ITALICS A darker story

The police report said that “the terrified child, Emma Calò, aged 6, clung, weeping, to the clothes of the concierge…M r and Mrs Berna begged the official to desist from his intentions, but he was adamant.” Told that this heart-wrenching scene took place in Rome in 1944, most Italians could confidently guess the background: the official would have been a Nazi engaged in the round-up of Jews that followed Italy’s withdrawal from the second world war, when the Italians’ German allies became their occupiers. As for the Bernas, their compassionate behaviour typified the Italian nation, which had been seduced by fascism but was never anti-Semitic. The official, however, was not German, but Italian. And, as Simon Levis Sullam’s vigorously revisionist history makes clear. while many Italians stood up for the Jews, many did not. Some looked away, and some took an active, even enthusiastic, part in the persecution and removal of the 6,746 Jews sent from mainland Italy to German extermination camps. This was particularly true in the Italian Social Republic (Rs1), the fascist-run state in the north. To ingratiate themselves with the victors after the war, Italian bigwigs exalted the role of the Jews’ defenders while minimising that of their persecutors. Hampered though it is by the disappearance of much of the documentary evidence, Mr Levis Sullam’s short book sets out to give the latter group their sinister due. It is hard to overstate the pervasiveness and potency of what became the accepted version of events. Even the leaders of the surviving Jewish community adopted it. “Everyone”, declared the president of the Union of Italian Jewish Communities in 1956, was “careful to warn the doomed innocent victims; all the friends, the acquaintances, the neighbours were ready to take them in, to hide them, to help them.” That story has entered history textbooks and has even been embraced by Yad Vashem, the Holocaust museum in Jerusalem: one of its publications states that Italians rejected anti-Semitism as “contrary to Italian traditions”. But, as a German diplomat explained in a note to Berlin as the deportations began in December 1943, “with the forces at our disposal in Italy, it is impossible to comb through all the towns”. Italians took part in 2,210 arrests; 1,898 were made by Italians alone. Then there were informers who betrayed Jewish acquaintances and people who worked willingly for such bodies as the General Inspectorate of Race and in Italy’s seldom-mentioned concentration camp at Fossoli near Modena. (Fossoli was no Buchenwald, but nor was it a holiday camp: in February 1944, prisoners appealed to Catholic prelates for help in alleviating their -miserable conditions” and for “aid that the elderly, women, children and the ill implore from human solidarity”.) Though his focus is on the cruelty Jews endured, Mr Levis Sullam acknowledges that the story was many-sided. After a Jewish man and his mother were caught trying to flee to Switzerland, the local fascist chief released them and returned their seized property. The Bernas’ efforts to save Emma Calò met with the “tacit agreement” of a policeman accompanying the official. Not that they succeeded in saving the little girl. She died in Auschwitz two months later. The official was acquitted of all charges after the war, “thanks to the activities that he claimed to have carried out on behalf of the Resistance”.

*The article was published in The Economist, on October 27, 2018.