… Were there any black sheep in all this on the Italian side?”

CARPI: “Look, there might have been someone here or there, certainly not at a high level, it’s hard to find. They did not leave a trace. There must have been someone; the great majority, not the average, the great majority were of an opinion…”

CARACCIOLO: “They acted well.”

DANIEL CARPI: “They acted well. (…)”

BERNARD GROSSER: “(…) The register made in the holy city of Jerusalem, that we have come to deliver to you in your capacity as the highest representative of the Italian people, contains 1000 signatures, which have been affixed by as many men and women, who having been in Italy as refugees in the grim period of the ruthless Nazi persecution have not forgotten the good that the Italian people, in their great majority, did them.”

NARRATOR: “Bernard Grosser, president of an association of Jews scattered all over the world who during the war, threatened by Nazi extermination, were helped by Italians. The association is called ‘Gratitude to the Italian population’. In June 1985 a delegation of it was received at the Quirinale by the President Pertini. Our investigative report on the Jews and Italy that you saw started from this event, which the newspapers did not even cover at the time. Since then, all this time, we have been looking for documents, testimonies, interviews. The conclusion we have reached is that the Jews, during the years of persecution, received fraternal and generous help from the Italians, perhaps more than from any other people in Europe. Among the heroes, we found ordinary people who sometimes paid for their humanity with their lives. But also, unexpectedly, government ministers, ambassadors, generals, police commissioners, high representatives of a discredited and beaten regime, beaten and discredited men themselves, who, nevertheless, when faced with the monstrosity of the massacre managed to behave honorably (…).”

PETACCO: “Good evening, here we are to comment on these two beautiful, touching programs by Nicola Caracciolo on the condition of the Jews and their relations with the Italians during the war. We will talk about it with Giulio Andreotti, with Professor De Felice, with Elio Toaff, chief rabbi of Rome, then there will be a connection with New York with Franco Colombo and the rabbi of New York, Hertzberg. There was also to be a connection with Tel Aviv, with Shimon Peres, foreign minister, but unfortunately he didn’t make it on time for the appointment and therefore, we know nothing, something must have happened. But let’s continue in the studio; Mrs. Tullia Zevi, president of the union of…”

ZEVI: “… of the Italian Jewish communities.”

PETACCO: “… of the Italian Jewish communities; Nicola Caracciolo, who is the author of the programs you have seen; and Monsignor Clemente Riva, auxiliary bishop of Rome. I would start immediately with Mr Andreotti, not as Foreign Minister but as a historian, because as you know he is used to deal with history. From these two programs came out a… I’m very happy because we came out very well, ‘Italians, decent people’ I would say. But is it really so? Can we present ourselves to history with a clear conscience?”

ANDREOTTI: “I believe that certainly the overwhelming majority of Italians not only did not adhere to the theories of racial discrimination, but indeed, in practice, very many did everything they could to soften and, when possible, to cancel the results of that legislation. Both in the first moment, perhaps by creating some convenience paternity or maternity and, in particular, during the German occupation. But it also seems to me that it must be said – Professor Levi Montalcini reminded us this morning when she cited a document by ten scientists from July 1938, a few months before the racial laws – that there were also, in the intellectual world in particular, some who supported this infamous legislation. But I believe that racial legislation was precisely the discriminating factor to put the biased on the one hand and the vast majority of Italians on the other. I would also like to say – Monsignor Riva will be able to say it better than me – that also in the Catholic field, many people – who perhaps had seen an important milestone in the conciliation of 1929 and therefore could have considered Mussolini as an instrument of something useful – were, I would say, shocked by the racial legislation, that was absolutely unacceptable on a human level, even before a Christian one. So it seems to me that it is fair to be able to say that the Italian people did not participate in this, with the due exceptions that unfortunately there were.”

PETACCO: “Yet, nobody protested aloud, if I remember correctly. Do you agree, Mrs. Zevi?”

ZEVI: “It has to be seen, I have followed with a lot of attention and a lot of interest both this program of this evening and that of last week. It is the same tragic reality in which the Jews of Europe have fallen. However, it is a tragic reality to which the Jews of Eastern Europe have come from different worlds and levels from those of Western Europe. So the impact of the racial laws and limitations that costed Italian Jews in the beginning, these racial laws, for us integrated Western Jews – in general we belonged to the middle, lower-middle class – were infinitely more serious than they could have been in an Eastern European reality. So for us the impact of these things destroyed our families. And experiences… for example our schoolmates who turn their faces and no longer greet you, people you grew up with…, the impact on us, who grew up in a free society – as it seemed then to us, just kids going to school – it was terrible. Our lives were disrupted by these racial laws.”

CARACCIOLO: “Here I was thinking about it, there is one thing we could say: it seems to me that there really is an important discriminant, that at the beginning the first racial laws were accepted by the majority of Italians without joy and without satisfaction, but also without protest, and they let things run their course, giving some satisfaction to Jewish friends by saying ‘I’m sorry’, but not going any further than that. When, on the other hand, the danger of genocide, of extermination appeared, then it seems to me that we can say that in their overwhelming majority the Italians became aware of the seriousness of the problem and behaved with great humanity and with great courage. This is a little bit what I had done, tried to explain.”

PETACCO: “Professor De Felice, you who are a great connoisseur of that period, why did Mussolini decide to make these laws? What pushed him to it?”

DE FELICE: “It is a rather complicated issue, because on the one hand there are certainly foreign policy reasons connected to the choice he [Mussolini] was making. It is clear that such a discriminating element between the two regimes made the alliance not very credible. But from another point of view there is also a reason that I would reconnect to the idea of the ‘new man’ that Mussolini wanted to create. New man who had to be, according to him, different from the bourgeois man, ‘flabby’, we would say, who was the type of the average Italian. And, among the various tools to make him tougher, there had to be also [the fact of] fighting against what was then the quintessence of the bourgeoisie, according to Mussolini: the Jewish type, seen as the quintessence, from all points of view, of the Jewish type. I would say these as the two main reasons.”

PETACCO: “But did he knew – later, when the persecutions, the genocide began – did he know or didn’t he know about all of this? Is there evidence that he was aware, before the Social Republic, so to speak?”

DE FELICE: “Yes, yes.”

TOAFF: “Documents do exist.” (…)