Fascist Italy & the Jews
The Italians and the Holocaust: Persecution, Rescue, and Survival.
by Susan Zuccotti.
Basic Books. 334 pp. $19.95.
When I went back to school in Turin after World War II, I learned that most of my teachers had been members of the resistance, participants in the anti-fascist network which suffered many losses and supplied heroes and legends to my generation of young Italians. We did not have to learn from them what fascism was—how the Italian alliance with Germany had deteriorated into total submission and Nazi occupation of the country. But we did learn a great deal about the lore of the resistance movement, and were enchanted and exhilarated by it. As far as the Jews were concerned, we were told that they too had undergone “the persecutions” (as they were called) of the fascist period, but our teachers had no desire to pursue the subject any further. The only event connected to the war that had any clarity or vividness was the fascist/anti-fascist struggle.
Later on I discovered that not all my teachers were born heroes, that some of them had had a life before anti-fascism and the resistance. During that earlier life they had been members of the fascist party and had sometimes even been carried away by the rhetoric of the moment. More than one had published articles in support of the 1938 racial laws, modeled on those of the Third Reich, which excluded the Jews from Italian life; others had limited themselves to a few phrases inserted here and there in articles on other subjects—just to get published perhaps or to avoid calling attention to themselves. Still others added their names to one or another of the manifestoes on racial matters issued during this period.
In any case, whatever their past sins, most of these people did behave honorably later on, risking their lives in the resistance, refusing to yield even when all seemed lost (the winter of 1944), displaying bravery when captured. A few ended up in Buchenwald or Auschwitz as “political” prisoners and brought these sinister names home with them when they returned, but—here again—only as one more part of the resistance saga.
Both then and during the three decades following the war, there seemed to be some sort of tacit agreement in effect to avoid mentioning the Holocaust, either in its general or in its specifically Italian aspect. The subject was not taught in the schools, and never really addressed in public. There were of course plenty of noble movies about the Nazis’ sinister obsession with the Jewish people, and there were splendid novels about Jews in wartime Italy like Giorgio Bassani’s The Garden of the Finzi-Contini, but when the subject did come into focus in the Italian mind, the tendency was to blame everything that had happened on the Germans.
Years later, The Garden of the Finzi-Contini was made into a touching film by the Italian director Vittorio De Sica. After the film opened, I had occasion to remark to De Sica that I had once seen a photograph of him during the war, running happily down an empty street in Rome, holding hands with the beautiful blonde actress Maria Mercader. The photograph had been taken in the winter of 1944, exactly the period in which the protagonists of Bassani’s novel were arrested and deported, the same winter De Sica was to reconstruct so beautifully in his film almost thirty years later. I asked De Sica in the course of our conversation whether he was aware of the coincidence. He replied that he had never been happy in Rome during that terrible year, and reminded me that actors smile out of a sense of duty, and that he had been close to the resistance, which was true.
De Sica, like so many other Italian intellectuals, politicians, writers, and teachers, did not see the point. Like everyone else, he felt cleansed and absolved of any earlier wrongdoing by the great wave of anti-fascist commitment which swept Italy during the German occupation, and by its victorious outcome. Italian fascism had been crushed after all not only by the oncoming Allied troops, but also by Italians themselves, serving passionately and selflessly with the partisans and in other underground units. Indeed, when the war ended in 1945 these Italian anti-fascists were far more extreme than the Allies in their determination to end that period of Italian history, once and for all. Unfortunately, however, in sweeping away all traces of fascism, they also swept from memory every trace of what had happened to Italy’s Jews during the fascist era.
Thus, with all the avenues, piazzas, and schools named’ after the martyrs and heroes of the resistance in Italy today, there is nothing to remind the postwar generation that there were once anti-Jewish laws on the books, and that thousands of Italian Jews, children included, fell victim to them. Nor for that matter is there any reminder that there were once courageous individuals who defied those laws—people like a barber in the village of Roncabello, for instance, who refused under torture to betray the Jewish families hidden in his village and whose name (up until recently at least) had never been heard of in Italy. Now at long last his story, along with that of many others like him, has been told in an important new book by Susan Zuccotti which attempts for the first time to investigate the Italian chapter of the Holocaust in a systematic and scholarly fashion.
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Given Italy’s longstanding avoidance of the subject, one might have expected The Italians and the Holocaust to be an indictment of Italian behavior during the war years, but it is closer to the opposite. Much of the book is devoted to documenting the many ways in which ordinary Italians tried to help the Jews during the German occupation—to the point where Italy ranks with Denmark as the “best” nation in Europe during this dark period. At the same time, however, the author points out that the impressive number of good deeds performed by individual Italians cannot obscure the fact that something very troubling did happen in Italy, whose implications have never really been faced.
According to Miss Zuccotti, the majority of Italians never regarded themselves as enemies of the Jewish people and did not become informers for the Germans as so many others in occupied Europe did. They dealt with the racial statutes largely by ignoring them, or pretending not to understand what they entailed, and they did their best not to go along with German demands. If they did not actually help the Jews, they at least tried to do them no harm.
Within this benign but essentially passive majority of secret nonadherents, there also existed a much smaller group which went beyond mere good will, and it is this group which engages most of the author’s attention. Working from a large body of data, much of which she has personally gathered and verified, she divides it into three categories.
The first category is made up of what she terms “altruistic people”—individuals (and sometimes whole families) who were willing to run any risk and overcome any obstacle, including the statistical probability of getting caught, in order to offer help where it was needed, and to thwart the machinery of persecution wherever possible. The behavior of these individuals—whose stories, taken together, add up to an amazing anthology of heroic deeds—is all the more striking in that the penalty for such activities (at least during the German occupation) was certain death.
Miss Zuccotti makes a number of interesting observations about the members of this group. She points out that apart from their exceptional altruism, the main thing they had in common was their outright rejection of racial doctrine—a rejection, incidentally, which does not seem to have been grounded in any specific political position, whether anti-fascist or otherwise. In other respects, they could hardly have been more diverse. They came from all walks of life, and from big cities as well as remote farming villages. Some were religious, others not; some had arrived at their actions via an “international” outlook on world events, others acted on the basis of a personal code of morality.
Most striking perhaps is the absence from this group of any “notables”—persons of influence or reputation who could be singled out for achievement in any area other than courageous behavior in a brutal time. Thus, there were many Catholic priests who supposedly acted with the permission of their “superiors,” but none of those “superiors” is to be found here; nor are there any writers, thinkers, artists, or leading personalities.
Miss Zuccotti’s second, and larger, category consists of people who did not play a role in the more daring rescue operations (the smuggling of refugees across enemy borders, the devising and coordination of intricate escape plans), but who did offer support to the Jews on a day-to-day, continuing basis. In this category, made up of quite humble people who simply refused to accept the singling out and persecution of others, are to be found the poor couples with many children of their own who took in other children; the farmers who opened their houses to strangers seeking shelter; the entire villages which adopted fugitives and remained silent despite every kind of pressure from the authorities.
The “miracle” of Villa Emma is one of the many shining episodes Miss Zuccotti records in this connection: approximately one hundred Jewish children collected by Jewish organizations mainly from Croatia in the Balkans were protected throughout the German occupation by a chain of local families in the countryside of Modena. Not a single person talked, not a single child was lost to the Germans during the entire episode.
The third and most surprising group described in the book, and perhaps the one uniquely Italian, is composed of bureaucrats, civil servants, military personnel, and fascist officials who extended themselves to help Jews despite the obvious risks this entailed to people like themselves in positions of formal accountability. Some of the incidents Miss Zuccotti reports in connection with this group amounted to actual insubordination—cases, for example, of commanding officers in the Italian army in France, Croatia, and Dalmatia who systematically refused to obey German orders to deliver Jews to the SS in territories controlled by Italians. More frequently, they involved the creation of deliberate bureaucratic confusion, so that orders received were somehow lost in the shuffle and never carried out.
Especially unexpected are the episodes involving fascist officials with some degree of power (such as heads of city or local administration) who helped to save lives by closing their eyes to certain activities, by dropping hints of impending danger so people could escape in time, sometimes even by providing false papers when needed. Yet they remained fascists and stayed on in their jobs. Of all the groups Miss Zuccotti describes, this last-named is the most puzzling of all, and the hardest to figure out from either a historical or a psychological vantage point. Perhaps it may best be understood within the context of the traditional Italian dislike of state authority.
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Thanks to the collective efforts of the people Miss Zuccotti writes about here, the majority of Italian Jews and a substantial number of foreign Jews who sought shelter in Italy did survive. Yet curiously enough, the net effect of her carefully researched and scrupulously documented book is to make this period in Italian history less, rather than more, comprehensible.
Given the exceptional courage of some Italians, and the basic decency of most of the rest, the reader is left wondering how the racial storm could have erupted in the first place and how it could have been directed, as Miss Zuccotti reminds us, not against outsiders, but against a deeply-rooted minority loyal to the government which had not known discrimination for over two hundred years, and which had long-established ties in the military, the judiciary, and the professions. A prime minister with no past history of racial bias proposed the race laws, a king of Italy signed them, and they became an accepted national fact, setting in motion the machinery of destruction which produced at least part, if not all, of the required toll. The machinery was highly imperfect and often sabotaged, yet it did lead to arrests, deportations, and thousands of deaths.
Miss Zuccotti does try, by all the means at her disposal, to explain how this could have happened and why, but in a sense the explanation is not hers to make. Her book ends where a collective reexamination of the Italian past must begin; its merit is not in the answering but in the raising of questions. By documenting both the glories and the national disgrace of this period—the wholesale failure of the Italian elite to protest the racial laws while there was still time to avert the catastrophe—her book compels Italians to look more deeply into the past than they have as yet been willing to do. In this it performs its most valuable service.
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