Judith Roumani's book is an extraordinary and intimate monograph on the fate of Italian Jews in one part of Tuscany of Italy. The study is based on a vast array of primary sources drawn from twenty archives in Italy, the United States, and Israel, as well as oral history interviews and correspondence with twenty Italian Holocaust survivors the author conducted between 1999 and 2018, not to mention published memoirs. It is a unique microhistory of the Holocaust that focuses on the province of Grossetto in southern Tuscany. Consisting of twenty-eight townships, Grossetto had several important Jewish communities, including those in Partigiano, Castell'Azzara, Scasano, Montalto di Castro, Grotte di Castro, Latera, Monte San Savino, Santa Fiora, Lippiano, Acquapendente, Manciano, Sorano, Città di Castello, Castell'Ottieri, and Piancastagnaio.
Examining the fate of Grossetto's Jews, Roumani finds that the evidence serves as further proof that the old “brava gente” myth of Italian innocence during the Holocaust is no longer viable. Her argument is based on the discovery that the governor of Grossetto, Alceo Ercolani, ordered the establishment of an internment camp specifically for Jews in November 1943, on his own initiative, prior to receiving instructions to do so. What's more, Roumani brings to light that the Bishop of Grosseto, Paolo Galeazzi, himself an ardent Fascist, agreed to the governor's request to rent out a Catholic seminary building in Roccatederighi for use as an internment camp specifically for Jews. As Roumani states, “this appears to have been one of the very few instances in Europe of church property that had not been requisitioned, being provided, or rented out, for what was in fact a waystation to Auschwitz” (1).
Roumani demonstrates that during the period of the Racial Laws (1938–1943), both Governor Ercolani and Bishop Galeazzi strongly supported the Fascist government and its policies on Jewish matters. She cites the May 1939 words of a Jewish university professor who had been fired from his job and banned from publishing. His career rudely cut short, and with no income, he remarked, “I am experiencing the destruction of everything that has made up my very reason for existence” (38). Prior to the German occupation, local authorities in southern Tuscany demonstrated “cruelty and injustice” when they expelled Jews from public schools and posted “Aryan Business” signs all over the towns to humiliate and stigmatize the Jews (43).
Jewish youths in Pitigliano described the humiliation they felt at being ostracized by their non-Jewish friends. But the general atmosphere in the various Grossetto townships varied widely. Roumani gives the example of the priests in Pitigliano, who were much more empathic towards the Jews than in the town of Grossetto. As a teenager, Ariel Paggi relocated from Pitigliano to Grossetto after World War II started. Going from middle to high school at the time, he recalled that whereas in Pitigliano, the subject of the Jews was glossed over in religious class, in Grossetto, Paggi could recall only one instructor in three years of high school “who did not accuse the Jews of deicide in order to portray the Holocaust as a just punishment” (100).
Roumani shows that many Jews in Pitigliano got warned by their non-Jewish neighbors and fled to the countryside prior to the German occupation. When the Germans arrived in Grossetto in 1943, for example, many of its Jewish residents were already hiding in caves or barns and on farms. The author reconstructs the dramatic story of the children of Azeglio Servi, Jews from Pitigliano, who went into hiding on November 27, 1943, after an army officer's wife warned them to leave the town. As head of the Jewish community, Azelgio Servi stayed put with his wife and youngest child. The four Servi children found farmers willing to provide food and shelter. “The Jews of southern Tuscany,” Roumani writes, “definitely would not have survived had it not been for the brave individuals who secretly defied the local Fascist and Nazi authorities to protect them. Among the townspeople, help given the Jews was secretive and timid, but among the exposed country people, it was wholehearted and generous to the point of risk for themselves.” (72–73)
The Jews of Grossetto nonetheless did not get the same sympathy from local Fascist officials. Chapter 4 documents the behavior of the Bishop Galeazzo of Grossetto, whose defenders praise his rescuing some Jews and whose critics condemn him for deporting others to concentration camps. Roumani meticulously reviews Bishop Galeazzo's critical role in the Fascist persecution of Jews by leasing a Catholic seminary in the village of Roccatederighi to the provincial governor for interning Jews. On the other hand, the author shows that Galeazzo also saved certain Jews he favored. The majority interned nonetheless were deported on Galeazzo's watch. Roumani concludes that the bishop's defenders have tried to downplay “his collaboration with the ruthless head of the province in putting Jews in danger in an internment camp, and his acquiescence in sending the Jews to deportation” (100).
While Bishop Galeazzo acted on orders to deport Jews, Grossetto's governor, Alceo Ercolani issued the orders themselves. Ercolani, Roumani argues, “seemed inclined to adopt a harsher attitude toward Jews than even the Mussolini government” (101). Ercolini not only ordered the establishment of the Jewish internment camp in Roccatederighi, but he ordered the expropriation of Jewish property, ostensibly to pay for the fees connected to the maintenance of the camp. Much of the proceeds from the sale of Jewish property remained unaccounted for and, in fact, found their way into his own pocket. Ercolini ordered the first transport of Jews from Roccatederighi to the concentration camp in Fossoli on April 18 and a second transport on June 7, 1944. Two days later, the internment camp in Roccatederighi was dissolved.
In the chapter on the fate of foreign Jews in southern Tuscany, we learn that Governor Ercolini ordered their arrests all over the province and their internment in Roccatederighi. In her discussion of the fate of the Roccatederighi camp inmates, Roumani finds that on the first transport to Fossoli, on April 18, 1944, all deportees were foreign Jews, with the exception of three Italian Jewish families from outside the Grossetto province. In the second and last transport, the deportees were also foreign Jews, leaving behind local Jews from Grossetto and Pitigliano. While Bishop Galeazzi and camp director Gaetano Rizziello carefully constructed the list of deportees to save local Jews, they were also aware that the Jews they did place on that list were being sent eventually to their deaths. Roumani emphasizes that the main actors in these deportations – those who carried out the order and the man who gave the order (Governor Ercolani) – were Italians. “This over-zealous and ideological prefect [governor] exhibited cruelty and cupidity and active collaboration in the Holocaust in his handling of Jews,” she writes (102).
In this commendable study that sheds new light on the Fascist treatment of Jews on the local level, Judith Roumani concludes with a chapter on the Grossetto province after 1945. Attempts to reconstruct Jewish lives after the war proved difficult, and many left to larger cities like Florence or emigrated to Israel or the United States. The Jewish community in Pitigliano, she writes, “today is largely virtual.” She concludes: “The people and the province, as a whole, are perhaps only now finally coming to terms with the past, their historical treatment of the Jews, and the less-than-stellar behavior of the local Fascists. . . . On the other hand, they can also be extremely proud of those who did indeed risk their lives to save Jews.” The experience of Jews in the southern Tuscan province of Grossetto “embraces two extremes: non-Jewish Italians who fearlessly protected their local Jewish neighbors and other non-Jewish Italians of the province who set up a concentration camp from which they callously and hypocritically sent Jews, some Italian, some foreign, on their way to the death camps” (180–181).
