Rome Leader Riccardo Pacifici Slams Auschwitz Arrest ‘Disgrace’
Image by getty images
The head of Rome’s Jewish community, Riccardo Pacifici, was arrested in Poland and held overnight on Tuesday, after finding himself locked inside the Auschwitz death camp, where his grandparents were murdered. In a tweet he sent out in Italian, Pacifici called the arrest, which took place on International Holocaust Remembrance Day, “a disgrace.”
After attending a ceremony commemorating the liberation of Auschwitz and appearing live on “Matrix,” an Italian television talk show, Pacifici noticed that the camp’s gates had been closed, locking him inside together with Jewish community spokesman Fabio Perugia, “Matrix” host David Parenzo and two technicians. After an hour outside in the bitter cold — it was minus nine degrees Celsius — and no response to their calls for help and efforts to alert someone through the security cameras, they decided to attempt to leave through the box-office, by climbing through an open window. That activated the alarm, bringing the museum guard and several Polish police officers.
Pacifici, Perugia, Parenzo and the technicians were arrested immediately and interrogated on the grounds of Auschwitz until 2:30 in the morning, then brought to the police station outside the camp where they were questioned for another three hours.
“They arrested us and treated us roughly as though we were criminals,” community spokesman Perugia told Haaretz. “More and more police were summoned until there were some 12 officers who held us in the camp.”
Pacifici tried to tell the Polish police officers what had happened, but the difficulties posed by the language barrier apparently prevented him and his colleagues from communicating effectively, leading him to tweet in Italian: “We are being held by the Polish police inside Auschwitz…. A disgrace.”
The five men were released only at 6 A.M. on Wednesday morning at the end of prolonged questioning with the assistance of an interpreter and following the intervention of the Italian Foreign Ministry and the Italian Embassy in Warsaw.
“I’m astounded,” Pacifici said from the airport where he and his colleagues awaited their flight back to Rome. “They interrogated us until six in the morning — two Jews who had been locked inside the Auschwitz camp, where I lost some of my family,” he told the Italian newspaper La Stampa. “My grandparents died here. It’s a shock. Our only crime was that we tried to get out through the window.”
The incident, which took place at the end of a broadcast of the Italian talk show “Matrix” on Channel 5 (which is owned by former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi), was widely reported in the Italian media.
The program in which Pacifici participated was broadcast during the day of special programming that much of Italy’s media devoted to International Holocaust Remembrance Day. The special programming included discussions, interviews, and documentary and feature films about the Holocaust.
For more stories, go to Haaretz.com or to subscribe to Haaretz, click here and use the following promotional code for Forward readers: FWD13.
This is a moment of great uncertainty. Here’s what you can do about it.
We hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, we’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s independent Jewish news this Passover. All donations are being matched by the Forward Board - up to $100,000.
This is a moment of great uncertainty for the news media, for the Jewish people, and for our sacred democracy. It is a time of confusion and declining trust in public institutions. An era in which we need humans to report facts, conduct investigations that hold power to account, tell stories that matter and share honest discourse on all that divides us.
With no paywall or subscriptions, the Forward is entirely supported by readers like you. Every dollar you give this Passover is invested in the future of the Forward — and telling the American Jewish story fully and fairly.
The Forward doesn’t rely on funding from institutions like governments or your local Jewish federation. There are thousands of readers like you who give us $18 or $36 or $100 each month or year.
Support our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.
