Elizabeth Bettina is the author of the book, “It Happened in Italy: Untold Stories of How the People of Italy Defied the Horrors of the Holocaust,” published last spring by Thomas Nelson. The book tells the largely unknown story of Jews who survived World War II in Italy — both natives and those who fled there when no other country would take them. Bettina began research for the book in 2003, after seeing a photograph of a rabbi at the church where her maternal grandmother was married in Campagna, near Salerno. A native New Yorker who grew up in a largely Jewish neighborhood on Long Island, she is fluent in Italian, which aided her in researching and facilitating a meeting with Pope Benedict XVI and Jewish survivors. Novelist and travel writer Michael Luongo talked with her in New York City.
Michael Luongo: Explain the book’s focus on what seems a paradox — that Mussolini, Hitler’s strongest ally in the war, refused to help carry out the extermination of the Jews.
Elizabeth Bettina: The survivors have said that they do not believe Mussolini really wanted to harm them — that, otherwise, he would have had them deported. The foreign Jews believe that Mussolini put them in the camps as a “via di mezzo” [middle way] to appease Hitler without harming them. The Italian Jews lived in their homes, and the racial laws took away many of their civil liberties, such as having a civil servant job, going to school, etc., but they were not deported. The Jews I have interviewed felt that the Italians treated them “like human beings, like they were. There was no difference between us and the Italians.”
It was after September 8, 1943, when Italy was under German occupation [following the Italian uprising against Mussolini], that the Jews went into hiding.
M.L.: What first made you interested in the topic?
E.B.: The picture of an Orthodox rabbi, bishop and police officer [in Campagna] started me on this very unexpected journey. I wondered: What was a rabbi doing in my grandmother’s village, standing on the steps of the church where she was married — in 1940? I began meeting Jews who survived because they were in Italy and wanted to acknowledge the people of Italy for saving their lives.
M.L.: Tell me more about stories you heard — like playing cards with policemen, family visits, trips to spas, all while in a concentration camp.
E.B.: When I heard these things, I couldn’t believe them myself. They did not occur in only one place in Italy. Survivors had similar stories about their treatment, no matter where they were in Italy, whether they were in a camp with barracks or if they were “internati liberi,” or internees that were free in a village.
M.L.: The book also focuses on Giovanni Palatucci. What role did he play?
E.B:. Giovanni Palatucci was the Questore di Fiume [Police Chief of Fiume] and his uncle was the Bishop of Campagna. He helped save 5,000 Jews. Unfortunately, his actions were discovered by the Germans, and he was sent to Dachau, where, at age 36, he died.… Palatucci was honored by Yad Vashem in 1990; in 2002, he was beatified by Cardinal [Camillo)] Ruini.
M.L.: The Vatican has been blamed for turning a blind eye during the Holocaust. Does what you found change anything?
E.B.: Many of the survivors in this book were saved by priests and nuns throughout Italy. In addition, I recently received copies of papers showing that money was sent to Campagna from the Vatican to help the Jews.
M.L.: What about today’s war refugees? Iraq has four million war refugees and there is Darfur, a place many Jewish organizations are working in.
E.B.: My message is, if you are not indifferent, things can be different. This book shows that because people were willing to risk their lives for others, the others lived. You have choices.
M.L:. What do the survivors tell you about this book and the legacy of that time period?
E.B.: This is a story that needs to be told because stories of those rescued and the rescuers are important. During the worst of times, there can still be humanity. As Walter Wolff [a survivor] said, “Bad times, good people.”
There are so many stories about the Holocaust, but very few about what happened in Italy. The survivors in this book are grateful to be alive today, and happy that their stories will live on after them. They believe that before this book, the Italian story was not known by the general public.
M.L.: What was it like growing up Italian in a Jewish neighborhood? What similarities do Jews and Italians share in America — and in Italy?
E.B.: For me, my friends were my friends, and differences in religion did not matter. My friends came to my house to help me put up the Christmas tree and make struffoli, and I went to theirs for Passover and matzo ball soup. If we overlook the differences and focus on the similarities between people — well — maybe things would be better that way.
Michael Luongo, who lives in New York City, is a frequent contributor to the Forward. Visit Elizabeth Bettina’s Web site at www.elizabethbettina.com.
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Interesting! I can't wait to read the book.
Dear Editors,
In her interview with the Forward ("In Italy, ‘Bad Times, Good People,’" Michael Luongo, September 17, 2009), Ms. Elisabeth Bettina rightly seeks to honor the courage and humanity of those who went against the mainstream and helped Jews during the Nazi-Fascist persecutions. To support her case, however, she omits essential historical facts and misrepresents the context in which this happened. We wish to correct the errors not only as a matter of accuracy, but also out of respect to both the Jewish victims of Fascist persecution and the bravery of those who helped Jews.
It is simply not true, as stated in the interview, that “the racial laws took away many civil liberties (from the Jews) but they were not deported” and that “Mussolini, Hitler’s strongest ally in the war, refused to help carry out the extermination of the Jews.”
In fact, in 1938 foreign-born Jews residing in Italy were stripped of their citizenship and asked to leave, and Italian Jews were deprived of the most fundamental civil and human rights. Italian Jews found themselves trapped and forced into very difficult life conditions. Some 3,000 Jews who were able to leave fled the country.
Mussolini imposed the census of the Jews first in 1930, following the “Patti Lateranensi” (the 1929 agreement between the Kingdom of Italy represented by Mussolini and the Vatican), and then in 1938 with the promulgation of the racial laws and the establishment of the Ministry of the Race. The registry of the Jews enabled the persecution that brought to the isolation, spoliation, arrest, and final deportation to Auschwitz of 8,600 Jews starting in October 1943, of whom only few survived. As documented by sixty years of research of the Center for Contemporary Jewish Documentation in Milan and mostly available online (www.cdec.it), almost half of the arrests were carried out by the Italian police and with the help of Italian informants.
It is also inaccurate to state that “Italy fell under German occupation following the uprising of Italians against Mussolini.” Mussolini was removed from power by King Vittorio Emanuele III, and, in September 1943, founded the Italian Social Republic in the North of Italy. He was followed by hundreds of thousands of Italians who efficiently carried out the anti-Jewish policies of the republic. Between 1943 and 1945 Fossoli (near Modena) functioned as transit camp to Auschwitz, and a death camp was established in the Risiera di San Sabba, downtown Trieste.
Promoting this kind of misrepresentation of history offends the memory of all the men, women and children who were murdered in the extermination camps, that of those who risked their lives to save their neighbors, and ultimately compromises our ability to understand the past.
Sincerely, Natalia Indrimi
The board of Centro Primo Levi Alessandro Di Rocco Andrea Fiano Eitan Fiorino Lice Ghilardi Stella Levi Andrew Viterbi
For further reference: Liliana Picciotto Fargion, Il Libro della Memoria, 1991 Michele Sarfatti, The Jews in Mussolini's Italy: From Equality to Persecution, 2006 www.cdec.it www.museoshoah.it
If you are interested in the subject of Jewish survival in Fascist Italy, please look elsewhere! In her book Elizabeth Bettina exploits the personal stories of a few foreign Jews that survived in Italian Internment camp into the most outrageous, inaccurate, romanticized misrepresentation of fact. Fascist camps are portrayed as “ summer camps”, the Italian people who did not object to Mussolini’s racial laws, and cheered in mass for Il Duce and the Führer, are loving saviors of Jews. Not a word about the relentless anti-Semitic campaign carried out by the government and the press, no mention about Italians who spontaneously denounced their Jewish neighbors, nor of the thousands who were deported. Bettina confuses interning Jews with “saving” Jews. What she does not grasp is that if circumstances allowed a large percentage of the Jewish population to survive, it does not follow that the Italians “saved” them. The grotesque implication of the author’s reasoning is that since “only “ 20% of Italian Jews were deported, the fact that the lives of all Jews in Italy became hell ( expulsion from schools and university, loss of jobs, property, dignity) was some negligible fact. If what happened to Jews in many other countries was much worse, it does not make the persecution of the Jews in Italy something that country can be proud of. Neither the presence of the Pope nor the fact that Jews had been living in Italy since ancient times, prevented thousands to be killed simply because of their religion. Generalizations such as “the people of Italy defied the horrors of the holocaust” are a first step toward revisionism.
Tony Di Natale
From the review of Adam Smulevich (www.moked.it) on the presentation of Ms. Bettina's book in Florence.
"Reading Bettina's book and listening to her words, it becomes clear that the stereotype of 'Good Italians' is often used used to avoid delving into a painful page of Italian history. The plaques remembering the thousands of Italian Jews who were massacred by the Fascists and the Nazis should be a testimony to a different story. After the presentation of Bettina's book at the synagogue of Florence people asked why Ms. Bettina neglected to talk about the larger reality surrounding her limited narrative. "I am not a historian, I just wanted to tell a story based on the testimonies of some survivors, a beautiful story of solidarity." Many in the audience do not consider the author's defense satisfactory. “Those who take on such serious topic, must also take responsibility for the consequences that their writing might have among the readers" says the scholar Sandro Servi who worries about the ways in which Bettina's text might be easily instrumentalized."
It is with shock and dismay that I read : Elizabeth Bettina: Italy, ‘Bad Times, Good People’ by Michael Luongo in your current issue. In an interview filled with glaring inaccuracies, Ms. Bettina has the audacity (ignorance? bad faith?) to proclaim that Mussolini (that well known protector of Jews) interned them in camps in order to appease Hitler, therefore for their own protection. And she goes further, claiming that although they lost "some" of their civil rights, they were not deported!
It is hard to believe that this kind of soft core Holocaust revisionism could find a place in your pages...
My grandmother, a native of Vercelli (near Torino), was interned in the camp at Fossoli and deported from there to Auschwitz with her entire family. She was the sole survivor. She was one of the over 8,000 Jews deported from Italy, somehow all overlooked by Ms. Bettina. Fossoli was a far cry from the recreational safe havens provided by Mussolini that the the author refers to. Primo Levi, (another Italian Jew that goes unmentioned), who has provided us with the most chilling and clear headed accounts of the Holocaust, was one of those deported from Fossoli. The train tracks started at the camp and lead directly to Auschwitz.
I had never heard about Elizabeth Bettina before this insulting interview, and after a brief excursion into her website, I was edified. I don't know why she prides herself in exploiting the survivors who "were saved" and I understand even less why these poor people have been paraded to a variety of encounters with Catholic clergy , all the way up to the Pope. Whatever interests this serves, it is not their own. My heart goes out to them.
I have no intention in getting into history lessons here, I leave that to the experts. But from a publication like yours one expects more responsibility in fact checking the materials you print. And I certainly expect The Jewish Forward to have the good faith and the courage to publish a retraction and a correction, as well as letters like this one.
I trust and hope you will do the right thing.
Mary Whynn
As a German Jew and Holocaust survivor, my whole family escaped to Italy in October 1939. What Elizabeth Bettina writes, concerning the attitude of the Italian people and Government towards the Jews, is correct.
After September 8, 1943, everything changed because all parts of Italy not yet liberated by the Allies came under German occupation and Italy lost its sovereignty. From then on, the Italians had absolutely no voice in what happened to the Jews in Italy, and the Germans than used Mussolini as a pupped to get as many Italians as possible to fight for Germany. It was the Germans who rounded up Jews and transported them to Auschwitz.
Dr. Pollak, an Auschwitz survivor and former Italian concentration camp inmate, wrote the following memorial placard:
"In the hours of darkness at Auschwitz, like a mirage we had visions of the bright and lush garden of Urbisaglia in Italy, the land of sun and good people"
The ‘bright and lush garden of Urbisaglia' is the Villa Bandini estate that was used as a concentration camp for Jews.
I have written on the attitude of the Italian people and its government towards Jews in my story of surviving the Holocaust in Italy. This book also contains my wife's story of surviving Auschwitz. We are publishing and donating all copies of this book to the Holocaust Museum of Southwest Florida in Naples were it is available to raise funds for its mission.
Heinz Wartski
The previous postings, dated September 23 and 24, criticize the Bettina book on the following two issues:
1. For not concentrating on those Italians who were Nazi sympathizers. To this I can respond that the hard-core fascists, who were Nazi sympathizers, constituted a small minority of the Italian people. The important fact that lead to the survival of most Jews in Italy, was the predominant sentiment of its people.
2. For not concentrating on the 8,600 Jews who were deported to Auschwitz from Fossoli. On this, I can report that Germany was in total control of Italy at that time, and the deportations were administered under their sole jurisdiction. Furthermore, Mussolini was installed as a puppet in Salò for the sole purpose of enticing some of his hard-line followers to join the Germans in their war efforts.
If Bettina suggests that the predominant sentiment of the Italian people was conducive for Jews in Italy not having been exterminated, what evidence do the four writers, Indrimi, DiNatale, Emil, and Whynn, have to contradict that suggestion?
During WWII, I personally found those very same sentiments among the Italian people that Bettina attests to. My personal findings encompassed different regions in Italy from Lombardy to Abruzzo.
It is true that the fascists enacted a number of racial anti-Semitic laws. However, none of those laws affected the attitude of the majority of Italians, and none of those laws resulted in the abuse or extermination of anyone.
Heinz Wartski
I am surprised by the debate over Ms. Bettina's book, which seems to tell only of the popluar resistance in Italy, when in fact there is a much more serious story to be told. Many countries' populations took risks to save their Jewish neighbors, but in Italy the government and army themselves took those risks, issuing visas and even facing down, for example, the French Vichy police at gunpoint in order to rescue a small number of Jews.
Dorothy Rabinowitz' article in the Wall Street Journal, "An Army of Schindlers From Italy" treats this subject,
http://www.annoticoreport.com/2009/08/army-of-shindlers-from-italy.html
and Israeli filmmaker Joseph Rochlitz' 1987 film "The Righteous Enemy" documents the Italian authorities' systematic resistance to Hitler's "Final Solution", during the war in all Italian-occupied areas.
http://www.vimeo.com/4355886
One doesn't wish to romanticize, but does one need to do so when the facts speak for themselves? The fact is that, despite consistent pressure from Germany, not one Jew (Italian or non_Italian), was deported from Italy until the Germans assumed direct control at the end of the war. This included European Jews who fled to Italian-occupied lands (on report of the safety of Italian areas) and were hastily issued Italian citizenship to prevent their deportation.
It is an injustice neglect to recognize the Italian actions which are, to my knowlege, without parallel among the wartime governments.
Our community should also recognize that, amidst the current wave of anti semitism in Europe, the Italian government and civil institutions seem to be distinguishing themselves in support for the state of Israel.
To the Editors of the Forward:
When statements in an article are being questioned, it is standard journalistic practice that the editors or the author of the piece offer a reply. Regarding the interview by Michael Luongo with Elizabeth Bettina, I have seen neither. Myself and others in this forum have offered personal thoughts and accounts, expressing widely different opinions. Yet the aim of the article was not opinion but history. Because of this I find it peculiar that the author is a travel writer while none of the many specialized historians who live in our city have been asked for their expertise on this particular subject. As an Italian-American I am very proud of my heritage yet I cringe at the suggestion that Italians were better then anyone else because no Jews were deported until the Germans took over Italy. The same happened everywhere. France surrendered to Germany in 1940, the Jews were deported starting in July 1942. Polish Jews, were exterminated as Germans arrived into Poland, the same happened in Hungary and all over Europe. If The Forward wants to open a debate it should begin from facts not opinion.
Tony Di Natale
The alternative to establishing Italian concentration camps for illegal alien Jews was to transport us to the Austrian/German border and turn us over to the Germans who would have been glad to expedite us to their death camps.
In contrast with the German extermination camps, the Italian concentration camps had no life-threatening conditions. Medical treatment was available in Italian camps because the Italians would have considered it a blemish on their national honor for an inmate to die while in their custody.
Heinz Wartski