1960s

ZAVOLI: “Here is another October, Piazza Giudia after twenty years. The ghetto is what it once was, it’s easy to fill a square again. Of the 2,091 Romans, 101 returned, 1286 were taken here and 11 returned. They are here, I don’t know exactly where, but here, in this square.”

WOMAN 1: “The morning of October 16th is a day I will never forget, I was 10 years old. My mother came home saying they were taking everyone away, all, children, women. We dressed quickly, we were going down the stairs when we heard the Germans knocking. They banged hard at the door, then a Catholic woman from the first floor came and said to us: ‘Come, come inside, I’ll save you!’ And in fact, when we went out the door, we saw that the Germans were knocking at another house. [other woman at the side: ‘and so we ran away’] And we also saw some friends of mine, from school, Calò Elena. She [this presumedly refers to the catholic woman hiding them] had eight children. And they went on the trucks: they were crying, screaming … then my older sister stayed behind and mom said: ‘go away, go away, as for Marina I’m going to save her myself’. Instead a Catholic man passed and he saved her. He said she was his daughter.”

WOMAN 2: “My sister had left the house, when she came back in in the evening she found the house empty, due to the Germans coming. They had taken away her husband with six children. So she called me in the morning and said: ‘Fortunata, do we want to go to the military college?’ We went to the military college, we had the whole scene, then my sister said: ‘I would like to join my husband with the children’, then a German interpreter did not understand, so the Italian one said: ‘what do you want madam?’ ‘I want to go and join my husband and the children’. He says: ‘Madam, I’m sorry, but [space] is complete, there’s no more, nothing to do’. Then, while they were going out, [the captured jews] waved like this, with their hands from the trucks. Then the Germans with bayonets gave them strokes on their hands. They covered the tents and ran away. She was gone and I have never seen her again. Another sister-in-law came home and called me: ‘Look, Fortunata your sister has left, she’s gone away.’ ‘But how?’ ‘She went to join her husband with the children’. And I’ve seen her no more.”

WOMAN 3: “I went back home and called in a loud voice ‘mum, mum, mum!’ and no one answered me anymore. At home there was my mother, four sisters and three grandchildren, the youngest of whom was nine months old.”

MAN 1:“She was called Elena Di Porto, everyone knew her for the courage she had in the neighborhood. That morning, when the trucks were divided into three groups to pick up the Jews, she went from one truck to another bringing help to everyone. A good word for everyone, he said to them ‘rest assured it’s nothing, you’re going to do a trip, they take us to work, but they won’t do anything to us’. He brought courage to everyone. At a certain moment she saw her sister-in-law getting on top of a truck with four kids attached to their skirts, rushed over to that side and said: ‘Give me one, I’ll take it to you, this too is my son’. ‘But go away, you can still save yourself, go and save your sons’ ‘My sons are already safe. Give me one of these … I will come with you, we will help each other to die’.”

MAN 2: “They came into my home, took me, my wife and three children, the youngest of which was six months old. They made us follow them and they put us on trucks and took us to Via Della Lungara, the Lungara was a school for officer cadets. We stayed there with other co-religionists of mine for two days. The following morning they took us with their trucks to Tiburtina station, where the journey began. As the train went on, there was a woman who gave birth to a child. Finally, after a few days we reached Padua, from here a short stop and then the journey resumed to Poland, where I arrived. And from that day on, they called me Ein¬hundert¬acht¬und¬fünfzig¬tausend¬sechs¬hundert¬drei¬und¬zwanzig [158623].”

MAN 3: “Between me and him, there is a difference of 113 numbers. (…) What I’m telling you is nothing extraordinary, nothing strange. Here, wherever we turn, there are only pains.”

WOMAN 4:“That morning I saw everything. Also to me they deported my sister with 4 children and my brothers-in-law. And in this building, a pregnant woman, the Germans knocked on her door – I was hiding in my home – and seeing, this woman went to open, without any cares, they took her and she said: ‘look I’m in the ninth month of pregnancy, don’t take me away’. They said: “Come!” They sent her away. She says: ‘but don’t take me away!’. With the butt of the rifle behind this woman’s back, I saw, and she fell, pregnant like she was … And I felt like crying. Enough, I don’t want to remember anything anymore.”

WOMAN 5: “To me, Germany and the Fosse Ardeatine took away 14 [dear persons]: my mother, two sisters, my sister-in-law, four children and my son; my husband, my father and my brother at the Fosse Ardeatine.”

ZAVOLI: “People who, despite everything, since millennia is used to believe in the authority, whoever that is. They had delivered to [the Nazi chief in Rome, Litenant-Colonel Herbert] Kappler the requested 50 kilos of gold. And so they felt safe.”

MAN 4: “With the request of the 50 kilos of gold they had guaranteed that everything would be over. Instead, one morning my wife opens the window and sees two of my friends on the ledge. She said to them: ‘What are you doing?’ ‘Wake up your husband, we are surrounded by Germans’. ‘Are we surrounded by Germans!?’ They said: ‘yes’. I get up, go down the stairs and for first I look at the door, so that it was well closed, I call the doorkeeper and say: ‘nobody must open here!’. In that moment I heard machine gun shots. I ran away into the courtyard and begin to call ‘Alberto, Mario, Angelo, come down, give me a hand, we must save what we can, men, women, children, pregnant women, let’s go!’”

ZAVOLI : “And how many people you saved that day?”

MAN 4: “About thirty.”

ZAVOLI : “Is it true that when the relatives of those people thank you for what you did that day you protest? why?”

MAN 4: “Yes, I protest because I saved them here but they died at the Fosse Ardeatine. They thank me anyway for the matter, they tell me ‘at least they died here, some day we [can] bring a flower [on their grave]’.”

ZAVOLI : “Senta, di casa sua quante persone ha salvato?”

UOMO 4: “Quattro. Mia moglie e tre bambini.”

ZAVOLI : “Look, how many people have you saved from your home?”

MAN 4: “Four. My wife and three children.”

ZAVOLI : “And how many did you fail to save?”

MAN 4: “Many. Including my mother, two sisters and a brother.”

ZAVOLI : “Where did you personally save yourself?”

MAN 4: “In a Catholic church that is behind our building, with the help of a Father.”

ZAVOLI : “With how many other people?”

MAN 4: “Eh, about thirty.”

ZAVOLI : “Listen, Mr. Di Segni, would you like to show me the path you took that morning?”

MAN 4: “Yes.”

ZAVOLI : “Other parts of the city were also being raided at the time, but they were isolated round-ups, with silent dramas, not a tumultuous and resonant tragedy like in the ghetto. They descended into the courtyards from the tangle of the houses, jumping from the roof terraces, from the galleries, from the dormers, from the terraces. Old people, children, women were thrown from 5-meter walls and veered towards the Tiber or the Ara Coeli.”