Tuesday, February 26, 2019

A story of an Italian Jew.

As part of my (modern) (Italian) literature kick that I've been on for a while, I read Giorgio Bassani's "The Garden of the Finzi-Continis," which depicts Italian Jews in Ferrara on the eve of WWII.

And, as it turned out, a new resident of the resthome was a(n old) (Jewish) guy from Italy.

So, I mentioned the book to him one evening when I was assisting him, and it turns out that he and his family had fled to Switzerland when shit got bad, and that's where they waited out the war.

I then asked him if he knew any Jews from his town who were fascists (there's characters like that in the Bassani).

As it turns out, his uncle was a lawyer who had become a fascist in order to grease the wheels and more easily join corporate boards, and when his family was fleeing, everyone told him that he should go, but he kept insisting that he would stay and be protected.

"You are a fool!," he said that they told him.

"But," the guy told me, "He was protected, they hid him."

They don't know where, but some of his business connections hid him and kept him safe, and he waited out the war in Italy where he had always lived.

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