Fearlessly Courageous

Fearlessly Courageous

Desk of Dennis Piller

2/1/2021

Remembering the Holocaust -75th Anniversary

MANTUA, Italy — Jan. 27th marked 75 years since the liberation of Auschwitz. The need for Christians to remember the appalling history of Antisemitism and its culmination in the Nazi death camps is as pressing as ever. Four Italian Holocaust survivors who cheated death during an infamous Gestapo raid on the Rome ghetto have dedicated their final years to educating the public about the Nazi atrocities of World War II that killed much of their families. They do so as the last generation of witnesses to the Holocaust dies out, taking their firsthand testimony with them. The new exhibition, “From Italy to Auschwitz” exhibit seeks to tell the story of the deportation between 1943 and 1944 of more than 10,000 Jews from Italian territory — deported for political or other reasons. Here is one of those stories I wish to share with you: 89-year-old Emanuele Di Porto was 12 when the Nazis entered the Rome ghetto and arrested him along with his mother. “My father traded souvenirs. He got up at 3 a.m. and went to the Termini railway station to sell items to German soldiers returning from the front,” Di Porto says. “On Saturday, October 16, he went out early in the morning. My brothers and I were alone at home. At 5:00 a.m. my mother heard noises, and looked out the window, and saw the Nazis rounding people up in the streets of the ghetto. Thinking that the SS only wanted to capture the men, my mother went to my father at the railway station to warn him of what was happening.” “I was at the window and saw my mother being captured by a soldier and loaded onto a truck” Di Porto’s father told his wife to go home and take the children to her sister, who lived in another district. He would be waiting for them there. “I was at the window and saw my mother being captured by a soldier and loaded onto a truck,” says Di Porto. “I started screaming and went out onto the street. My mother, seeing me arrive, motioned me to leave but the Germans took me and threw me on the truck. Somehow my mother managed to get me off, and I walked without turning around. I was dying of fear.” Di Porto eventually reached a square with streetcars and boarded one that circled the city. When he told the conductor that he was Jewish and the Germans had raided his house, the man sat him down next to him in the front of the car. “It was six in the morning and it was raining,” Di Porto says. “At 11:00 the driver gave me half of his snack. At 2:00 there was the shift change, and the controller told the colleague replacing him to ‘look after this kid.’ The colleague of the next shift did the same thing. So, I stayed on the tram for two days, sleeping and eating in the carriage. In the morning, in the depot, the drivers noticed my presence, but no one told me to leave.” On the third day, an acquaintance of the Di Porto family who also lived in the ghetto got on the tram. “He told me that my father was convinced I had been captured together with my mother,” Di Porto says. “At that moment my father was near San Pietro, in Vatican City. I joined him and found my relatives. From October 1943 to June 4, 1944, the day of Rome’s liberation, we stayed in our house in the ghetto without realizing the danger we were facing. My mother, deported to the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp, was immediately killed in the gas chamber at the age of 37.” Emanuele was saved twice, first by his mother and then by the staff of the tram company.

“My mother brought me into the world twice,” he says. “First when she gave birth to me and then when she got me off of that truck.”

That raid was carried out by the Gestapo with help from fascist collaborators between 5:30 a.m. and 2 p.m. on Saturday, October 16, a day that became known as “Black Saturday.” It is no coincidence, that the Nazis chose to conduct the raid on the Jewish Day of Rest. Two days after the raid 1,022 people, including a child born the previous day, were taken to Rome’s Tiburtina station and herded onto 28 cattle wagons unequipped with toilets. From there, they were deported to the Auschwitz extermination camp. Only 16 of them returned — 15 men and one woman.