INTERNATIONAL HOLOCAUST REMEMBRANCE DAY 2013
About the Photo:
Venice, 1941: Italian Foreign Minister Ciano (left) and German Foreign Minister von Ribbentrop (seated at right). Circled: The Marquis d’Ajeta (left) and Count Pietromarchi, two high-ranking Italian officials who were to become instrumental in preventing the deportation of thousands of Jews from territories occupied by Fascist Italy. (Courtesy of the National Center for Jewish Film)
The Righteous Enemy, which is about the non-Jewish Italian resistance to Hitler’s “Final Solution”, begins with the story of the director’s father, Imre Rochlitz, who was interned by the Italians occupying Yugoslavia’s Adriatic Coast during World War II. The film then expands to show how Italian officials prevented the deportation of some 40,000 Jews in Italian-occupied France, Greece, and Yugoslavia.
H.E. the Ambassador of Italy to the United States, Claudio Bisogniero, will be greeting the audience and filmmaker Joseph Rochlitz will be introducing the documentary and presenting his father’s wartime memoirs Accident of Fate (WLU Press, 2011).
Unique interviews explore why these officials subverted Mussolini’s orders to comply with German plans for Jewish annihilation by creating ingenious bureaucratic evasions and, when necessary, literal roadblocks. Included are previously unseen Italian and German newsreel footage, archival photos, and excerpts from Eichmann’s trial in Jerusalem.
“There have been so many books and films depicting the horrors of the Nazi atrocities, that it is a welcome change to find one which can call attention to decent, humanitarian people who, on a large scale, were willing to challenge the Nazis… this is the first time that the Italian resistance has been presented on film.” – Carl Alpert, The Jewish Advocate (Feb. 1988)
Film provided by The National Center for Jewish Film: jewishfilm.org
Italy/UK, 1987, 57min, color/black and white
Director/Producer/Writer: Joseph Rochlitz
English and Italian/French/Hebrew/German with English subtitles
RSVP
Please click on “Make a Reservation” by January 28, 2013 at 2 PM
RESERVATION IS REQUIRED FOR OUR EVENTS FOR SECURITY REASONS. A RESERVATION IS NOT A GUARANTEE OF A SEAT. WE WILL ACCOMODATE GUESTS ON A FIRST-COME FIRST-SERVED BASIS.
DOORS OPEN AT 6:30 PM AND CLOSE AT 7 PM PROMPTLY
PHOTO ID REQUIRED
LOCATION:
Embassy of Italy/Italian Cultural Institute
3000 Whitehaven st Street NW
Washington, DC 20008
ABOUT ACCIDENT OF FATE
A Personal Account, 1938–1945
Book by Imre Rochlitz, and Joseph Rochlitz
Accident of Fate is a first-hand account of persecution, rescue, and resistance in the Axis-occupied former Yugoslavia. At the age of thirteen, Imre Rochlitz fled to Yugoslavia from his childhood home in Vienna following the Nazi Anschluss, leaving his family behind. In January 1942 the Ustashe (Croatian Fascists) arrested and interned him in the Jasenovac death camp, where he dug mass graves. On the verge of death, Rochlitz was released due to the extraordinary intervention of a Nazi general. He escaped to the Adriatic coast, where he and several thousand other Jewish refugees were protected by the army of Fascist Italy. After Italy’s surrender, he joined Tito’s Partisans, becoming an officer and army veterinarian, and rescued dozens of downed Allied airmen. In 1945, he fled Yugoslavia’s Communist regime and reached liberated southern Italy. In 1947, at the age of twenty-two, he emigrated to the United States.
With unique personal photographs and documents supporting the text, this eyewitness narrative covers little-known topics and provides a revealing historical account of the period. The book helps clarify and render accessible the complexities and contradictions of conflict and genocide in wartime Yugoslavia.
MORE INFO AND TO PURCHASE THE BOOK: HERE
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