“Casa di vita” (House of Life) . This recognition reads on a plaque displayed a few days in the monastery of the Franciscan Missionaries of Mary in Piazza del Carmine (Florence).
The award was conferred by the International Raoul Wallenberg Foundation for the help offered by the sisters of this community to many women and children, during the Nazi roundups that took place exactly 71 years ago.
After the roundup and deportation of 1,022 Roman Jews to Auschwitz, the Nazis quickly went up north in the Italian peninsula to make similar surprise raids in major cities.
Florence was immediately targeted and the city paid a very high price, with two roundups on November 6 and November 26, 1943.
With the pressure of persecution, and knowing that the Germans had requested the lists of all Florentine Jews, the Jewish Assistance Committee, set up by the young Chief Rabbi of Florence Nathan Cassuto, in agreement with Matilde Cassin, decided to turn to the Archdiocese of Florence. The first contacts occurred through Giorgio La Pira.
The Archbishop of Florence, Cardinal Elia Dalla Costa, immediately instructed Don Leto Casini, Pastor of Varlungo and Dominican Father Cipriano Ricotti to assist the Jewish Assistance Committee and help shelter Jewish refugees in a number of monasteries and religious institutions of the diocese .
Following the directives of the Cardinal, over twenty convents and religious institutions -not counting the parishes- opened their doors offering shelter to more than 110 Italian and 220 foreign Jews.
The Missionary Sisters of Mary in Piazza del Carmine answered the call. Eighty mothers with their children were hosted and hid among the rooms of the convent, in silence. With mutual respect of religious customs, they lived together and shared the same spaces.
One of the women was the Chief Rabbi of Genova’s wife, Wanda Abenaim Pacifici. All this could happen thanks to the courage of the mother superior, Sister Ester Busnelli, who was recognized Righteous among the Nations by Yad Vashem in 1995.
His two sons were hosted one night; the next day they were hidden in another monastery in Tuscany because there were only women at the Franciscan Sisters’ place.
The sisters of Piazza del Carmine risked their lives at all times. They knew that the Germans did not tolerate those who helped the Jews, whose destiny was the gas chambers. These were two months of living on tiptoes: sometimes hidden in cellars, fearing of a raid or a betrayal, or of being taken by the Nazi fury.
Then the night of the raid came. The night of November 27, at about 3 a.m., a patrol of about thirty SS, assisted by the fascist militia, inspected the convent.
Room by room, they shouted in German: “Get up!”. Most of those women and their children were found and taken into the big theater auditorium.
A girl by the name Lea Lowenwirth – Reuveni volunteered as an interpreter in German and French and was able to release many women making believe the Nazis that they were undocumented Hungarian. In total, thirty women and girls were saved.
In the general confusion, a woman was captured by a SS agent. She was with her son Isaac. In an extreme gesture, she dropped her baby at a nun’s foot, and the Germans did not realize it. The nun promptly hid the child under her skirts, saving his life. That child is today a father and lives in Israel with his family.
The women were first deported to prisons in Florence and then were transferred to Verona. They were finally moved to the Auschwitz- Birkenau camps from where they never returned. In that place of extermination Wanda reached somehow her husband, Rabbi Riccardo and then both were killed. Their grandson, named Riccardo, son of the baby saved by the nun, is now the President of the Jewish Community of Rome.
On November 19, 2014 the ceremony of the ‘Casa di Vita’ commemorated the work of the Franciscan Sisters of Florence and was attended by the religious who succeeded Mother Esther: Sister Vera Pandolfi, the Chief Rabbi of Florence, Joseph Levi, and Ms. Sara Cividalli, President of the Jewish Community of Florence whose loved ones were hidden a few meters from the establishment
“This event is an eye-opener warning that we need for the present times – explained Rabbi Levi – . We must continue to reflect and disseminate a culture that educates and manages to create another kind of humanity. There may be conflicts, disagreements, but they cannot take us beyond the limit of human, which is what happened during the Shoah. The violence has been legitimized with a thousand reasons. This must never happen again. And we are here to send this message to all humanity, to all, to the believers of all religions.”
The International Raoul Wallenberg Foundation urges to share reliable information on other “Houses of life ” either by e-mail (irwf@irwf.org), by telephone or by contacting the various offices of the organization.
New York : 212-7373275
Jerusalem : + 972-2-6257996
Buenos Aires : + 54-11-43827872
For more information,
https://www.raoulwallenberg.net
