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Italians
took everything from Ursula Korn Selig's family
during World War II, including a hotel the
family owned on the Riviera and the money they
carried after fleeing Germany's persecution of
Jews in 1938.
Italians
also saved her family from almost certain death
in Nazi concentration camps, Mrs. Selig said,
hiding them in a succession of secret shelters
in Italy between 1938 and 1944, often at the
risk of the Italians' own lives.
The two
faces Italy displayed toward Jewish citizens and
refugees just before and during World War II
have become the focus of recent historical
research that both undermines that country's
wartime image as a nation of benign captors, and
rekindles memories of heroic Italian
individuals.
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Ursula
Korn Selig, 85, who hid in secret
shelters in Italy during the
Holocaust,
in her Manhattan apartment with her
dog, Domani.
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Mrs. Selig, 85, who has lived in Manhattan
since 1950, offered her double-edged testimony
after a panel discussion on the new scholarship
at the Museum of Jewish Heritage, in Battery
Park City, on Wednesday evening -- days before
Jews commemorate Kristallnacht, the night of
deadly attacks by German Nazis in November
1938.
The new
findings contradict the conventional belief that
Italians began to enforce anti-Semitic laws only
after German troops occupied the country in
1943, and then reluctantly. In a spate of
studies, many of them based on a
little-publicized Italian government report
commissioned in 1999, researchers have uncovered
a vast wartime record detailing a systematic
disenfranchisement of Italy's Jews, beginning in
the summer of 1938, shortly before the
Kristallnacht attacks in November.
That year,
Mussolini's Fascist government forbade Jewish
children to attend public or private schools,
ordered the dismissal of Jews from
professorships in all universities, and banned
Jews from the civil service and military as well
as the banking and insurance
industries.
Ilaria
Pavan, a scholar at the Scuola Normale Superiore
in Pisa, said a series of incrementally more
onerous laws in 1939 and 1940 revoked peddlers'
permits and shopkeepers' licenses, and required
Jewish owners of businesses --as well as stock
or bond holders-- to sell those assets to
"Aryans." Bank accounts were ordered turned over
to government authorities, ostensibly to prevent
the transfer of money out of the
country.
There is
little record of the sums involved in the
confiscations and forced sales of Jewish-held
property between 1938 and 1943, said Ms. Pavan,
who was a member of the official government
commission charged with investigating the
anti-Semitic plundering. But between 1943 and
1945, when the Italian government was under the
direct supervision of German overseers, the
looting of property of Jewish Italian citizens
and Jewish refugees who had fled to Italy in
hopes of sanctuary, she said, totaled almost $1
billion in today's values.
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A
photo of Harry Arlin, with his parents,
Emily and Leo Armstein,
in the Ferramonti di Tarsia
concentration camp.
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And
Harry Arlin, today, at his home in
Huntington, N.Y.
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After the war, encouraged in part by Italy's
American occupiers, Italians embraced a spirit
of national reconciliation that "allowed the
construction of a sanitized collective memory,"
said Alessandro Cassin, the publishing director
of the Centro Primo Levi, a research institute
in Manhattan that promotes the study of Italian
Jewish history, and that organized the panel
discussion.
The
whitewash was possible, in part, because by
comparison with the horrors inflicted by Nazi
Germany, the Italian government was "not as
lethal," said Guri Schwarz, an adjunct professor
at the University of Pisa. It did not sanction
physical abuse of Jewish citizens, did not
execute anyone in the internment camps
established for Jews in southern Italy, and did
not begin to send Jews to Nazi concentration
camps until the German occupation in 1943, he
said.
Of the
45,000 Jews counted in Mussolini's census of
1938, about 8,000 died in Nazi camps. About
7,000 managed to flee. About 30,000 lived in
hiding before being liberated by Allied troops,
Mr. Schwarz said.
One of
those hiding was Mrs. Selig, who was among about
100 people in the audience for the discussion on
Wednesday.
"It is a
very complex situation," she said, when asked
afterward about her feelings toward wartime
Italy and Italians. Thirteen years old when her
family fled Berlin and settled in northern Italy
in 1938, she said her experience in Italy over
the next eight years ran the spectrum from the
despair of destitution to the exhilaration of
freedom.
"They took
everything from us," she said. "My father and
mother were quite wealthy when they arrived in
Italy. But when they came to the United States
after the war, he had to work as a night
watchman, and she had to work in the garment
district."
On the
other hand, as she said during a
question-and-answer period after the
presentation, "I would not be here if not for
Italians.
"An
Italian woman hid me, an Italian priest put me
in a convent where I wore a nun's habit, and an
Italian boy risked his life to bring us food,"
she said.
Harry
Arlin, 83, an audience member who said his
family was interned in an Italian camp for
several years, also stood to describe his
experiences, saying, "If the Italians hadn't
taken us to their camp, we would have been sent
to the German's camp, and we would have been
killed."
Michele
Sarfatti, the author of several books on Italian
Fascist anti-Semitism, said a higher portion of
Italy's Jews survived the war than their
counterparts in most other European
countries.
But
Italian culpability for the persecution of Jews
remains relatively unknown, and largely
unacknowledged by Italians, Professor Pavan
said. "People were made destitute, people were
turned into ghostly nonentities in their own
country," she said. "This is also
true."
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