"If you are not indifferent, things can be different. This is what this story is about." Elizabeth Bettina

By Debra Michals

Elizabeth (Nicolosi) Bettina ’84 thought she knew everything about Campagna, a tiny village nestled in the mountains of Southern Italy that holds special meaning for her family. It was where her beloved grandparents were born and later married, and as a child Bettina spent virtually every summer there, falling under the spell of the enclave’s Old World charm. In all the years she visited, though, there was one thing she never discovered: Campagna’s remarkable connection to the Holocaust.

Bettina stumbled upon this relatively unknown piece of history one August night in 2004 while sharing a pizza with her grandmother during one of their trips to the village. Flipping through a dissertation-turned-book that the restaurant owner had shared with her, Bettina saw a photo from the 1940s that showed a group of people, dressed to the nines and smiling, on the steps of a church. A rabbi standing noticeably front and center caught her eye. “I thought, ‘Wait a minute, what’s a rabbi doing in Campagna during World War II?’” she says.

From the restaurant owner, she learned for the first time that Jews had been interned at the local convent during the war. Hungry to know more, she began asking questions and over the course of the next three years tracked down twenty-five survivors (all now living in the United States) who eagerly shared their experiences as Jews in Italy in the years before the country was occupied by Germany. The resulting book, It Happened in Italy, published in April, weaves together Bettina’s journey of discovery—which culminated in an audience with the pope—with survivors’ stories contrasting the humanity of the Italians in preoccupation Italy with the inhumanity Jews experienced elsewhere in Europe.

“I had never heard anything in all my years of going to Campagna about Jews being interned during World War II,” recalls Bettina, who understood the town to be Catholic during the 1940s. “I knew that my great-grandfather had hidden some Jews during the war, but some is like ten or twenty. That’s very different from an orthodox rabbi standing in front of a church. When you see that, you know there’s a system in place; there’s more than some. There’s a community, enough for there to be a rabbi.”

The survivors she talked to remembered the passage of racial laws in 1938 that prohibited Jews from working and eventually led to their detention. But for Italian Jews, detention meant confinement to their own homes, not work camps or death camps. In fact, according to her book, Jews from elsewhere in Europe fled to Italy because it did not require visas and they could choose where they ended up under the Italian system of “confined but free.” “What mattered in Italy was that the Jews were off the beaten path,” Bettina notes. Most Jews were able to be interned with family members. “They were generally treated with dignity and could practice their religion or get married,” she says.

Typically housed in convents, old hospitals, schools, and apartment buildings, Jews in Italy did not face crowding or starvation and had the freedom to come and go—as long as they signed out when they left and were back to sign in by dusk. Many survivors have memories of picnics and playing cards and other games. One survivor recounted, “Yeah, I had to sign in every day, and then we went to go have coffee—me and the police.”

In fact, the twenty-five survivors Bettina interviewed had surprisingly kind words about their treatment. “‘Thanks to Italy, I’m an old American now.’ That’s what I heard over and over,” Bettina says. 

While it’s difficult to pin down exact numbers, Bettina says that research documents, scholarly works, and figures from The War Against the Jews, by Lucy Dawidowicz show that approximately 80 percent of Jews in Italy were saved, whereas about 80 percent of Jews were killed in occupied Europe. “There is a list of one day—Sept. 16, 1940—272 Jews who had fled to Italy were interned—and, thus, saved—in the convent next to the church where my grandmother got married,” Bettina says, adding that there were approximately 40,000 Jews in Italy before the war and 32,000 after the war. Nearly 8,000 of those 40,000 were deported to places like Auschwitz once the Germans occupied Italy.

During the German occupation, the risks Italians took to help Jews intensified. “Italian police would often warn Jews that they were going to be deported so they could flee. They’d tell them, ‘Don’t be here tomorrow; if I find you, I have to take you away,’” Bettina explains. One of the heroes of Bettina’s book is Giovanni Palatucci, a police officer who defied orders to implement Hitler’s “Final Solution” and saved 5,000 Jews in Italy from being deported to Nazi death camps. He falsified documents so Jews could escape Italy and sent those who couldn’t get away to an official government internment camp at the San Bartolomeo convent in Campagna, where his uncle was the bishop. When the Germans figured out what Palatucci was doing, they sent him to Dachau, the first concentration camp opened in Germany, where he died.

Despite uncovering so many intriguing stories, Bettina didn’t immediately think to write a book about what she discovered. Her original goal, as she began meeting survivors, was to get them back to Italy, where they might serve to remind local residents that “even during bad times, there can be good people.” That was especially the case with Walter Wolff, an eightysomething survivor whom she met in 2005 when he spoke at Queens College. “Walter wanted the people of Campagna to know that the good Italian people saved his life,” Bettina says.

She not only got Wolff and a few others back to Italy the next year, but she also managed to get the bulk of the trip costs donated. “I thought, I have to get them back there because the people of Campagna should know that [Wolff] still exists and about the work he’s done to get the word out there about all this—but he was getting older so time was limited,” she recalls, choking back a tear. “The most unforgettable part of all this was reliving their stories on this journey,” she says. “Walter got to Italy at the last time he was able to travel; he died at age 90, two years ago. I wish we had met sooner; there’s so much I still want to ask him.” Bettina made a few other trips back with survivors, one of which included a June 2008 audience with the pope. “Some of the German Jews that we knew wanted to meet the pope so they could acknowledge the people who saved them, including the local Italian clergy,” says Bettina, whose book is now in the Vatican library. “I put some feelers out and got a yes. The pope is German and has his own history of that era. I remember sitting there looking at the pope thinking, ‘This is surreal.’”

The more she researched, the more Bettina realized that she had to put the many stories she captured into a book. These days, she continues to collect survivor stories and is working on a documentary with research partner Vincent Mamorale about Italians and the Holocaust. In five short years, that one photograph of the rabbi in front of the convent has completely changed Bettina’s life—and not just professionally. “When I look back, I almost can’t believe any of this happened,” she says. “If I have learned anything, it’s that you never know when something will change your life and take you on a different path—and it can be pretty incredible if you follow where it leads.”

Debra Michals is a freelance writer and feminist scholar who has written several articles for the Smith Alumnae Quarterly.