The Italian Executioners: The Genocide of the Jews of Italy PDF
Preview The Italian Executioners: The Genocide of the Jews of Italy
The Italian Executioners The Italian Executioners The Genocide of the Jews of Italy SIMON L E V IS SUL L A M Translated by Oona Smyth with Claudia Patane With a foreword by David I. Kertzer Princeton University Press Princeton & oxford Copyright © 2018 by Princeton University Press Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to Permissions, Princeton University Press Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540 In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 6 Oxford Street, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TR press.princeton.edu Jacket art: Milan, Italy, 1943. SeM/Universal Images Group/Bridgeman Images All Rights Reserved First published as I carnefici italiani in January 2015 by Giangiacomo Feltrinelli Editore, Milan, Italy. Copyright © 2015 Giangiacomo Feltrinelli Editore ISBN 978- 0- 691- 17905- 6 Library of Congress Control Number 2018938054 British Library Cataloging- in- Publication Data is available This book has been composed in Baskerville 120 Pro Printed on acid- free paper. ∞ Printed in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Contents Foreword vii David I. Kertzer PrologUe An Evening in 1943 1 one The Ideological Context of Genocide 9 two The Dynamics of Genocide: Interpreting Actions, Motivations, and Contexts 29 three The Beginning of the Persecutions 59 foUr The Seizure of Jewish Property 67 five December 1943: Arrests and Deportations from Venice 76 six Hunting Down Jews in Florence 92 seven At the Border: Jews on the Run 101 eight A City without Jews: Brescia 109 nine Informing 118 conclUsion Amnesties, Repression, and Oblivion 131 Acknowledgments 143 Notes 145 Glossary 175 Index 179 Foreword The impulse to erase or recast painful historical memo- ries may well be a universal human trait, but it can be a dangerous one. When the uncomfortable events of the past are replaced in memory—a nd, even worse, in histo- riography— by a triumphal account of virtue, the danger is all the greater. It is just such a misrepresentation of the past that Simon Levis Sullam tackles head- on in this short but important book. Those who have spent much time in Italy in recent years may be pardoned if they get the impression that Italians fought in World War II not on the side of the Nazis but with the Americans and British against the Nazis. From the immediate postwar years to the pres- ent, memories of the relations between the Italians and the Nazis have focused for the most part on the Resis- tance. One small indication of this: Italy boasts dozens of centers for the study of the Resistance but few for the study of Fascism. Yet the Resistance lasted a year and a half and involved only limited parts of the country and a small minority of Italians. By contrast, the Fascist re- gime lasted two decades, covered the whole country, and involved millions. If Italians are, understandably perhaps, eager to mis- remember their past support for the Fascist regime and their past alliance with Nazi Germany, they have shown themselves even more eager to construct a wholly viii | foreword misleading history of their responsibility for the perse- cution and cold- blooded murder of their fellow Italians whose only sin was being Jewish. It is this history that Levis Sullam seeks to set straight in these pages. In the widespread attempts to separate Italians from any responsibility for the Holocaust, few elements have been more central than ignoring Italy’s vicious campaign of persecution of its Jewish citizens that was launched in 1938 with the introduction of the draconian racial laws. Adults were thrown out of their jobs, their children were thrown out of the schools, and all Jews were cast as nefarious enemies of good, Christian Italians. As their Jewish neighbors were persecuted, it was the rare non- Jewish Italian who spoke up for them. More commonly, former friends crossed the street to avoid having to greet them. Italian academics showed themselves all too eager to benefit from the openings created when their Jew- ish colleagues were cast out and, indeed, following the war, fought mightily to resist giving their positions back to them. Italy’s antisemitic campaign, beginning two years be- fore Italy entered the war, can properly be placed along- side the antisemitic campaign in these years in Germany (and elsewhere in central Europe) as a crucial step in the process that would make the Holocaust possible. Before people could entertain the idea of sending Jewish chil- dren and other defenseless Jews to their death, simply for being Jewish, they first had to rob them of their hu- manity, to cast them as dangerous enemies. This the Ital- ians did with the imposition of the racial laws. The antisemitic campaign facilitated the mass murder of Italy’s Jews in another way as well, as Levis Sullam foreword | ix shows, for it created both a census of all of the Jews and a bureaucracy devoted to their surveillance and persecu- tion. As he notes in these pages, the roundup of France’s Jews was slowed by the lack of documentation on who the Jews were and where they lived. The Italians had no such problem, thanks to the racial laws and the antise- mitic government machinery that had been in place for five years before the roundups began. An important part of Italians’ ability to distance them- selves from this past has been the creation of the myth of the “good Italian.” Levis Sullam shows that this myth was constructed very early, beginning in the final months of the war, as Italians quickly remade their identities to cast themselves on the side of the war’s victors. In this convenient narrative, Italians had only positive feel- ings for their Jewish fellow citizens. All of the horrible things done to the Jews were the work of the evil Ger- mans, notwithstanding the Italians’ own heroic efforts to protect them. Insofar as the Holocaust is concerned, this myth relies both on the erasure of the five years of the Italian state campaign against the Jews in the years leading up to the Shoah and on the misrepresentation of how it was that those thousands of Jews in Italy in 1943–4 5 came to be identified, located, and transported to the death camps. The Roman Catholic Church has been among the in- stitutions with the greatest stake in this historical mis- representation. In the Holy See’s official version of this history, contained in the 1998 Vatican statement “We Re- member,” the antisemitism that led to the Holocaust was wholly distinct from the “religious” anti- Judaism that the Church had promulgated. As Levis Sullam shows,
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