BOOKS
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Quoting from diaries and reminiscences we learn that when the sudden
and virulent anti-Semitism struck a raw nerve, some of the more
conservative Jewish elders would bow to it as they used to in the
ghettos, which had been abolished only seventy-five years before, and
would attack the Zionists who "believe they have another Fatherland
that is not Italy"; that the second set of racial laws, of November 1938,
would pull the rug out from under these loyal
discriminati
as well; and
that by June 1939 when all Jews were expelled from the party and the
army reserve, and had to sell their properties and lose the right to
practice their professions, they would be dumbstruck. Still, the gradual
tightening of the noose had started much sooner for the antifascists, for
Vittorio Foa, who was a member of the Turinese group Giustizia e
Liberti, whose notorious leader, Mario Levi, had fled Italy in 1934, and
whose members were such writers as Leone and Natalia Ginzburg, Cesare
Pavese and Carlo Levi. Yet others, such as Massimo Teglio of Genova,
turned from a sort of playboy into an exceedingly clever underground
figure - collaborating with an enormous network of priests and nuns
who were hiding Jews, and moving them from one place to another,
often all around the country. He was close to being captured many times
while helping to hide others, but always escaped, often with the
assistance of Catholics whose sense of humanity would win out over
their fear of retribution for harboring or helping Jews.
I could go on exemplifying how Stille has managed to convey the
personal histories of dozens of networks of people, and of individuals,
most of whom ultimately perished, but some of whom came back to
their homes from the death camps, from exile in remote confines, and
from America and Switzerland. Instead, I would suggest reading this
book which alone can impart the flavor of life under Italian fascism,
along with the myriads of responses of individuals among the majority
(99 112
percent of Italians are Catholic) population ultimately displayed
- and Stille shows how insidiously fear crept up on everyone, as is
customary in dictatorships, and how its spread eventually allowed for
genocide.
Some of the deportees, such as Gina Schonheit who ordered her son
not to be stupid and obey the Germans who were shoving him and his
father onto a train other than hers, demonstrated the sort of courage
that
ultimately saved them. Her sixteen-year-old son, when insisting his
father ape German phrases at crucial moments, did the same. But after he
came back to Ferrara it took Franco almost forty years
to
speak of
Buchenwald. The psychoanalysts would explain this silence as repression,
as wishing to forget in order to go on
to
other things; sociologists
might point to the fact that in the 1980s the search for "roots" became
prevalent. But even while remembering was put on hold, it took place.
