January 27 is the International Holocaust Remembrance Day.
Recurrence set on the date when, seventy-seven years ago, the Red Army liberated the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp.
Among the few survivors found in the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp, not far from Krakow, there were also about fifteen Roman Jews. The only ones still alive among the more than two thousand deported from the city since the terrible 16 October 1943.
Rome and the Nazi occupation.
The most dramatic episode in the millennial history of the relationship between Rome and the Jewish community had already begun on 26 September. The SS major Herbert Kappler had, in fact, asked the leaders of the Roman community for a quantity of gold. The nazi asked for a quantity of 50 kilos of gold within 24 hours.
The gold of the jewish.
This very heavy outlay would have guaranteed the Roman community against subsequent round-up and deportation actions. Actions that were already underway in other parts of occupied Italy. The gold was delivered to the Gestapo headquarters in via Tasso, home to the notorious prison for patriots and political prisoners. However, the vague promise of immunity to Roman Jews was not kept. The great roundup on October 16 was only the beginning of a very hard period. Which saw the oldest Jewish settlement outside Palestine at the mercy of an increasingly ruthless and dangerous enemy.
La razzia, the big kept.
At dawn on 16th October 1943, a coordinated police action shaked the City. Known as the night of the raid. The families of the Ghetto, rounded up house by house, were gathered in the square near the Marcello theater and loaded onto trucks. It was not a transfer to the labor camps, as most of them, women and men and children, were shooting. But a one-way train ticket to Aushwitz. For all the other Roman Jews, the period of hiding began which ended only in June 1944 with the entry of American troops into Rome.
Solidarity and help.
It was only thanks to the relief and aid work of a large part of the Roman population and numerous religious institutions that the Roman Jews survived. Thus it was that the Community was not totally annihilated. In fact, about 4000 people found refuge in the convents and Catholic colleges. However, this did not prevent severe criticism from being directed at the Vatican and its highest hierarchies when the war was over. Mainly for never having publicly taken an official position against the racial laws of fascism. Controversies of this type are still alive today, at least on the level of historical research. Anyway, the historic visit in 1986, cemented relations between Christians and Jews. When Pope John Paul II visited the ‘older brothers’ gathered in the Great Temple in Rome and represented by the then Chief Rabbi Elio Toaff.
On the International Day of Remembrance, therefore, we remember all the victims of the Nazi-Fascist fury. So that such aberrations never happen again, and for no one, in the future.
