February 9 at 6:00 pm

NYU Casa Italiana Zerilli Marim�, 24 West 12th Street   

Reception to follow

 

Serena Di Nepi, University of Rome La Sapienza, Jewish Museum of Rome, Agnes Peresztegi, Commission for Art Recovery, Alex Karn, Colgate University, Natalia Indrimi, Centro Primo Levi, New York.

In early October 1943, the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg, the German agency in charge of seizing Jewish books and art, sacked the Jewish community building in Rome and seized the Rabbinical College library and the Community library, the latter being one of the most comprehensive and precious pre-modern Jewish libraries in the world. In 1946, the Allies located the Rabbinical library near Frankfurt and facilitated its return to Rome in 1950. No trace was ever found of the second one.

Despite various investigations, the latest following, in 2002, the Anselmi Commission on the confiscation of Jewish assets, its fate remains obscure. Over the years, hypotheses multiplied and at least one volume from the library emerged in the US. For the first time this panel will address  the study of the content and history of the library, as it emerges through the registers of Inquisition, censorship, community chronicles and other historical sources dating back to the 15th century. Experts will also analyze the history of the investigations and discuss future efforts to recover this priceless patrimony.  Read

 

Alessandro Portelli

Over the course of seventy years, national memory, historiography and the justice system have shown profound ambivalence towards any real assessment of the Fosse Ardeatine massacre. Outside of the saga of Kappler's escape, Pribke's trial and the farce that followed his death, the massacre has catalyzed national sentiments that have more to do with the internal conflicts of Italian society than with the event itself and its victims. Consequently, formal historical inquiry and an understanding of the interplay between what we can reasonably assume as fact, and what happens in the realm of memory - including imagined events and false memories - becomes central to any attempt to seek justice individually or collectively.

The specific matter under discussion here is the killing of 335 people - hostages, or simply people randomly picked up off the street - by the German occupying forces in Rome on March 24, 1944 in retaliation for a partisan attack the British official record consistently referred to as a "bomb outrage" on the previous day - March 23, 1944 - in which 32 German soldiers had been killed.

This event, this massacre, resonates both backwards and forwards and somehow succeeds in illuminating a whole century of not just the history of Rome but that of the country as a whole, despite lasting only one day. It elucidates history through the people involved and at the same time illuminates memory, due to the fierce controversy it provoked not just within historical record but across successive generations of the general population as well.

Let me begin with two narratives. The first is a British official document, summing up the sequence of events on the occasion of the criminal proceedings against the German commanders in 1946.
According to this report, the course of events was as follows:
At approximately 15.00 hours, on 23rd March, 1944, as a party of German police were marching along the Via Rasella in Rome, a bomb was thrown from a nearby house causing the death of 32 German policemen, and injuries to others. As a result of this outrage, it was decided by the accused, von Mackensen, Commander of the 14th Army and General Kurt Maeltzer, Military Commander of Rome, to institute reprisals against the population of Rome. Ten Italians were to be shot for each German killed; the reprisals to be carried out within 24 hours of the bomb outrage.

According to a June 1944 report in British Home Office Records.
At 14.00 hours, 24th March 1944, the persons to be shot were transported by lorries, in relays, to the Ardeatine Caves, in batches of five. They were taken inside the caves, and shot in the back of the head by SS men. At the termination of the massacre, it was found that 335 persons had been shot, which exceeded the original ratio of 10:1. The caves were then mined. No warning of the reprisal was given to the public, and enquiries by the German authorities to find the persons guilty of the bomb outrage were not completed until long after the massacre had taken place.

Now this is quite an accurate account (actually, the bomb was not thrown from a window - but that need not concern us now). The point to be emphasized in this report is that no warning of the reprisal was given to the public. It was carried out immediately - within 24 hours - and the purpose of the German authorities was not to punish the perpetrators, but to punish the city. So the response needed to be immediate and as severe as possible.

The other story is a personal anecdote. I had just been awarded a literary prize for my book on the Fosse Ardeatine, and I called my wife who was at the hairdresser's. She told the people in the hairdresser's the news, and the woman sitting next to her said, "What was the book about?" "The Fosse Ardeatine", my wife told her. "Oh," said the woman, "I know all about it!" (This is what everyone always says. You mention this episode, and immediately, memories and emotions flare up.) "I know all about it. It was those partisans who threw the bomb, and then went into hiding who were to blame. And the Germans looked for them. I remember the bills they posted all over the city. 'If the perpetrators turn themselves in, we will not retaliate. But if they do not turn themselves in, we will kill ten Italians for each German'".

In fact, this is not the way it happened. There was no warning to the population, no attempt to catch the partisans, no invitation to them to surrender themselves to avoid reprisals. But this woman's version of the story is the one that has prevailed in public memory; it is the way people remember it. In claiming that she actually remembered seeing the bills, despite the fact that they never existed, this woman was merely one among many; the story as she reported it is ubiquitous. What I'd like to explore, then, is the meaning of this intensely remembered and dramatically misremembered event, and ask how we are to understand the gap between what actually happened and the many ways in which it has been remembered. Read