fossa, italy | More than 65 years after villagers provided shelter to Italian Jews fleeing from the Nazis, a group of those who evaded capture rushed to repay that sacrifice in rural communities hard-hit by an earthquake.
A delegation of around 20 elderly Jews and their descendants — as well as community leaders — made their way to makeshift camps in the area around the mountain city of L’Aquila on April 13, offering everything from gym shoes to summer camps for children.
“I wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for these people,” said Alberto Di Consiglio, whose parents were sheltered in the small hamlets of Fossa and Casentino during the war. “We have to help them.”
More than 100 tent cities were built around L’Aquila and the 26 towns and villages affected by the 6.3-magnitude quake, which struck April 6, killing 294 people and displacing another 55,000.
At least five Jewish families, around 30 people, took shelter in the small mountainside villages of Fossa and Casentino in mid-1943, when German forces began to take direct control of central and northern Italy. They remained there until the arrival of the Allies a year later.
In October 1943, a few weeks after the families left their native Rome, Nazi troops swept in on the capital’s Old Ghetto neighborhood, deporting more than 2,000 Jews. Only a handful survived the death camps.
The runaways initially hid in Fossa, about 10 miles from L’Aquila, but were forced to flee to the nearby village of Casentino when warned that the Germans had learned of their presence.
“We stayed in a ruined house until a woman took us in,” Emma Di Segni said. Though they had fake documents and posed as refugees fleeing Allied bombings, their hosts knew who they were and were aware they could be executed if caught sheltering Jews, she added.
“They knew what they risked, but they never said anything,” she recalled.
Di Segni is in contact with descendants of her saviors now living in Pittsburgh, but she came to the tent camp set up outside Casentino to look for their next-door neighbors.
In one tent, Di Consiglio managed to find Nello De Bernardinis, 74, the son of the couple who sheltered Di Consiglio’s father and eight other relatives during the war.
“It’s so painful that such righteous people should suffer like this and live in a tent,” Di Consiglio said.
De Bernardinis said he was fine for the moment and greatly appreciated the gesture of the Jewish community checking in on him and his family. He said, though, that it would be useful to have help during harvest time, and Di Consiglio promised his whole family would come.
Riccardo Pacifici, the head of Rome’s small Jewish community, said that the capital’s Jews, which number fewer than 15,000, were already collecting money and clothing for all quake victims.
Luigi Calvisi, the mayor of Fossa, said he would work to get recognition from Jerusalem’s Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial for people like De Bernardinis and others who sheltered Roman Jews.
Irena Steinfeldt, director of the Righteous Among the Nations department at Yad Vashem, said the museum was not familiar with the stories of Fossa and Casentino.
“We want to hear these stories,” Steinfeldt said.
Other stories of Jews being saved in the same area were recorded, she said, usually involving Jews who fled from Rome to nearby villages.