A People Under Terror: Italian Jews During World War II
Stille, Alexander
We print below an excerpt from Benevolence and Betrayal,* an extremely rich portrayal of the fate of the Italian Jews during the Second World War. By showing the varying fates of several...
...Not included in this total are the five grandchildren and the two sons-in-law who were also arrested and deported...
...A couple of days after the massacre I went out to the caves to look...
...There, they met up with Attilio Di Veroli and his entire family of seven as well as Michele Di Veroli, son of Umberto, known as Monsieur Macaroni...
...They opened their house to us, they gave us their bedrooms...
...Known as "Stella" (meaning "Star"), because of her beauty, Celeste was from another of the large, old ghetto families...
...Hunger was rampant in the city...
...Giuditta and Silvia [sisters] were the only two to return...
...And yet, at moments, he writes with the stoic concern of a man trying to wrap up his affairs and take leave of the world...
...Out of the group of one thousand, only 32 would return after the war...
...After about ten days we had to escape from there because someone told the Germans that we were there...
...Luckily, no one was killed...
...They're with my cousin.' Silvia and I started walking off, when suddenly I hear her call me, 'Rosa.' And I said to myself: 'Oh, God, she's going to get me.' `Listen,' she told me, 'stay out of sight for a few days.' And we went away...
...Their main task was to recover parachutes dropped by Allied aircraft and give aid to American and British paratroopers...
...Of the 2,091 deported, roughly one in twenty survived: 73 men and 28 women...
...I didn't want to go into any convent," says Michele, Enrico's son...
...He explains how one friend, a certain Gasparini, went all the way from Rome to Fossoli in order to give him a thousand lire...
...We were afraid, but we wanted to know and at that point I didn't care...
...According to Italian historian Silvio Bertoldi, Anticoli's name was added at the last minute, replacing that of Celeste Di Porto's brother...
...In his first month on the job, February 1944, the number of Jews arrested in the city jumped from 29 to 141...
...It had been set by partisans...
...But this counted little with the Germans...
...It was the eighteenth of March 1944...
...Every day after her father's arrest, Rosa would appear at Regina Coeli to bring him something to eat, something to supplement the meager prison rations...
...We knew the day of the attack at Via Rasella that they had taken some Jews," Rosa says...
...To collect a few lire a day, Attilio Di Veroli had taken up his old itinerant life, making the round of the city's churches, collecting used furniture, fixing things, receiving an occasional handout...
...Only 275 were admitted to the camp to work as laborers...
...From that hideaway, the family decided to find a place in another convent or monastery...
...Ten days later, a convoy of roughly one thousand Jews left Fossoli for Auschwitz...
...I can only say good things about the people there...
...Twenty-six of the Jews who died in the massacre are believed to have been turned in by the Black Panther...
...Lazzaro Anticoli, a young street peddler arrested the morning of the massacre, managed to scribble a note before being dragged off to the caves: "If I never see my family again, it is the fault of that sellout Celeste Di Porto...
...During the German occupation, however, Celeste had become the city's most lethal German informant, turning in about fifty Jews from the ghetto...
...There was a concierge at a building nearby on Via Arenula who at night would bring us a bottle of water that we had to use for all our needs, for drinking, cooking, and washing," says Olga Di Veroli...
...Michele (Umberto's son) was posing as a Neapolitan student named Michele Capuiano who had been stranded in Rome behind the battle lines...
...I got a ride on a garbage truck...
...only a few returned home...
...Fighting alongside his brother, rather than being a source of comfort, Michele says, only made things worse...
...you have arrested my father and I want to bring him something.' `Are you Jewish?' one of them asked...
...Chained together in groups of three, they were led into the caves, made to kneel down, and shot in the back of the head...
...I had gone out to get some bread, and as I was coming back I hear this explosion and a whole wing of the convent just collapsed," recalls Rosa Di Veroli...
...To be at war with your own brother is the worst thing imaginable...
...Shoot yourself...
...so that by urging his sons to "study hard" and "listen to the advice of Professor Resciude" Enrico Di Veroli was telling them to lie low and stay out of sight...
...See, here's your signature on this receipt.' My father said: 'That's okay, it can wait until the end of the war.' But the man said, 'You have to come with us.' My father said: 'Don't hurt me, I have a family.' `What hurt...
...And the morning my father was arrested the woman told us: 'Don't all go out together.' So my sisters, my mother, and I went out alone and we never saw my father and brother again...
...One day on the street, their father ran into an acquaintance whom he persuaded to take in his family for a while...
...That's the way I am...
...That evening the Mother Superior came up to me and said, 'Listen, Carmela' (that was the false name I went under), 'you should have told me you were Jewish.' I said: 'If you want us to go, we'll leave immediately...
...After 556 • DISSENT A People Under Terror October 16, I began writing something down in my own fashion and my father said to me: `What do you want to write down...
...I saw her and I thought, 'Mamma mia, if they get us?' It was enough for her to make a sign and they would have grabbed us...
...q FALL • 1991 • 561...
...although he spelled it incorrectly, the word "resciudde" in Judeo-romanesque dialect means "beat it" or "get lost...
...There were certain things that needed to be done...
...Despite the dangers of the German occupation, the women continued to move freely about the city during the day...
...the last name "Rita" is the false name the family had been going under...
...Olga and Flora, together with their mother, moved into a convent of Philippian Sisters on Via Cicerone...
...His wife was thrown to the ground, knocked unconscious, and lost several teeth...
...It was dangerous to move around this way, but I had a certain strength that came from the fact that I didn't give a crap anymore...
...The Black Panther's own father was so deeply ashamed by his daughter's betrayal that he turned himself into the Germans and died in a concentration camp...
...After that episode they even insisted on bringing us our meals in our room so that we would be seen as little in public as possible...
...Dear Grazina, May 15, 1944 You cannot imagine how much pleasure I had receiving your letter of the 12th and in receiving good news and knowing that you all are well...
...One day we had an appointment to meet my father and brother at the Teatro Marcello and when he didn't show up we knew they had been taken," Rosa recalls...
...I didn't want to die like a mouse in a trap...
...On June 16, from Fossoli, Enrico managed to get another letter to his wife, through a Catholic friend in Rome...
...The Italian puppet government installed a new chief of the Rome police, Pietro Caruso, who pursued the search for Jews with quickened vigor...
...His most strongly desired wish is that his family write him immediately [adding a second "b" to the world "subito" (immediately) to stress its importance]: "I beg you to answer me immediately so that I can be at peace...
...I'm supposed to pay you back one hundred lire a day...
...In the pages below, Stille traces the story of a Jewish family in the ghetto of Rome...
...Like his Uncle Attilio and Uncle Enrico and their families, Michele Di Veroli (Umberto's son) was forced to find a new hiding place after the bombing of the San Benedetto church...
...But the day after Cassino fell, the Germans loaded 281 Jews into a train headed for the detention camp at Fossoli...
...What do you do...
...After leaving the convent in the middle of the night, the family found refuge with another former client of their store, who lived in Via Porta Settimiana...
...In Rome, the circle was closing rapidly on the Jews hiding throughout the city...
...We explained what had happened, and said, 'My mother seems half-crazy.' The woman came and gave my mother a hard slap across the face...
...In the convent at Via Cicerone after her father's arrest, Olga, her sister, and mother spent the remaining days of the German occupation listening to the artillery shells coming closer to Rome and trying to avoid a last minute capture...
...He had been able to see a list of the victims, and Attilio Di Veroli and Michele Di Veroli were on the list...
...We ate bread and lettuce, which we dressed with the salty liquid that come from anchovy cans...
...My mother, who was holding him by the arm, said she remembers feeling my father jump," Olga says...
...What little they had, they shared with us...
...They tried to help in every way possible...
...Nonetheless, he takes great pains to reassure his family and keep them from worrying: "I want you to know that I am well and that I am ready for whatever the future holds in store...
...After her father's arrest, Olga and her family developed contacts in the Rome prison that allowed them to keep up a clandestine correspondence...
...To stay locked in a room, with no news of the family, was more than they could bear...
...But I never had a good FALL • 1991 • 557 A People Under Tenor feeling about that place...
...It was a time of constant fear...
...Maybe something has happened, maybe Silvia [their older sister] has been freed.' `No,' I said, `I don't think she's happy...
...There were some friends who had a store nearby who would let us know when it was okay to go out and who brought us things that we needed...
...With spring weather beginning to warm the city and Allied troops inching daily closer and closer to Rome, the future was beginning to look brighter...
...My sister said: 'Look, how happy mother is...
...Luckily, several women who were watching the incident came to her aid...
...Written a few days before his deportation, this letter is much more full of foreboding: "Up till now I have been at Fossoli, and we do not know what fate awaits us...
...Because my father had lots of Catholic friends I was always fortunate to be able to find hiding places in churches and convents...
...Of the 2,091 deportees, 1,067 were men, 743 were women, and 281 were children...
...The story quickly circulated through the city that the Germans had taken a large group of Italians, mostly antifascists being held in the Rome prisons, to the Ardeatine Caves just outside the city...
...They served to round out the number so that the Germans could maintain their ten-to-one quota...
...Michele went and we had to move from here to there to try to save ourselves...
...Having narrowly escaped arrest while staying at their relatives' house in Trastevere, the family went to stay in a convent near the Ponte Rotto...
...So we went up to a woman hiding in the convent whom we knew to be Jewish, also...
...Avenge me...
...Particularly striking in Enrico Di Veroli's letters is the degree of concern for others at a time when he himself was in constant mortal danger...
...77 were deported during the German occupation, 8 returned...
...Benevolence and Betrayal: Five Italian Jewish Families under Fascism, by Alexander Stille...
...Naturally, Finzi had been among the "discriminated" Jews, those granted exemptions for their patriotic contributions...
...And in March the number climbed further to 163...
...We were well there, we stayed a few months, but then one day my father saw some people being arrested right under the windows of the house and he became afraid...
...Using the same method, he was able to send us back a couple of notes...
...We brought him food every day...
...One morning when my sister and I were sleeping we heard the woman's little boy playing with a German soldier...
...We were constantly on the move, trying to avoid a round-up...
...Mussolini's regime was at first relatively tolerant toward the Jews, some of whom declared themselves "loyal citizens...
...One of Enrico Di Veroli's principal concerns is that the family find ways of thanking and repaying the Catholic friends who have helped them in this time of calamity...
...The "Professor Resciude" to whom he refers was a fictional invention...
...Of the original nucleus of thirty-three Di Veroli family members—the four brothers and their children—some ten were either deported to Auschwitz or killed at the Ardeatine Caves...
...My Uncle Attilio had much more trouble...
...Standing on the bridge between the ghetto and Trastevere, she would finger people as they walked by...
...Every day, a new episode," Michele says...
...Because the melee occurred in front of the convent where the Di Verolis were staying, the women, without knowing where she lived, picked her off the pavement and carried her to the convent...
...that's why we suspected her...
...It's only an idea...
...And we went there and brought him food...
...Among the Jews killed at the Ardeatine Caves was Aldo Finzi, former undersecretary of the interior and a member of the first Fascist Grand Council...
...Hard-line Italian fascists crawled out from hiding and were on the ascendant...
...If you have to die, better to die with rifle in hand...
...As they were leaving, Rosa saw an old childhood friend, Celeste Di Porto, with whom she had gone to elementary school...
...When Olga and her sister Flora returned that evening, they found their mother in a strange state...
...Because the Germans were well known for their threat of killing ten Italians for every German murdered, the city trembled at the prospect of a massive retaliation...
...At the end of their resources, Rosa and her family found themselves back in the old Theater of Marcellus, the ancient amphitheatre just next to the ghetto where the Jews from the neighborhood had been rounded up on October 16 before being taken away in trucks...
...My sister, my older sister, Silvia, and I went to Via Tasso [the site of Gestapo headquarters] and I said: 'I am an Italian citizen...
...the other 750—including Enrico Di Veroli—were gassed immediately...
...On the afternoon of April 25, 1944, Enrico Di Veroli was walking his wife back to the convent, when he heard someone call his name...
...Not long after the massacre, Rosa and her older sister, Silvia, ventured back into the ghetto area to get some bread...
...Olga's brothers, Michele and Gianni, didn't like the idea of going into a monastery and, instead, left Rome to join the antifascist resistance...
...Out of the estimated eight thousand Jews present in Rome at the moment of the German occupation, about a fourth were captured...
...With the Germans settling in for a long occupation, many Italians began reconsidering their options...
...Throughout those months the family of Enrico Di Veroli moved from house to house and convent to convent, staying a step or two ahead of the Germans and the neofascists...
...we have no proof," says Rosa...
...Of the 335 men killed in the Ardeatine Caves, 77 were Jews, all of them, like Attilio and Michele Di Veroli, nonpolitical Jews who simply happened to be in the Rome prison at the time of the ambush...
...In this period, the beautiful dark-haired Celeste earned a new nickname: "La Pantera Nera," the Black Panther...
...The Di Verolis, however, were in no way exceptional...
...The rest of the family—Enrico, his wife, Grazia, and their two younger daughters, Olga and Flora—found a place to stay in buildings connected to the parish church of San Benedetto...
...I had gotten the false documents through friends who knew someone in one of the government ministries...
...Because there were a lot of important Italian soldiers and antifascists there, people who became important political figures after the liberation...
...The Misses "Michelina and Gianna Rita" are in fact his sons, Michele and Gianni...
...They needed to be certain about the people they let in to the Palazzo Laterense...
...This radio transmitted war news to the Americans and the English...
...These are days you'll never forget as long as you live.' And so it's been...
...We tried to shake Mama a bit, but we couldn't get her to stop laughing...
...Mamma stopped laughing and starting crying...
...Not long after this reunion, on March 3 the church of San Benedetto was hit by an Allied bomb—one of the few that fell on Rome during the war...
...Writing hopefully of his eldest daughter, Silvia, arrested with her husband and children on October 16, he says: "I have had news that Silvia and all the others are in Theresienstadt in Czechoslovakia and that we can write her through the International Red Cross...
...During the war a large percentage of the Italian Jews were deported to concentration camps in Germany and Poland...
...The people in the convent tried to help us as much as possible but they had to send us away...
...New York: Summit Books, 1991...
...They wanted, especially, to remain in contact with Enrico Di Veroli, who was staying with friends...
...So the ten of them lived in the two-room store with no kitchen, bathroom, or running water...
...In the evening we would try to find somewhere to sleep, sometimes in the open air...
...I got up my courage—I had been to school with her—and said: 'Ciao, Celeste, how are you...
...This excerpt is printed with the kind permission of the author...
...Enrico, don't play games with me...
...Prisoner number 175 on the list was Enrico Di Veroli...
...His concerns run from the practical ("Don't send cooked meat, it goes bad, send hardboiled eggs instead") to salutations to friends he has left behind: "Give my greetings to all those who ask of me...
...And they told me to go look in Regina Coeli prison...
...But I couldn't see a thing...
...It was not easy to get into the Palazzo Laterense...
...Don't you remember, you gave a thousand lire of merchandise on credit...
...Because he was blind in one eye, he took his fifteen-year-old son Michele with him...
...In this convent there were, along with Jews, a number of soldiers and officers who had escaped from the Italian army...
...There's no way around it, the people of Rome opened their hearts to us...
...We were sitting there in the ruins the whole day because we had nowhere else to go," Rosa remembers...
...Celeste had said they were 'fine,' they were `with her cousin,' and in fact they were with 558 • DISSENT A People Under Terror her cousin, dead at the Ardeatine Caves...
...Olga Di Verdi recalls that period as a string of adventures, escapes, and disasters...
...We're just taking you in for questioning.' " As they dragged off Enrico Di Veroli, a fracas ensued...
...But they said: 'Everyone has to leave.' " Michele Di Veroli was immediately able to find another place in a monastery but the other Di Verolis were not so lucky...
...The majority of the victims, however, were ghetto Jews with typically Roman last names such as Di Consiglio, Di Veroli, Di Porto, and Funaro...
...But instead of killing 320, they killed more...
...Although full of spelling and punctuation mistakes, the letters are written in a shrewdly constructed code in order to avoid identifying friends and relatives...
...I beg you not to worry, that I am well and I feel strong and full of courage because I have hope that all will end soon and we will be able to embrace one another in perfect health...
...But I was sure it was my father...
...the temptation to make several thousand lire by selling Jews to the police became too much for some people...
...By 1938, however, under pressure from his ally Hitler, Mussolini announced a new set of "racial laws...
...The next day, March 19, was a national holiday, the day of Saint Joseph...
...Two weeks later, on June 4, when Rome was liberated, Enrico Di Veroli was at the transit camp in Fossoli, near Modena—an area that would have to wait another nine months for the end of the war...
...1991 by Alexander Stille...
...By showing the varying fates of several Italian Jewish families, Alexander Stille, a gifted young writer of Italian descent, has provided a valuable record of a tragic experience...
...Nor does it include the dozens of other cousins, aunts, uncles, cousins-onceandtwice removed on the maternal side of the family...
...Luckily, we were able to find a place to stay in a convent near the Teatro Marcello...
...No, it's not that, we just need to know so that if they were to come for you, we can take you down a secret passageway.' They were incredibly good and courteous to us...
...He [Renato] had a brother named Attilio Di Veroli and thought it might be him...
...And from there I went to the Palazzo Laterense, through Monsignor Tercole, a friend of my father's...
...When the killing was done—it took several hours—the Germans exploded dynamite at the caves' entrance to hide the evidence of their crime...
...No one knew the names of the people who had been killed...
...Yes,' I said...
...The previous day, March 23, 1944, a bomb had exploded in Via Rasella while a convoy of German soldiers was passing, killing thirty-two German soldiers...
...I beg you all to be good, calm and to always get along, and to take the best possible care of Mamma, to pick up the stuff from Sig...
...560 • DISSENT A People Linder Terror Even at this late date, he does not appear to have grasped the full extent of the Germans' "final solution...
...I was always the most reckless of the family...
...We had a system of communication, slipping notes inside the clean laundry or inside the packages of food," Olga says...
...But on the morning of March 24, when she arrived at the prison gates, the guards told Rosa that her father and brother were no longer there and they had no idea where they had been taken...
...Riso and that of all the others . . . so that when I return I find all in good order, and if by some chance I should be delayed a bit not to despair and to remain calm...
...She seems nervous.' We finally learned that my father had been FALL • 1991 • 559 A People finder Terror arrested...
...At one point he writes: "I hope that Misses Michelina Rita and Gianna Rita study hard and never tire, succeed at their exams, and listen to the advice of Professor Resciude and pass their exams...
...Di Veroli, Di Veroli.' Finally, my father turned around and said: 'My name is Niccolata Rita' [the false name he was going by...
...Although it was dangerous to return to the old Jewish quarter, the baker knew them there and made sure they got something to eat...
...I moved to the Angelo Mai Institute [a religious institute belonging to the Catholic church], where about a hundred Jews were hiding...
...To find out more about her father and brother, Rosa called her old employer (and distant cousin) Renato Di Veroli, who was hidden inside the Vatican City...
...Be sure," he urges his family, "never to forget as long as you should live the great and good action of this man . . . in fact I beseech you as soon as you have received this letter to go and thank him and repay him all I owe him...
...EDs...
...They even had a radio transmitter there...
...They were afraid of informants...
...You, who know so much, do you know what's happened to my father and brother?' `They're fine,' she said...
...Although they were only about sixty kilometers from Rome, American troops were bogged down for the winter in the treacherous mountainous country at Cassino in a stand-off that seemed to last forever...
...I sometimes had to do guard duty at night on the roof because they were constantly watching out for a possible raid by the Germans the way they did at the basilica of Saint Paul's [which the Germans broke into, arresting numerous Jews and antifascists...
...The Germans raided some of the convents...
...Some did it out of self-interest, but a lot of them out of pure generosity...
...That evening we were afraid to go back there...
...Don't turn around,' my father said to her...
...Rosa, however, had her own suspicions...
...What happens if your brother dies alongside of you...
...The man, who was with another guy, was a client of our store who had lost an arm in World War I. My father had loaned him a thousand lire...
...But remaining in the ghetto at this point was untenable and the two families left and split up after four or five days...
...We knew that for every German, ten people would be killed...
...She was laughing and laughing...
...The people at the convent never tried to convert me...
...My mother continued to delude herself that they would come back, that there had been a mix-up, and maybe they had exchanged clothes and documents with other people," says Rosa...
...On May 20 the Allies finally broke the stalemate at Monte Cassino and began the final offensive that would soon culminate in the liberation of Rome...
...The hopes of an immediate Allied victory had faded...
...After the bombing, we wanted to stay in another convent but they wanted money, something like 200 lire a day, which we didn't have...
...Sometimes Enrico and his wife, Grazia, would walk arm in arm through the city...
...There were 353 Di Verolis listed in the 1938 census...
...The youngest was Rosa's little brother, Michele, who had celebrated his fifteenth birthday the month before his death...
...She got this idea in her head...
...Having nowhere else to go, Rosa's family went with her uncle Enrico Di Veroli and his family to their store back in the ghetto for several days...
...Michele and Gianni went to a partisan formation in the hills of Lazio led by Giorgio Costanzo...
...Although they do not know for sure, Rosa and her family suspect they were turned in by the seamstress with whom they were staying at the time...
Vol. 38 • September 1991 • No. 4
