Cory Holt

The Levis, having dressed in several layers of clothing and taking only what valuables would fit inconspicuously in their pockets, took the rear exit from their building. Instead of walking into Via del Portico d'Ottavia, they exited near the Church of Sant'Angelo in Pescheria. Someone had told them to use this exit because there was no one there.
The Levi family then walked virtually unnoticed from their home to Via Santa Maria dell'Anima, a narrow, quiet alley only one block from the busy Piazza Navona. It was there, at number fourteen, resided Gianni Farnese, a man with whom Giancarlo Levi had worked at the Bank of Italy as an accountant until the racial laws of 1938 had forced him from his profession. The two men had remained friends during the long years since. The Levi family had nowhere else to go.
After a short knock, Gianni Farnese opened his door with noticeable apprehension. Seeing four desperate faces staring at him from the entrance, he knew something grave had just befallen Rome.
Giancarlo greeted Gianni first, his voice no louder than a whisper.
"Gianni, there has been a roundup in our neighborhood. We have escaped. We have nowhere else to go."
Gianni allowed the family into his tenement, a small living quarters, really, with a cellar ten feet by ten feet below the kitchen floor. After the four were safely inside his home, Gianni made inconspicuous glances both directions along his street. Seeing nothing, he quickly closed and bolted the door.
Giancarlo made a quick account of what had happened that morning. Gianni looked at the four faces surrounding him, their eyes ablaze with desperate fear.
Giancarlo, like Gianni, was thirty-four year old, but looked ten years older. He was a lean man of average height, short, graying hair, thin lips, an intelligent forehead. His wife, Renata, two years his junior, her hair unkempt, her cheeks red from the cold, was, from her appearance, an unremarkable woman. But Gianni knew otherwise of her. She was an iron woman, steeled by five years of hardship.
Their eldest child, daughter Anna, was twelve years old, plain, yet intelligent-looking, quiet, and simple. Giovanni, their son, was ten years old. He had grown half a foot since that last time Gianni had seen him, and looked more like his mother with round face and large eyes.
After some coffee and bread, Gianni and Giancarlo decided that only one course of action was feasible. The Levis would have to hide in the cellar directly below the kitchen floor. The door, roughly two feet square, lay beneath and completely concealed by an old worn rug. It was unusual for such quarters to contain a cellar, and that Gianni's did so prevented the Levis from having to seek sanctuary in a monastery or convent (and at considerably more risk).
Gianni Farnese knew he could not turn the family from his home. He hated Fascism. He despised Nazis. He was a devout Catholic who had never understood the Jewish faith, but he had known Giancarlo and his family for ten years, respected them, actually felt love toward them. Although he would risk his freedom and his life in concealing them, it was a risk he did not question.
It was decided the Levis would remain in his cellar until a more promising option could be found. But everyone knew, even the children, that no other option would be as safe and reliable as sanctuary in the cellar. There they would eat, sleep, wash, talk, read, and worship until the world outside was again safe. Better days were far distant. How Gianni would feed this family of four presented an obvious problem. There would be a way, although Gianni knew none now. Help would have to come from several sources, he was sure.
The cellar itself, at least physically, was hardly a sanctuary. It maintained a constant temperature of fifty-five degrees, was damp, lit by single light bulb attached to a bare wire hanging from the ceiling. Although the floor was earthen, it was covered by a few ragged wooden boards so the dirt was not visible. Two of the walls were lined with shelves. The distance between floor and ceiling was about seven feet.
Soon, Gianni brought down several blankets, two pails of water (one for drinking, one for washing), some soap and towels, and a newspaper. He promised dinner in a few hours, but nevertheless brought some bread for the Levis to eat. After a few words of encouragement he knew were empty, he ascended the wooden steps to the kitchen, and closed the door. The Levis could hear the rug slide into place.
Gianni looked around upstairs. There was now no hint that anyone other than he lived here. Despite his own fear and trepidation, he felt no emotion other than sadness the remainder of the afternoon. His sadness was easily justified.
Unbeknownst to him, indeed to the remainder of the world, Gianni's beloved city of Rome had just entered the realm of perhaps the greatest horror ever to befall mankind, the Holocaust.
Gianni Farnese's ancestors had lived in Rome for more than five centuries, since the beginning of the Italian Renaissance. He, like most Italians, was infinitely proud of his heritage, his city, and his nation. Now, as he sat in his armchair while the afternoon gave way to darkness, he realized that his nation had betrayed him, his countrymen, and especially the Jews. He could not understand the motives leading to the roundup that day, nor what precisely made the Jews different, other than religion. The Jews, he knew, had been in Italy, in Rome, for two millennia. They were as Italian as he, as Mussolini, as the Pope, as Giuseppe Verdi and Marco Polo and Michelangelo. Why a government would purge any of its citizens, especially in the Holy City itself, he could not understand.
Gianni Farnese had never entered the army. At fourteen, his right leg had been crushed in an automobile accident, and had never properly healed. He was still often forced to walk with a cane, even now, twenty years later. He had instead gone to the university and studied accounting. At twenty-two, he began working for the Bank of Italy, first as a teller, then, two years later, he was moved to the accounting department, where he met Giancarlo Levi. There they worked together for five years before the racial laws. They had remained friends.
Gianni knew the Levis barely managed a living, with Giancarlo working at odd jobs and Renata as a seamstress. The work was sporadic, but the family always seemed to have just enough to subsist. The days when they had both worked together now seemed another life, for times had changed so dramatically.
Meanwhile, that morning, along with the roundup in the ghetto, SS police, armed with lists of names and addresses of Jews living outside the ghetto, began around 5:30 to visit individual apartments. That day, 365 German SS police arrested 1,259 persons before the roundup ended nine hours later. Of these, 896 were women and children. They had all been transported to a temporary detention center in the Italian Military College, a mere six hundred feet from the Vatican. The next day, 252 non-Jews would be released. (At least seven Jews are known to have slipped into this group.) The remaining 1,007 would be shipped to Auschwitz. It was obvious that this roundup was the final warning for the Jews. Those who managed to avoid it quickly left their homes.
Says one Jew after the war, "From Radio London we had learned about the existence of concentration camps and the provisions against the Jews but, to tell the truth, we did not believe much. We thought all these stories were matters of Allied propaganda against the Germans."
The fears of Rome's Jews were placated by the presence of the Pope and the Vatican City. Although Pope Pius XII did not openly defend the Jews, and had not opposed the racial laws, his presence, thought most Roman Jews, would be enough to deter the Germans from persecuting them.
To add to their faith in their Duce, the Pope, and their leaders, Roman Jews added another dimension to their apparent passivity which was common to all European Jews. Survivors constantly repeated the phrase, "We thought it could never happen here. We had done nothing wrong. We were always loyal citizens."
The Jews of Italy, who were as Italian as their Christian neighbors, and had experienced so little anti-Semitism during the past, thought it could happen anywhere but in civilized Italy. They had always been loyal citizens and could not conceive unprovoked punishment.