[
Update Sept 2013:
IF YOU READ THE ORIGINAL ENTRY FIRST (BELOW -- IT
STARTS "My fraud alarm has a hair trigger...") PLEASE COME
BACK AND READ THIS! --NEXT PARAGRAPH ..."Reports
have surfaced..." I wrote the original entry,
below, in the summer of 2012 and used standard
sources in praise of Giovanni Palatucci, widely
referred to as the “Italian Schindler.”
BUT...
Reports have surfaced recently about a full-scale
reassessment of his role during WWII, including
one from the Centro Primo Levi at the Center for
Jewish Studies in New York that claims to have
studied hundreds of documents on Palatucci. Far
from helping save Jews from Nazi death camps, he
may have been a fraud, responsible for sending
them to their deaths. After seeing the report, Yad
Vashem (the organization in Israeli that confers
the honorific of “righteous” on such as Oskar
Schindler) has said it has 'commenced the process
of thoroughly examining the documents.' ]
[update: Feb 2015] The
most recent version of the list of the Righteous
on the Yad Vashem website still lists Giovanni
Palatucci.]
Campagna, the Righteous Town
—a Memorial and a Name
[The 3-dimensional
wooden Star of David shown in the image was erected in
early 2012 on a slope near the San Bartolomeo
monastery. It was a project of local high school
students. A plaque gives the name of the work as "A
Symbol to Remember Man and Place." It is part of a
project entitled Contemporary Art in the Places of
Jewish Memory in Campagna.]
My fraud alarm has a hair trigger when it
comes to self-aggrandizement and World War II. There
were simply not that many Oskar Schindlers to go
around—those who risked (and often lost ) their lives to
help save those who had committed no crime except that
of being a Jew. But there are some, to be sure. Yad
Vashem calls them "Righteous Among the Nations"
or "Righteous Gentiles." Yad Vashem (or the
Holocaust Museum) in Jerusalem is the official Israeli
entity that documents the events of WWII that led to
the destruction of European Jewry. It was set up in
1953 with the approval of the Knesset, the parliament
of the state of Israel.The origin of the name is a
Biblical verse, Isaiah 56:5: "And to them will I give
in my house and within my walls a memorial and a name
(Yad Vashem) that shall not be cut off". Part
of the museum is dedicated to the "Righteous Gentile."
I am pleased to report on two such individuals—indeed,
an entire town.
The
town is Campagna, about 30 km (20 miles) due east of
the city of Salerno in the Picentine hills of the
Cilento area. (The name of the town Campagna is not to
be confused with the similar sounding "Campania," the
name of the Italian region of which Naples is the
capital city.) Campagna, the town, is about 5 miles
north of Eboli. The town was
the site of one of the concentration camps for Jews
set up by Fascist Italy in WWII. The camp operated
from 16 June 1940 to 8 September, 1943, the date on
which Fascist Italy surrendered to the Allies. The
criteria for the location of such camps were that the
sites should be relatively isolated, not near ports,
important roads, railway lines, airports or munitions
factories. Campagna met those criteria and the
prefect of Salerno proposed two monasteries in
the town: the Convent of the Osservanti
dell’Immacolata Concezione and the Dominican
monastery of San Bartolomeo, both of which had already
had some very non-clerical use in that they had been
used as training facilities and barracks for officer
candidates in the Italian army. San Bartolomeo was
from the 1400s and on a steep slope of the Girolo hill
in the valley of the Atri river. At the time the
building had three floors and sufficient room for 450
persons plus guards. The Concezione was from
the 1500s and was somewhat smaller than S. Bartolomeo.
There have been a number of holocaust
commemorations in Campagna this year involving the
premises of both sites of the concentration camp.
There is a memorial museum on the premises of
San Bartolomeo, a permanent display called "Itinerary
of Memory and Peace" with photos, documents about the
site, related events and the Holocaust in general.
As concentration camps go, San
Bartolomeo was more than lax. On October 29, 1941,
Fascist party secretary Aldechi Serena, wrote a letter
to the police chief of Campagna, complaining that
there was "too much liberty in the concentration
camp..." . Some details on the detainees and their
treatment:
The first internees were 430 men captured in
different parts of Italy. Most of them were Jewish
refugees from Germany, Austria, Poland, Czechoslovakia
and Dalmatia, In the group there were also some
British citizens and a group of 40 French and Italian
Jews. Internees were allowed to receive food parcels,
and none of the internees was killed, subjected to
violence or deported to the infamous Nazi death camps
in the north. Prisoners were allowed to organize a
library, school, and theater. They could receive aid
from DELASEM.* San Bartolomeo is immediately adjacent
to normal residential buildings in what was (and still
is) a small mountain town; prisoners were apparently
at liberty to wander around and make friends with the
populace and even accept hospitality such as meals.
Two inmates died of illness in three years and were
buried in the local cemetery with Jewish rites. There
were two rabbis among the detainees. A number of the
inmates were also doctors who provided medical
attention. Inmates even had a soccer team that played
against local amateur teams, and they had a camp
bulletin. Also, a small synagogue was set up in San
Bartolomeo. For a while, a pianist among the prisoners
played the organ for Christian services on Sundays.
Key figures in this story are
Giovanni Palatucci, police chief of the northern
Italian district of Fiume and his uncle Giuseppe Maria
Palatucci, bishop of Campagna. Giovanni sent as many
as he could to Campagna and in Fiume was so "sloppy"
at his record-keeping that thousands of Jews in that
northern center would have been sent to certain death
had he not arranged for them to slip though the
cracks. Various sources say that he saved about 5,000.
He refused promotion and transfer as well as a
safe-conduct pass to Switzerland when he was about to
be found out. He paid with his life. He was arrested
by the Gestapo and sent to Dachau where he perished at
the age of 33. He is on the Yad Vashem list of
Righteous Gentiles.
His uncle, Giuseppe Maria Palatucci (1892-1961)
the bishop of Campagna was cited in 2006 with the Gold
Medal for Civil Merit. The citation reads:
During the last world war, this bishop of highest
human and civil merit worked with heroic courage and
civic virtue to provide moral and material aid to the
Jews interned in Campagna, succeeding in saving around
1000 inmates from being deported to Nazi extermination
camps. He was a brilliant example of coherence, human
solidarity and moral strength based on the highest
Christian values of sharing in the suffering of
others. At San Bartolomeo a prisoners'
room and the synagogue have been reconstructed. A film
was made in 2008, directed by Salernitan documentary
film-maker, Maria Giustina Laurenzi, called “Una
storia diversa. Gli Ebrei a Campagna 1940-1943”.
["A Different Story. Jews at Campagna 1940-1943".]
Also, there was a TV film by Fabrizio Costa (2001)
entitled "Il rumore di un treno" (The Sound of
a Train). It dealt with the life of Giovanni Palatucci
and was broadcast by the Italian state television
network.
Official recognition was given to the town of
Campagna by the President of the Republic of Italy.
The citation reads:
The population of Campagna, in spite of regulations,
threats of punishment and reprisals, showed a high
degree of solidarity and human brotherhood in choosing
to alleviate suffering, give hospitality and at times
aid the flight of Jews interned in the concentration
camp in that town. It was a notable example of
self-sacrifice and highest civic virtue. 1940-43.
The Italian state also issued a
citation to honor Giovanni Palatucci. As well, the
Giovanni Palatucci committee and rabbi Shalom Bahbout
(chief rabbi for Naples and southern Italy) have
petitioned the Yad Vashem to recognize Campagna as a
"City of the Just."
--------------------
*DELASEM is the acronym for
Delegazione per l'Assistenza degli Emigranti Ebrei
(Delegation for the Assistance of Jewish Emigrants), a
Jewish organization set up in 1939 to facilitate
emigration for Jewish refugees in Italy.
The organization was authorized by the Fascist
government and was legal until Sept. 8, 1943, when
Fascist Italy surrendered to the Allies. At that point,
with southern Italy in Allied hands, assistance became
irrelevant at ex-camps in the south such as the one at
Campagna.
Antonimi (bibliography) says that "Despite limitations
between 1939 and 1943, DELASEM succeeded in aiding more
than 9,000 Jewish refugees and in helping 5,000 of them
to leave Italy and reach neutral countries, primarily
Spain." In the Italian territory still occupied
by Germany and in the so-called Italian Social Republic
(a remnant Italian Fascist state set up in the north),
DELASEM was declared illegal but worked clandestinely
through various agencies to continue providing help to
Jewish internees.
As a point of clarification, most of the Jews in all
Italian camps were refugees from elsewhere in Europe;
they were not Italian —hence the term
"Assistance of Jewish Emigrants " in
DELASEM; the goal of the organization was to help get
those people out of Italy. As noted in this article ,
there were some Italian Jews in camps, including
Campagna, but I have found no source —and I
appreciate elucidation on this —as to how they
were selected. To my knowledge, between the
implementation of the so-called "racial laws" in 1938
and Fascist Italy's surrender in September of 1943,
there was no mass movement in Italy, in general, to
round up Italian Jews and herd them into camps; in
Campagna, no refugee Jews were deported to the
north. The racial laws for Italian Jews were draconian
economically and socially, to be sure. The government
forbade Jews from attending schools and universities,
fired Jews from professorships, banned Jews from the
civil service, military, and banking and insurance
industries, and required Jewish owners of
businesses to sell their assets to 'Aryans'; the
government also confiscated Jewish bank accounts. The
situation after September 1943 was dramatically worse.
In the part of Italy that was still Fascist (everything
from Rome north) there was a wide-spread cave-in to
deport Jews, both refugees and Italian, to Nazi death
camps . As a result, " ...Of
the 45,000 [Italian] Jews counted in Mussolini’s census
of 1938, about 8,000 died in Nazi camps. About 7,000
managed to flee. About 30,000 lived in hiding before
being liberated by Allied troops" (cited in Vitello).
Bibliography
—ANTONIMI , Sandro. (2000). DELASEM, Storia della più grande
organizzazione ebraica di soccorso durante la seconda
guerra mondiale (De Ferrari: Genova. — BETTINA, Elizabeth.(2009)
It Happened in Italy: Untold Stories of How the People
of Italy Defied the Horrors of the Holocaust.
Nelson, Nashville. —CAPOGRECO, Carlo Spartaco.
(2004). I campi del duce. L'internamento
civile nell'Italia fascista, 1940-1943. Einaudi:
Torino. — CORBISIERO, Fabio. (1999).
"Storia e memoria dell'internamento ebraico durante la
Seconda guerra mondiale. Il campo di concentramento di
Campagna" (in Nord e Sud, n. 6, NIS: Napoli. — PERONO, Gianluca. (2001). Gli Ebrei
a Campagna durante il secondo conflitto mondiale.
Edizione Comitato Giovanni Palatucci. Campagna. — RAIMO, Goeffredo. (1992). A Dachau
per amore. Giovanni Palatucci. Litotipografia
Dragonetti, Montella. — VANZAN, Piersandro. (2008). Giovanni
Palatucci, giusto fra le nazioni. Editrice Velar. — IZZO, Valentino. (2003). Raccontare
Campagna... Il SS. Nome di Dio. — IZZO, Valentino. (2009).
Antisemitismo - Palatucci - Campagna - Foibe (APCF),
2009. — VITELLO, Paul. (2010). "Scholars
Reconsidering Italy’s Treatment of Jews in the Nazi Era"
in the New York Times, November 4, 2010.
My thanks to Laura Papallo for calling my attention to
this.