Other articles

  • Cipriana Selva

    Cipriana Selva was born in Rome on the 13 October 1920. At the time of the Fascist regime she was a young vivacious teenager living with her parents, her uncle and an unmarried aunt. As the only child of a lawyer and a medical doctor, Cipriana had a comfortable middle class upbringing, and she remembers […]

  • Maddalena Giraudo

    Walter Marx was born on February 27 1926 in Heilbronn, a small German city of 60,000 inhabitants. Like all of the 1000 Jewish citizens who lived in the city at the time, Walter had to escape Germany to avoid the consequences of its anti-Semitic laws. And like that of many other Jews who eventually crossed […]

  • The Pallavicini Family

    Stories of Jewish families rescued from capture and deportation by Italian citizens during World War II abound. Many of the protagonists of these heroic actions are to be found amongst the Italian partisans rebelling against their government’s anti-Semitic policy and some of the local clergy working independently from the Vatican. Some of those heroes who […]

  • Ezio Giorgetti

    Mr. Ezio Giorgetti, a hotel owner on the Adriatic Coast, was responsible for the rescue of forty Jewish refugees in the aftermath of Italy’s armistice with the Allies. On September 1943, a few days after the armistice, a group of forty Yugoslav Jews from the city of Asolo (Treviso), arrived in the town of Bellaria, […]

  • Father Giulio Gradassi

    Dr. Rubin Pick together with his wife and daughter escaped from Poland and took refuge in Trieste until September 1943. When the German occupation affected this area they decided to move south into the liberated part of Italy, but on their way they were forced to stop in Florence as their journey was becoming increasingly […]

  • Don Arrigo Beccari

    During Italy’s Fascist period, Don Arrigo Beccari was a young priest at the catholic seminary of Nonantola, a small village near the city of Bologna, in the Emilia Romagna region. In July 1942, a group of fifty Jewish children escaping from Dalmatia, (at the time occupied by Italian troops) took refuge in Villa Emma near […]

  • Don Brondello and the Catholic Church

    The subject of the Vatican’s response to the Fascist persecution of the Jews is complex and much debated. Whilst the Catholic Church has often been criticized for its tacit acceptance of the Nazi deportation of Jews, a clearer picture of Italy’s underground network of saviors – which allowed the majority of the 45,000 Jews residing […]