The time, October 1943. Italy was out of the war, but the Germans were rapidly taking over in Rome and elsewhere, and veteran Nazi divisions had halted the parade of the American and British forces up the Italian peninsula.
Southern France, refuge of tens of thousands of Jews from Germany, Poland, Greece, and Hungary, was being evacuated by the Italian troops, while close on their heels, like a pack of bloodthirsty ferrets, came the German SS and the Gestapo.
From the point of view of the French and Italian underground movements, the Italian surrender had its unfortunate aspects. Popular Italian sabotage of the almost universally detested German “partner” had become a major reliance of the underground, and indeed, of allied strategy; now the effectiveness of this sabotage would be greatly curtailed.
During the first weeks of September, four ships pledged by Mussolini’s government before its fall were to have begun the transportation of 30,000 Jews from Nice to North Africa. This long-brewed scheme, initiated by the Italian banker Angelo Donati, included at one time a project for the exchange of Italian prisoners for British and Americans; it involved the active participation of the British and American authorities, had been informally discussed with the Vatican, and was to have been financed by the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee.
The surrender aborted this grandiose plan, and from Marseilles to Rome, the taut fabric of the underground quivered and groaned. On September 7—the day before the secretly signed surrender of Badoglio was officially announced—the Germans moved to take over the whole of France. For the refugees, and especially for the Jews concentrated in the south of France, there was now no safety but in flight. Desperate parties of men, women, and children struggled on foot through the Alpine passes. Some fell into traps set by the eagerly waiting Gestapo. Others got through. . . .
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Back and forth before a side gate in the high wall that surrounds the Holy City marched a squad of Swiss Guards, as a squad of Swiss Guards has been marching for centuries, ever since the pontificate of Julius II, who had had Michelangelo design their magnificent medieval costumes. From the hurrying crowds, a small, nondescript figure detached itself, started to cross the square, then timidly retreated. Was this it, he wondered? The synagogues in Rome were closed, as were most of the synagogues of Europe. Instead he might find help, so he had vaguely heard, inside those high walls, where the goyim had preserved what was left of sanctuary in a world that had become unbearable.
A passer-by stared and shrugged. The little man froze like a frightened animal; then with sudden resolution, he hurried across the square and planted himself before one of the six-foot guards.
“Je suis juif de France,” he stated firmly. “Je demande—”
“Fool!” whispered the giant. His eyes rolled. His thumb gestured. “159 Via Siciliano. Vitel”
159 Via Siciliano was and is the address of the College International St. Laurent de Brindes des FF MM Capucins, where Father P. Marie-Benoit, peasant-born French priest, professor of theology, Hebrew scholar, and one-time director of the largest passport factory in Europe, was and is a respected member of the faculty.
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Born in 1895 in the little village of Bourg d’Iré, Maine-et-Loire, the eldest son of the local miller, Pierre Peteul began his novitiate in 1913 at Breust Eysden in Holland, where he took the name of his uncle, Marie-Benoit. His studies were interrupted by World War I, in which he served five years. Wounded at Verdun, he received five Croix de Guerre citations and the M6daille Militaire.
For services even more extraordinary in World War II, both to his country and to humanity, Father Benoit has thus far to my knowledge received no medals, only the unqualified admiration and gratitude of thousands of Jews who are convinced, not without reason, that they owe him their lives. To this may well be added the gratitude of the Christian world, whose highest traditions he defended through five years of labor, hardship, and danger.
Following World War I, Father Benoit returned to Breust for a year, and then went to the Capuchin College in Rome. In 1925 he received his doctorate in theology from the Gregorian University.
Seemingly Father Benoit’s early interest in Judaism and in the problems of European Jews stemmed from his Hebraic studies, which won for him, before he was thirty, high recognition among scholars. In 1927 he joined a French organization known as “Les Amis d’Israel.” His interest in Jewish problems survived the demise of this short-lived organization, although during the interval between wars his career was a quiet one, divided between teaching and his service as an ordained priest.
At the outbreak of World War II, he was mobilized and served briefly as an interpreter. Shortly before the fall of France, he returned to Rome, and soon after, because of Italy’s entrance into the war, moved to Marseilles. There he immediately became active in the resistance movement, and his earlier interest in Jewish problems made him a willing and effective collaborator with Jewish committees in the efforts exerted in behalf of French and foreign Jews, who were endangered by the implacability of the Gestapo and the pliancy of the Vichy government. In Marseilles the Capuchin convent at 51 Rue Croix-de-Regnier became one of the principal headquarters of this effort, which involved the lodging and feeding of refugees.
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Father Benoit also built up an efficient organization for smuggling Jewish and other anti-Nazi refugees into Spain and Switzerland. The Maison des Dames de Sion in Marseilles was always full of these refugees, a fact which the Gestapo soon came to suspect. Father Benoit was himself under constant surveillance—and as constantly warned by his faithful friends among the police. Eventually, as was to have been expected, one of his protégés was captured by the Gestapo while trying to cross the Spanish frontier and tortured into revealing Benoit’s part in the smuggling operations. After that the priest was likely to have visitors from the Gestapo at any hour of the day or night. This was inconvenient because increasing numbers of refugees escaped from nearby internment camps had also formed the habit of arriving at the priest’s apartment in the convent at all hours.
Fortunately, as Father Benoit has testified, “the Italian occupation authorities in Marseilles had adopted a very humane policy toward the Jews.” They even went so far as to accept the nomination of Father Benoit by the Bishop of Marseilles to serve as official visitor at the two principal internment centers in the city. This privileged position enabled him to deliver and take all kinds of clandestine messages.
“Little by little,” writes Father Benoit, “I began to collaborate with the Jewish organizations in Nice and Cannes. Every Sunday evening, accompanied by my secretary, a French Jew, I would take the train for Nice and Cannes and there I would remain until the following Wednesday, transacting current business with the UGIF (Union Générale des Israélites de France) and the synagogue on the Boulevard Dubouchage. The Jesuit Father Bremont devoted himself completely to our cause, despite his great age. . . .”
It was Father Bremont who introduced Benoit to Angelo Donati, director of the French-Italian Banque de Crédit in Nice, who is described by Benoit as “a personality of major stature, a man of great intelligence and courage, whose service to his coreligionists cannot be too much praised.”
With Donati and Lo Spinoso, who represented the Italian authorities, Benoit elaborated the plan already mentioned to transport 30,000 refugee Jews to North Africa. To consummate this undertaking it would be necessary to interest either Mussolini or his Minister of Foreign Affairs, and to this end, at the urgency of Donati, Benoit engaged himself to seek an audience with the Pope. (It was perhaps not entirely coincidental that at this time Benoit’s operations in Marseilles were being increasingly handicapped by the surveillance of the Gestapo, and that he had been summoned to Rome by his superiors.)
Before leaving for Italy Benoit had detailed conversations with the representatives of the consistory at Lyons, among whom he names Rabbis Isaïe Schwartz and Jacob Kaplan, Rabbi Leo Berman of Lille, Rabbi René Hirschler of Strasbourg, Rabbi Salzer of Marseilles, Raoul Lambert, President of the UGIF, and Edmond Fleg of the Eclaireurs Israélites.
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On July 16 Father Benoit was presented to the Pope by his superior-general. After presenting various items of information which it had not been possible to transmit through the usual channels, he pointed out to the Holy Father that the Italians were progressively retiring from southern France, and that the Germans were already in the vicinity of Nice, endangering the eight or ten thousand Jews in hiding there. What would happen to them, and to another twenty thousand Jews in southern France who would seek refuge in Italy when and if the Germans took over entirely?
Father Benoit then explained the Donati scheme in detail and the agreements in principle that had been reached with the British and American authorities. Would His Holiness instruct the representatives of the Vatican in London and Washington to give their active support to the project? Would he permit Father Benoit to present Donati to the Papal Secretary of State so that the latter might discuss the matter more directly with the Italian authorities?
Evidently the Pope must have responded favorably to this request because on August 7, Donati wrote Father Benoit as follows:
“I returned yesterday to Nice and found your postcard waiting for me at San Remo, for which thanks.
“In view of the great interest the Holy Father manifested in your audience with him with respect to the important question of the possible entrance of a certain number of Jews into Italy, I should inform you that the delegation from Nice has discussed the matter officially with the Minister of Foreign Affairs. I am well aware of the noble sentiments of S. S. Guariglia and I know also in what high esteem he is held by His Holiness. I do not thank you, because I know that you have accomplished this Christian mission without asking for my gratitude or that of my co-religionists . . .”
Two weeks later, on August 24, Donati wrote Benoit that the official authorization for the transfer of the refugees from Nice to North Africa was on the way. Would he please communicate this fact to the “neighbor of Monsignor Hérisse”?
Conspiratorial language of this sort appears occasionally in the correspondence. Monsignor H6risse was a French priest, a lively octogenarian with no liking for the Nazis, who resided at Sainte Marthe, which was inside the Vatican, hence not subject to the visits of the Gestapo. The British and American ambassadors also lived in Sainte Marthe. The “neighbor” referred to was presumably Lord Reading, to whom we find Benoit writing from Lisbon on September 8—too late, for the Italian surrender was announced the same day—asking that he intercede with his government to hasten the North African transfer.
Shortly before this Benoit had brought to fruition a closely related project: that of opening the Spanish frontier to the passage of Spanish Jews—or Jews possessing credentials attesting to their Spanish nationality. In this connection a letter from Cardinal Maglione, the Papal Secretary of State, dated September 2, quotes a formal agreement wrung from the Spanish authorities to permit the entrance of all Spanish Jews regardless of their political tendencies. In case of doubt regarding the authenticity of the refugee’s papers—so reads this stately document—final decision would rest in the impartial hands of—the Reverend Father Marie-Benoit of Bourg d’Iré.
To cap this, Cardinal Maglione adds that he has been assured by Monsignor Cicognani that “at the request of the Holy See and in conformity with the sentiments of the Spanish government, the requirements set forth in this agreement by the Minister will be interpreted with ample generosity. . . .”
Not the least heroic aspect of Father Benoit’s performance was his ability to play this elaborate diplomatic farce, at once grim and hilarious, with steadfast gravity.
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The deposition of Mussolini by the Fascist Grand Council, which occurred on July 24, shortly after the Allied landing in Sicily, was helpful rather than otherwise to the plans of Donati, Benoit, and their associates; the Badoglio government was even more eager to facilitate the North African transfer than had been Mussolini. The Italian attitude is easy to understand. The war was going against the Nazis. Moreover, anti-Semitism had no popular roots in Italy, and the mounting Italian hatred of the Nazis tended to express itself in a repudiation of the racist legislation which Nazi pressure had put on the statute books. Unable to abrogate these laws, the Italian authorities suspended their operation and in other ways tried to ameliorate the situation of the Jews wherever the Italian forces were in command, as in the Balkans, North Africa, and southern France. In Greece, the Italians moved to Athens a substantial part of the Jewish population that had been caught in the zone occupied by the Germans, thus saving many who would have been deported from Salonika.
Actions of this sort invariably provoked German protests. Moreover, the sheer physical difficulty and expense of lodging and feeding thousands of refugees constituted an important aspect of the problem. These difficulties were being daily increased by the passage across the French-Italian border, in advance of the imminent German occupation of southern France, of a widening stream of Jews and other anti-Nazi refugees. While Mussolini, and after him, Badoglio, were willing discreetly to assist this migration, they were even more eager to relieve the intolerable congestion of people and problems in northern Italy by hastening the projected North African transfer.
By September 1 the preparations were complete to the last detail for the North African transfer. The Italian government had agreed to make available four ships, the “Duilio,” “Guilio Caesar,” “Saturnia,” and “Vulcania.” In three voyages from Nice—to Tunisia, Morocco, and Algeria—these ships were scheduled to transport about 30,000 of an estimated 50,000 Jews awaiting passage. Financing of the project had been assured by the JDC.
Conceivably, the ships could have sailed as late as September 3, when the military armistice providing for unconditional surrender of the Italian armed forces was signed secretly in Sicily. But the announcement of the surrender on September 8, as Benoit testifies in his memoir, scotched the whole project, at the same time touching off a frantic scramble of Jews and other refugees across the Alps into northern Italy.
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Among the survivors of that terrible exodus was Icek Wajc, later to become one of Benoit’s trusted lieutenants in the Rome underground. Wajc was born in Poland in 1898, and for twenty years before the war had been a prosperous wholesale leather merchant in Paris. A modest man and a gentle one, Wajc is almost the last person Hollywood would choose to play in its cloak-and-dagger melodramas. After 1933, as the destitute refugees from Hitler’s Reich came pouring into Paris, he gave somewhat more than the help that was asked of him, to Jews and non-Jews alike. When the Nazis occupied Paris, Wajc’s three sisters and two brothers were deported to Germany and were never heard from again.
The Italian surrender found Wajc in the village of St. Gervais near the Italian border. With Aba Formanski, representative of the Jewish Coordinating Committee, and other underground leaders, he shared responsibility for evacuating over Iooo Jews from this area. All those under twenty-five were offered the choice of crossing the mountains into Italy or going to Spain or Belgium as maquis. Ninety per cent—practically all the able-bodied ones between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five—chose the latter course. The very old and the women who were pregnant had to be left behind. The others, under the leadership of Wajc, made the trip through a high pass in the Maritime Alps early in October. One member of the party was a woman of eighty; another was a man on crutches. On the third day of this desperate journey, all were so weak that they threw away their rucksacks. Two died en route. The others staggered down into the valley on the Italian side, only to find the Gestapo already there and expecting them.
Over 400 were captured, deported to Poland, and presumably gassed. A scattered few escaped and headed for Rome. Already a new address was stenciled on the minds of these and other refugees who escaped into Italy at this time: 159 Via Siciliano. There in the Capuchin convent, in the shadow of the Vatican and under its protection, a new center of resistance was forming around Benoit, now beginning the most difficult phase of his extraordinary career.
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When the forced migration of the French Jews into Italy was at its height, the Gestapo arrested Septimio Sorani, director of DELASEM (Delagazione Assistanza Emigrati Ebrei). This organization was finally forced underground after paying fifty kilograms of gold in extortion money.
Father Benoit was asked to take over a situation that demanded the immediate performance of miracles, and miracles of a sort were shortly apparent. Hundreds of proscribed Jews who yesterday were walking the streets of Rome disappeared into thin air, and in their places there appeared overnight equivalent numbers of Swiss, Hungarians, French, and Rumanians.
In achieving this feat of necromancy, Father Benoit was greatly assisted by a Jewish printer-engraver and an old hand press that was discovered in the basement of the convent; also by certain courageous Swiss, Hungarian, and Rumanian diplomats, who complained bitterly about the crudeness of the first passport forgeries they were asked to sign. They signed them anyway, often at the risk of their lives. They also signed the homemade ration cards that were necessary for the physical sustenance of the newly materialized Swiss, Hungarians, Rumanians, etc.
An essential department of this industry was the procurement of official stamps to go on the birth certificates of these synthetic nationals. Some old documents carrying the stamps issued by various French mairies were unearthed by Stephen Schwamm. These provided authentic originals which an ingenious Italian partisan reproduced on a rubber stamp. The documents also required revenue stamps, which were steamed off old legal documents. When it came to the signatures, Father Benoit and Schwamm became equally expert at imitating the handwriting of a number of French mayors.
M. Chauvet, an attaché of the Swiss consulate, signed 450 of these faked passports before he felt that the limits of his diplomatic immunity had been reached. The Rumanian Ambassador Grigorcea and the Hungarian Consul Szasz were equally prepared to risk the wrath of the Gestapo. Once, when some of the Hungarian ex-Jews whose passports he had signed were arrested, Szasz (a Catholic, although the name is that of one of the oldest Hungarian-Jewish families) went directly to the Gestapo, and with a revolver pressed against his breast argued so vigorously that he obtained their release. In all, nearly 2000 forged credentials were turned out in the library of the Capuchin convent.
Others whose names deserve to be inscribed in the grateful memories of tens of thousands of Jews whom they helped to save include Monsignor Dionisi, the Protestant pastor of Amenti, who sheltered many refugees and endangered his whole family; Brigadier de Marco of the Italian police, who liberated Jewish prisoners and withstood a third-degree examination by the infamous Caruso; and the Italian refugeebureau chief, Dr de Fiore.
Charrier, chief of the Italian Bureau for Feeding Foreigners, was sympathetic. But in order that the Bureau’s files might stand inspection, it was necessary to provide him with certificates “legalized by the Cardinal Vicar of Rome” attesting that a mixed committee collaborating with the Vatican had vouched for the cardholders. In this way some 3,000 forged ration cards were duly attested. The Vatican, which was in full accord with Father Benoit, did not directly vouch for these documents. It merely attested the authenticity of Father Benoit’s signature as head of a “Provisional Committee for the Aid of Refugees.” But under the circumstances this was a good deal, and it proved to be enough.
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Naturally, there was never enough money to pay for these and other operations. Through the British and American representatives at the Vatican, Benoit obtained from the JDC a grant of $20,000, deposited in a London bank. This became 8,000,000 lire after it had been sold on the black market, chiefly to Italians who expected the Allies to win. When this sum was exhausted, it became necessary for Schwamm and Benoit to go to Genoa, then under heavy bombing, to obtain the 14,000 lire left by refugees when the Germans occupied the city. They traveled by automobile on tires and gas obtained by extravagant bribery of the Nazis. From Genoa they went to Milan to arrange for the transport of children into Switzerland, and there the Gestapo picked up Schwamm, who was traveling under the name of Liore. Benoit escaped and returned to Rome.
Schwamm spent three months in the concentration camps of Warsaw, Cracow, and Czenstochowa. Liberated in January 1945 by the arrival of the Red Army, he made his way back to Rome by way of Bucharest and Belgrade. Aaron Kaszerstein, another of Benoit’s aides, to whose courage both Formanski and Schwamm pay high tribute, was also caught. Kaszerstein survived Buchenwald and is now in France.
Aba Formanski passed through nine concentration camps in all, escaping from the last one in time to join Wajc among the thousand refugees admitted to America by the special dispensation of President Roosevelt and interned for a year at Oswego.
When Schwamm got back to Rome in the spring of 1945, he found the Benoit center crippled by the arrest of these and other leaders of the group. Father Benoit was himself in hiding. But their work had been done. Hundreds of Benoit’s protégés were in America. Other hundreds were in Palestine. And the war was ending.
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So incessant has been the turmoil of sub-sequent events that the memory of that nightmare world of the underground is already fading from the minds of its survivors. Hence the full story of what non-Jews did—and refrained from doing—in order to rescue Jewish victims of Hitlerian savagery will probably never be told. Yet something—more, surely, than is possible in a single article—should be salvaged for history, for the moral and spiritual continuum of Western civilization that the Nazis all but destroyed.
From the records that have been placed at the disposal of this writer, and from the testimony of underground leaders like Formanski and Wajc, there emerge at least two facts that may well be weighed and remembered by Jews and non-Jews alike.
The first is that, beneath all the debris of human baseness and corruption that was piled high in the wake of Hitler’s conquests, there glowed a core of amazing and seemingly inextinguishable human courage and nobility. Men and women of every class and creed, in all the occupied countries, consciously risked death and torture simply because they were revolted by the ugly cruelty of the Nazis. Being quite simple people for the most part, they found it less easy to rationalize murder and torture than did some of the professors. Instinctively they rejected what seemed and was a betrayal of our common humanity, and they fought back as best they could: the janitress who lied once too often to the Gestapo and finally joined in the concentration camp the Jews whom she had sheltered; the African soldier who cleared a path for Formanski, returning to 159 Via Siciliano with his pockets full of incriminating documents and a Gestapo spy peering from the window opposite; the clerks who connived in the issuance of forged papers—these and thousands of others.
Without the collaboration of these innumerable anonymous stalwarts—their averted glances, their secret whispers, their alert counterespionage that so regularly exposed the ubiquitous Nazi stooges—it would not have been possible for Benoit and his aides to do what they did. The second fact is especially interesting psychologically. Evidently the Nazis suffered from a kind of moral inferiority complex. Aware of this, Benoit and his collaborators saved themselves sometimes by a fox-like caution, but as often by an effrontery amounting to arrogance. “Immer dreist!” counseled Father Benoit, himself a personality whom it was quite impossible to bully. In fact, in his own encounters with the Gestapo, Benoit invariably seized the moral initiative, so that it was they who were made to feel on the defensive.
The success of this tactic was helped, of course, by the fact that the Nazis were never sure how much support Benoit was getting, or would get, from the Vatican. The record shows that he got a good deal. But it is also probable that Benoit’s powerful example contributed importantly to stiffening the Vatican’s resistance to the Nazis. Certainly, he made himself the judge as to how much he would dare, and the record shows that there was little he did not dare.
Hitler is dead, the synagogues in Rome are open, and Father Benoit has returned to his classes at 159 Via Siciliano. But anti-Semitism is not dead, either in the political and economic shambles that is Europe, or in America. Nor is the need of the Jews for a tested friend and counselor less great today than it was when the Gestapo ruled Rome and the churches were crowded with Jewish refugees, and a black-bearded, brownrobed Capuchin directed a passport mill in the library of a Catholic convent.
In those days, Benoit’s Jewish associates would suggest that fate had made him “Ambassador of the Jews”—and wonder if the history of diplomacy recorded a more difficult assignment. The idea didn’t seem bizarre to Father Benoit, however. He said he would consider it a great honor.
