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                                                                                BOOKS, Page 64

Horrors and Heroes


By JOHN ELSON

BENEVOLENCE AND BETRAYAL
By Alexander Stille
Summit; 365 pages; $25


    The fate of Italian Jewry during World War II has a
special poignancy. This oldest of Judaic communities in the
Western world had survived nearly two millenniums of
intermittent repression and persecution. Italy was among the
last countries of Europe to eliminate the ghetto, when Rome was
liberated and the Papal States were abolished in 1870. Yet
during the next 60 or so years, life for Italian Jews was sweet
indeed. Anti-Semitism was of little moment in a country where
they were such a tiny minority -- 47,000 in a population of 45
million, as of 1910 -- that most Italians had never even met a
Jew. Barriers to their material and social success, to
assimilation and intermarriage, were few. In Italy, perhaps more
than in any other European land, Jews felt truly at home.

    The reality -- that their sense of security ultimately
proved chimerical -- is a tragically familiar tale, with more
than its share of ironies. Strange as it may seem now, a
substantial minority of Jews welcomed Benito Mussolini's
accession to power in 1922. He promised order in a land
threatened by leftist chaos, and il Duce's brand of Fascism did
not become ideologically anti-Semitic until he fell under Adolf
Hitler's political sway during the mid-'30s. To many Jews,
patriotism became a near substitute for faith and for the
ancient rituals they infrequently observed. Such was their
loyalty to their homeland that on the so-called Day of Faith
(Dec. 18, 1935), communities even donated gold and silver
religious objects from their synagogues to help pay for the
invasion of Abyssinia.

    Italian Jews eventually learned what happened to their
coreligionists elsewhere under Nazi rule. Yet even after
Mussolini approved the racial laws of 1938, which shatteringly
demoted Jews to second-class citizenship, many naively clung to
the belief that "it can't happen here." Ettore Ovazza of Turin,
leader of the country's Jewish Fascists, remained a true
believer until the very end -- perhaps even as he was shot dead
by an SS officer while trying to escape to Switzerland in
September 1943. A half-Jewish writer whose nom de plume was
Pitigrilli converted to Roman Catholicism and became a Fascist
spy; he had once lectured successfully in Warsaw, and his name,
curiously, lives on as a Polish slang term for something suspect
or obscene.

    Benevolence and Betrayal has heroes as well as moral
lepers. Rabbi Riccardo Pacifici risked his life by staying in
Genoa after its occupation by German troops to minister to the
city's large Jewish refugee population; he was one of some 7,000
Italian Jews to die in concentration camps. Carlo Schonheit, a
cantor from Ferrara, and his son Franco were among the handful
who survived Buchenwald, the horrors of which Alexander Stille
describes with chilling understatement. Pietro Cardinal Boetto,
the frail Archbishop of Genoa, unhesitatingly agreed to carry
on the work of a Jewish relief organization after it was forced
to disband. "They are innocents," he told his secretary. "We
must help them at whatever cost to ourselves." And then there
were the thousands of Italian Christians who out of uncommon
decency defied authority by harboring Jews or warning them of
impending Gestapo roundups.

    Stille, an American journalist with an Italian Jewish
father, is largely content to let the wonders and terrors of his
subjects' experiences speak for themselves. The result is a
dogged but deeply moving addition to the literature of the
Holocaust.