The American NBC-TV “Holocaust” series will be seen in holy beginning May 20. The first part of the four part series will be broadcast over Channel One (the priority channel) of national television. It had been scheduled for the end of the year and the decision to air it earlier came as a surprise.
The news media is “preparing” Italians for the event. Italy is probably among the West European nations most well-informed and most interested in its past. With a political alignment that is 25 percent Communist and 50-60 percent anti-Fascist Socialist, Social Democrat and Christian Democrat, the crimes of Nazis and Fascists during the war have never had time to creep into the latent mass unconscious as they have in Germany.
Reports on public reaction to “Holocaust” in other countries where the TV series was seen are being published again as are reports of Italian behavior towards Jews during the war.
An article in “II Giorno” described some of the many cases where Italians paid no attention to the racial laws issued by Mussolini in 1938. It cited various documents such as an angry report by an SS commander in France dated July 21, 1943 alleging that “the Italian military authorities and police protect the Jews with every means at their disposal,” housing about 1000 Jewish refugees on the Ligurian coast “in the best hotels” and providing them with all necessities and no restrictions.
Another case cited was a telegram from the then young diplomat responsible for the Italian Croatian office, Roberto Ducci (now Italy’s Ambassador to London). To save the Jews in Italian occupied territory from deportation by Nazis, he ruled that Italian citizenship would be granted to Jews born in the occupation zone, those living there at the time and those not born nor living there but with close relatives, of having property there.
A POIGNANT PERSONAL MEMOIR
A large spread in the Rome daily “La Republica” contained another poignant personal memoir, this one by the son of the Italian Consul in Stuttgart in 1934, Italo A. Chiusano. He recalled his father’s attitude of disgust at German anti-Semitism, his refusal to eat in restaurants that had signs barring Jews, and his reply to an SS official who spoke to him of Jewish “lack of creativity.”
“Four men founded the modern world, said Chiusano. “Four great Jews of German-speaking origin: Marx, who revolutionized economy and politics; Einstein, who revolutionized physics and cosmology; Freud, who revolutionized psychology; and Kafka who revolutionized literature.
With appropriate timing, Italian TV also alred an excellent documentary on the issue of the statute of limitations this week, containing films of concentration camp scenes, interviews with a few Italian survivors (such as the writer Primo Levi), with Gideon Hausner, Simon Wiesenthal and others.
The interviews described the situation in West Germany today regarding attitudes towards the statute of limitations and neo-Nazism. The case for “not permitting the world to forget, by allowing Nazi criminals to emerge from hiding” was strongly presented.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
