Neurologist and Anti-Nazi Partisan Davide Schiffer
Image by Courtesy of Wallstein Verlag
By Benjamin Ivry February 9, 2012
The French Jewish neuropsychiatrist and Holocaust survivor Boris Cyrulnik has written widely about the importance of “Creative Disobedience” and how when faced by the Nazis, badly-behaved children often had more useful survival strategies than polite, well-trained ones.
The eminent Italian neurologist Davide Schiffer has produced a memoir of his own war years, underlining the truth in this assertion. Although best known to doctors for such texts as “Brain Tumor Pathology: Current Diagnostic Hotspots and Pitfalls” from Springer Verlag in 2006, and “Through the Microscope: Neuroscience and the Bases for Clinical Reasoning”, out from the same publisher in June 2011, Schiffer’s “There is no Homecoming: Holocaust, Resistance, and the Postwar Years” originally out in Italy in 2003 from 5 Continents Edizioni and in a revised version in 2008 from Edizioni Sei, may be his most moving, limpidly written work.
Although no English-language version exists as yet, a German translation appeared from Wallstein Verlag last October. It explains Schiffer’s guilt feelings over the 1944 arrest by Italy’s Fascist police of his Hungarian Jewish-born father Sándor, and subsequent deportation to Auschwitz where he was murdered.
Taught to be obedient and respectful, 16-year-old Davide, raised in the town of Verzuolo in the Piedmont region of Italy, southwest of Torino, did not even think of attacking the policemen who were arresting his father. Instead, “like a fool, like an idiot,” he just witnessed the scene in shock. However, the tragic disappearance of his father immediately galvanized Schiffer who took to the hills as a teenage partisan, fighting the Axis foe after learning disobedience the hard way.
In happier times, sweet memories included Shabbat dinners when young Davide relished such culinary treats as oven-baked Rakott Krumpli, a potato casserole liberally seasoned with Paprika, and Hungarian palacsinta, central European thin pancakes comparable to the French crêpe. Such festive memories were interrupted by the rise of Italian anti-Semitism.
After the war, having resumed his studies, Schiffer was offered the opportunity to study at the renowned Institute for Brain Research in Neustadt, Germany. He eloquently describes his hesitation about studying in the “land of murderers” and speaking a language which from his days as a partisan he associated with screamed military commands. He concludes, “We cannot hate an entire people” and notes that many Germans too died in Nazi concentration camps, so he chose to take up the educational offer, which led to his long and distinguished career.
Watch Davide Schiffer speak in Torino in 2008 about his wartime experiences.
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.
