Introductions and documentary screening
On the occasion of the International Holocaust Remembrance Day 2015, the Embassy of Italy with the Italian Cultural Institute and the Centro Primo Levi New York, will host an event with the welcoming remarks of H.E. Claudio Bisogniero, Ambassador of Italy to the United States, and the participation of Vadim Altskan (U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum) and Marco Clementi (University of Calabria) who will comment and introduce the screening of the documentary film on the Italian Jewish Community in Rhodes during World War II, l’Isola delle Rose: la tragedia di un Paradiso (The Island of Roses: a tragedy in a Paradise), by Rebecca Samonà. The film chronicles the deportation of the Jews of Rhodes in July 1944. Marco Clementi is currently overseeing the cataloguing of the newly discovered Italian political surveillance archive in Rhodes which sheds new light on those events.
The program will also feature a special presentation of Cesare Frustaci. As a child, he was expelled from Italy in 1938 with his mother, and later survived the war and the massacre of Jews in Budapest.
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LOCATION
Embassy of Italy – Auditorium
3000 Whitehaven St, N.W.
Washington, D.C. 20008
MORE INFO
CESARE FRUSTACI
Cesare was born in Napoli, Italy. His Jewish mother, Margit, was a ballerina and his Roman Catholic father, Pasquale, was a famous orchestra director and music composer. In 1938, the Italian government issued anti-Semitic laws and began expelling foreign Jews from the country. His mother was sent back to Hungary with her son. They were not allowed to return home.
Cesare and his mother were forced to live inside a Yellow Star house within a ghetto for Jews. She made the difficult decision to send him out on the street after curfew with only a piece of bread and his Catholic baptismal certificate. She knew this would increase his chance of survival. In order to stay alive, he says, “I learned to use my brain,” devising clever ways to obtain food and shelter. Eventually, he was captured and sent in a boxcar to a youth detention camp. His mother was sent to a slave labor camp in Germany, where she was forced to work in a bombshell factory.
After liberation, the International Red Cross helped place Cesare in a new home. His mother spent almost two years searching for him. She walked all the way back to Hungary, searched 183 villages, and finally found him living on a pig farm with an adoptive family. Once they were reunited, she made sure to bring him back to school because education was their first priority. They returned to Budapest and resumed their lives.
Cesare resides in Port Charlotte and regularly volunteers with the Holocaust Museum of Southwest Florida to share his story.
SOURCE: The Holocaust Museum and Education Center of Southwest Florida
VADIM ALTSKAN
VADIM ALTSKAN is Program Coordinator, International Archival Program Division,
Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
Mr. Altskan has worked in state and special archives in Bulgaria, Croatia, Lithuania,
Russia, Slovakia, and Ukraine. His areas of expertise include Russian Jewish history,
the Holocaust in the former USSR, and the history of Jews in southwestern Ukraine.
MARCO CLEMENTI
Marco Clementi (University of Calabria) received a PhD in Contemporary History from the State University of St. Petersburg and holds a degree in Modern Foreign Languages and Literatures (University “La Sapienza” in Rome) and one in History (State University of St. Petersburg). He specialized in contemporary history in different scientific institutions in Italy, Austria, Chech Republic, Hungary, Slovakia and Greece. His publications include Storia del dissenso sovietico (2007), L’Alleato Stalin (2011), Camicie Nere sull’Acropoli (2013). He is a member of the St. Petersburg Memorial’s scientific council.
L’Isola delle Rose, la tragedia di un paradiso
L’Isola delle Rose, la tragedia di un paradiso (The Island of Roses, Tragedy in Paradise) is a moving documentary by Italian director Rebecca Samonà. Pregnant with her second child, Samonà travels with her mother to Rhodes, where their family lived for many generations. The Rhodeslis Jewish community goes back to the golden age of Italian rule and survived until the height of WWII, when Nazi Germany took control of the Mediterranean island and deported or sent most to concentration camps. Samonà tells a rather simple story about family survival through passed down traditions, food, songs, rituals, and their medieval Ladino Spanish dialect — using extensive family photos, newsreel and archival footage.
(Italy, 2007, 57 min, in Italian with English subtitles)
The Jews of Rhodes
On July 23, 1944, nearly 2,000 members of the century old Rhodes Jewish community, at the time an Italian possession and part of the Italian Social Republic, were rounded up and sent to Auschwitz. Theirs, was the longest deportation in Europe lasting 24 days.
Few hours after their arrival, most of the community had been murdered. The Jews of Rhodes were part of the Union of the Italian Jewish Community and had been subject to the application of the Racial LAws in 1938. After the Italian surrender to the Germans in the Fall of 1943, the civil administration remained in Italian hands. For 70 years the circumstance of their round up and deportation were mainly known through the testimonies of a handful of survivors. Today, thanks to the finding of the Carabinieri archive, their history can be written with a better understanding of how, almost at the end of the war, a small community, mostly of women, children and elderly, was transported to death from the farthest tip of the Mediterranean sea.
Documentation on Deportation
New Documents on the Deportation of the Jews of Rhodes. The Discovery of the Carabinieri Collection in the Dodecanese State Archive.
I
n 2011 the police in Rhodes, (Greece) contacted the Dodecanese State Archive concerning the discovery in a basement of a large collection of Italian documents. In November 2013, a team of scholars identified the records as the archive of the Carabinieri’s Central Special Bureau, a political police that, between 1932 and 1945, collected information on individuals, businesses, ethnic groups, spies, important events and political personalities. The records, which were thought to be lost, had remained for 66 years in the room where the Carabinieri had left them in 1945. A high number of these 100,000 files concern the local Jewish community in Rhodes, following the creation of the central governing body of the Italian Jewish communities (UCII) in 1931, to the deportation of July 1944. Their story can now be re-examined under new light based on a much broader evidence of their interactions with the Italian authorities. The documents of the Central Special Bureau are currently been catalogued and digitized by the Greek State Archives and with the support of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
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