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Italian Jews aid WWII saviors hit by quake

(Agencies)
Updated: 2009-04-14 09:42

With aftershocks still hitting the area Monday, Casentino was off-limits, but locals and visitors pointed out the now crumbled-church and the other ruined buildings in the village.

"Those were difficult times, like today," said De Bernardinis. "The Germans were always looking for Jews and we did what we could."

Firemen remove the marble statue of Madonna from the top of the church in Paganica, near Aquila, April 13, 2009. [Agencies]

De Bernardinis said he was fine for the moment and greatly appreciated the gesture of the Jewish community to check in on him and his family. He said, though, that it would be useful to have help during harvest time, and Di Consiglio promised his whole family would come.

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Riccardo Pacifici, the head of Rome's small community, said that the capital's Jews, which number less than 15,000, were already collecting money and clothing for all quake victims, but wanted to do more especially for communities that had helped during the war.

Luigi Calvisi, the mayor of Fossa, which lost five people to the quake and was heavily damaged, asked for sneakers for children. Holding talks with Pacifici in the tent camp where more than half of Fossa's 700 residents live, he also welcomed offers of specialized assistance for the elderly and a vacation for the young at a summer camp in Tuscany.

Pacifici said he would also work to get recognition from Jerusalem's Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial for people like De Bernardinis and others who sheltered Roman Jews. The memorial bestows a special honor on those who saved Jews during World War II.

Irena Steinfeldt, director of the Righteous Among the Nations department at Yad Vashem, said the museum was not familiar with the stories of Fossa and Casentino. She urged the Jewish families to come forward.

"We want to hear these stories," Steinfeldt said. "I would be happy if the families contacted Yad Vashem and told us."

Other stories of Jews being saved in the same area were recorded, she said, usually involving Jews who fled from Rome to nearby villages.

The aid brought by saved Jews to the quake zone came in parallel with help from Germany, which has offered to rebuild the church of Onna, a village that was nearly flattened by the temblor. The hamlet was the site of a massacre of civilians by German troops in 1944, but a Foreign Ministry spokeswoman stressed that the event was not the reason the place had been chosen.

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