1
Inventing the Resistance
Amay
Mario Pelizzari had seen them with his own eyes: Italian soldiers, perhaps those who had been serving in France, climbing the passes of the Val d’Ayas, “thinking of nothing but saving their own skins.” He had seen them, in those dramatic days after the armistice of September 8, 1943—when their commanders gave them no orders at all except to cease fighting the Allies—scrambling over the snow fields of Testa Grigia or straight up the glaciers of Monte Rosa to cross the border and reach neutral Switzerland, “tossing their hand grenades down the ravines and smashing their guns.” He had seen them run off and abandon Italy to the Germans. He had seen a piece of his country in utter disarray, and he’d made a vow to himself. If Italy was to be occupied by the Nazi-Fascists, he would try to do something useful, “so as not to become a laughing stock, one of the sheep,” and to try to redeem that spectacle of men fleeing that had made his “heart bleed.”1
Just a few weeks before, when Il Duce was ousted on July 25, Pelizzari, a forty-year-old draftsman for the Olivetti company in the Piedmontese city of Ivrea, had been one of those at the factory most alert to the dangers, one of the readiest to roll up his sleeves. He cruised the streets of his town with a colleague, hammers and chisels in hand, to chip off the public buildings every carving they saw of the fasces, the ruling party’s symbol.2 Along with his boss, the engineer Riccardo Levi, director of the technical department at Olivetti, Pelizzari also tried to establish a factory committee that was, in effect, a primitive Resistance unit.3 Under the name Alimiro he would one day be a legendary partisan of Ivrea.
In early September he moved to the Val d’Ayas, where Olivetti had a summer retreat for employees on the slopes of Monte Rosa. It was a picture-postcard spot, a dream in normal times. But now the German army was moving in to occupy Italy—even the little region of Valle d’Aosta, even the tiny Val d’Ayas. And German occupation, Pelizzari sensed, meant an immediate risk for Italian Jews: for Riccardo Levi, who had a wife and children, and for the many other Olivetti managers and employees of Jewish origin—perhaps no longer self-consciously Jewish, yet in one way or another forever Jews.
Not everyone was of Pelizzari’s mind. After Mussolini’s fall in July, and right up to the Italian surrender in September, some Italian Jews were naive enough to think that the worst was over; that the ghastly season that had begun with the anti-Semitic Racial Laws of 1938 had ended when Mussolini and the Fascist regime fell. “The Jewish situation seems to continue to improve,” wrote the Turinese Jew Emanuele Artom, one of Primo Levi’s circle, on September 3. Hadn’t the post-Mussolini government of Pietro Badoglio repealed some of the anti-Jewish measures—the prohibitions on posting obituaries, or employing Aryan domestic servants, or staying in holiday resorts?4 In August, Primo Levi himself had left for a vacation in the mountains without great worries about the future. Or at least that is how he would remember things forty years later.5
By the end of July, though, a battalion of German grenadiers was already posted at Aosta. And when the armistice was announced on September 8, things moved quickly. By the evening of September 10, the Wehrmacht controlled Turin, and the Germans needed just four days to occupy most of Piedmont—the city of Ivrea, the Canavese plain—as well as much of the Valle d’Aosta region, including the city of Aosta itself. Meanwhile Mussolini, on Hitler’s orders, was freed from his prison by a parachute commando, and installed as the leader of the so-called Republic of Salò. In Aosta and its province, the Italian Fascists quickly reorganized themselves around the German command and the various Nazi police services. There were not so many, though: the 30,000 Fascists in Aosta before Mussolini fell had dwindled to just over 1,000.6
The anti-Fascists of Valle d’Aosta and Piedmont also moved quickly, if not very professionally. At night a group of Olivetti factory workers went out to steal weapons and munitions from the unguarded barracks of the carabinieri, the military police corps. They hid them in the house of one of the workers, and when two machine guns proved too big to carry up the stairs they were forklifted up to the balcony.7 In Valle d’Aosta, the parish vicar helped move machine guns and munitions abandoned by Italian soldiers to a cavern under the cemetery.8
Primo Levi was close by. He had arrived in the Valle d’Aosta town of Saint-Vincent on the afternoon of September 9, and on the morning of the twelfth his mother, Ester—known as Rina—and his sister, Anna Maria, joined him. (His father, Cesare, had died the year before.) Initially the Levi family stayed with some relatives in their rented lodgings in Saint-Vincent, but five days later the three Levis moved again.9 On foot or perhaps mule-back, they climbed what locals call “the hill” and moved into the Hotel Ristoro, the only hotel in Amay, a village high above Saint-Vincent just under the Col de Joux pass. On September 19, Primo Levi took the pass to reach Val d’Ayas. He was on his way to a trattoria to meet a dozen Jewish friends and acquaintances. The agenda: how to reach safety in Switzerland.10
There seemed to be two alternatives. You could proceed to Valtournenche and pin your hopes on the cable car to Plateau Rosa and then down to Zermatt in Switzerland. The risk was that this might put you immediately into the hands of the Germans, if they had already taken command of the cable car stations. Otherwise you could try crossing the Monte Rosa glacier before winter came, with all the evident mountain-climber’s risks, as well as the risk the passeurs11 might not be trustworthy. Passeurs: cross-border smugglers accustomed to carrying various sorts of illegal merchandise, to whom the war offered the additional opportunity to earn money transporting men and women whose lives were at risk.12 To evade the guards of the border militia, the smugglers demanded between 5,000 and 15,000 lire per person (the equivalent of roughly $3,000 to $9,000 today).13 But some of them could also abandon their clients in the high Alps and simply disappear. Such unappealing options perhaps explain why nothing was decided at that meeting.14
Levi then returned to Amay, where he would spend, almost without interruption, the three months before his capture by the Fascist militia. “There are many little villages scattered around a valley, and then there is … a minuscule settlement called Amay”: so Levi recalled the place thirty years later in a conversation with a young friend of the family.15 The lodgings at Amay’s Hotel Ristoro were not luxurious, somewhere between a country inn and a mountain hut for hikers. But the managers were agreeable and the rooms had running water and were reasonably priced.16 Up on the top floor under the roof, the Levi family could feel relatively at ease, as much as was possible in those difficult times.
I first saw the village of Amay on a sunny day in September 2011. I had been studying the Resistance at Col de Joux and Primo Levi’s role in it for years, but I had not yet gone to see the main theater of action. For years, driving back and forth between Geneva and Turin, I had raised my eyes toward “the hill” where I knew Amay sat, and all those years I recognized, from down in the valley, the outlines of houses nestled in the green of vegetation or silhouetted against the white of the snow. Not even once, however, had I exited the motorway to climb the switchback road up that hill, arrive at the village half an hour away, and walk down its all but deserted alleyways. I had utterly forgotten the lesson of Richard Cobb, historian of the French Revolution, who held that history must be pursued on foot and not just read, must be studied in loco and not only in archival folders and the pages of books. It mattered, because before I went to Amay, I had never got past the surface of Primo Levi’s Resistance.
Until I saw the Hotel Ristoro, now transformed into a condominium; until I saw, right next to the former hotel, the tiny church and bell tower of Amay, a seventeenth-century chapel like one in a fairy tale; until I saw, above all, the stunning landscape that on a sunny day in autumn 1943 lay before the guests on the top floor of the Ristoro, I was unable to understand one of the basic facts of the Resistance experience: the geographical nature of partisan existence,17 the direct connection between the rebel and the territory in which he found himself. Before I went to Amay, I was unable to understand how difficult, how almost impossible, it was to carry out resistance in a place like that.
For Amay is too luminous, too airy, too visible a place to fight a war, let alone a guerrilla insurgency. The village, once a popular stopping point on a long mountain route, remains enchanting even today, when it is something like a ghost town. Its three or four streets are empty, the chapel is closed up, the haylofts and wooden granaries are in ruins, but the sweeping panorama of mountains and plain that opens out from Amay toward the great Aosta Valley is remarkably picturesque. But because of its astonishingly aerial nature, Amay was the last place that a clever partisan would choose as a base to hide out. Certainly, this perch over the plain offered the rebels a chance to mark eventual enemy incursions in good time. The problem was that this visibility worked in the other direction, too, at least for anyone with a pair of binoculars. Although it was just a bit lower down the mountain, Amay was different from Frumy, a pasture with Alpine huts where most (a dozen men!) of the Col de Joux band settled in. Frumy was off the track of the road that led up the hill. The huts were invisible, except from even farther up the hill; they could not be seen at all from the valley. At Frumy, there was none of the giddy visibility of Amay.
In 1932, a journalist for the Turin daily La Stampa praised Saint-Vincent as an “Alpine Eldorado” and called Amay “a delicious village immersed in emerald green,” a land of plenty close at hand. One May day in 1800, the (probably apocryphal) story goes, as Napoleon’s army was crossing the Alps into Italy, the First Consul himself ascended the hill on a reconnaissance mission, stopped at the inn of Amay, and drank some “rosy Carema wine.” The wine cup was dutifully preserved and proudly displayed to the guests of the Ristoro.18
The fall
The presence of Primo Levi’s whole family in that improbable Eldorado says much about their situation in late September 1943. In German-occupied Italy, Jews simply believed they were safer in the mountains than in the city. Certainly the epic aura that clings to the first partisans does not characterize their circumstances, which we might rather call domestic.19
Like most of his Jewish friends, the twenty-four-year-old Levi had not gone up into the hills for any pressing military or intrinsically political purpose. He was not evading an army call-up, since adult males “of the Jewish race” had been banned from military service in 1938 and were even less welcome in the collaborationist Italy of Salò. He wasn’t there to hide out and pursue guerrilla action, since he wouldn’t have taken along his sister and fifty-year-old mother. Nor was he there in response to a great call to take up the anti-Fascist resistance, for there had been no such call in the days just after the eighth of September; the resistance scattered here and there did not immediately become the Resistance with a capital R. Certainly Primo Levi stood with the anti-Fascists, and he had taken sides at least a year before Mussolini fell. Pressed by his charismatic cousin, Ada Della Torre, he and his friends—half a dozen Turinese Jews working in Milan—had already approached the anti-Fascist Partito d’Azione and even carried out some clandestine activities.20 But when Il Duce was ousted they were unable to translate that determination into concrete military or political action. The German occupation hit them more as endangered Jews than as rebels of the first hour.
Among Primo Levi’s closest friends from those days in Milan were Vanda Maestro, a chemist, and Luciana Nissim, who had earned a medical degree. Both were now in the mountains: Nissim was staying with her parents in a village in the lower Val d’Ayas, while Maestro was lodged with her brother in another nearby village. Five months later, the three would share a railway car and deportation to Poland. Della Torre, meanwhile, had left Milan for a job at Olivetti, down on the plain in Ivrea, and so she too was not far away.
On October 10 Vanda Maestro sent to another friend from those Milanese days a letter that was strangely lighthearted, given the gravity of the moment. She told of some romantic novels she’d enjoyed, complained of the “disgusting” Italian-made cigarettes she had smoked, spoke of how she missed her friends, and “of my humble hope we’ll be together at New Year’s” if “this awful period passes.”21 Later that month Vanda and her brother Aldo made an attempt to cross the border into Switzerland. When they didn’t succeed, Aldo returned to the plain while Vanda decided to go and stay with Luciana in Val d’Ayas. Eventually the two of them decided to leave the Nissim family and traveled first up to Brusson, then over the Col de Joux pass to meet Primo Levi at the Hotel Ristoro. It is difficult to be sure of the dates, but this was probably deep in the autumn, between the end of November and the beginning of December. “I don’t recall exactly,” Luciana would say half a century later; “I know that we two, dressed in ski pants, went up and settled in there.”22
As Eugenio Gentili Tedeschi, another of Primo Levi’s friends from the Milan circle, remembers it, in early December Vanda Maestro walked much of the way across Valle d’Aosta from east to west and climbed up to the village where Eugenio was staying, hoping to convince him to join the group of Jewish friends at the Col de Joux. Vanda was enthusiastic about the situation around Brusson. “She told me the civilian population there was very cooperative, and that even the mayor’s wife was knitting woolen socks for the partisans to wear in winter.” Eugenio did not share Vanda’s optimism at all. “I’m not coming, and you had better take care and change your routes right away, close up the place where you are staying, go somewhere else where no one knows you, and change your habits completely, for the risk is grave.” No, she said, she didn’t believe it. The two friends would never see one another again.23
There were other Turinese Jews in those mountains, people connected to Levi or to his friends, many of them related. Among them were Emilio and Guido Bachi, who will have a certain weight in our story. The Bachi brothers were some ten years older than Levi, and although they came from the same world as he did their experiences had been somewhat different. Born in 1907 and 1909, Emilio and Guido were old enough to recall celebrating, along with their elders, Italy’s victory against Austria in the Great War.24 They had grown up under Mussolini but had finished their university studies and completed their military service long before the racial laws of 1938 made Levi and his contemporaries pariahs in Fascist Italy—barred from serving in the Royal Army, the air force, and the navy, disdained as unworthy of any uniform and unfit for manly deeds.25
In family photographs Emilio Bachi looks vigorous, with blue eyes and blond hair, while Guido is less tall, dark eyed and dark haired. Their papers portray the Bachi family as a sort of low-key version of the Finzi-Continis, the prosperous, unwary protagonists of Giorgio Bassani’s novel The Garden of the Finzi-Continis set among the Jews of 1930s Ferrara. The Bachi family, it must be said, was more political than the Finzi-Continis. Emilio and Guido’s father, Donato, was a longtime Socialist who had worked with Camillo Olivetti, founder of the company of the same name, and after World War I they had started up an anti-Fascist review called Tempi nuovi.26Donato Bachi, for his part, was enough of an opponent of the regime to be sent into internal exile in 1940.27Beyond that, however, the Bachi story is very like the one Bassani told of Ferrara. It is a story of the fall of Italian Jews as they plunged, unwitting and stunned, from life abundant into nakedness and fear.
I have before me a copy of a photograph. “Bardonecchia, July 1935” is written on it, but it is not difficult to imagine it as an illustration for Bassani’s novel, which revolves around the Finzi-Contini tennis court, symbol of their innocent myopia, their oblivious, foreseeable defeat in the match of life. During a pause in the game at Bardonecchia, a dozen young men and women have posed for the camera, tennis rackets in hand. Or, more likely, they have posed before the game, for no one’s hair is out of place, no one is sweaty; all look impeccable in their tennis whites. One of them, playing a silly joke, hides behind the others with a hand up, two fingers extended, “making the horns.” Elena Bachi, Emilio’s sister-in-law, is on one side of the group. On the other, wearing a childish white cap, is Primo Levi, then sixteen years old. He is smiling and—so it appears—timidly waving.28
Elena Bachi would go on to marry Primo’s cousin Roberto Levi, a union loveless from the beginning, fated to end in tragedy. But those events pertain to the story of the fall. Before she resigned herself to an arranged marriage, celebrated almost glumly in February 1943, in the grim era of racial discrimination, Elena had quite happily enjoyed her circumstances as a privileged young woman at a time when an Italian Jew could grow up with every advantage: education, sports, games of bridge, travel. One day in Rome in the autumn of 1933, Elena and her sister Luisella had even been introduced to Vittorio and Bruno Mussolini, Il Duce’s sons, at a luncheon on the Via Camilluccia. Two years later, on May 1, 1936, they had celebrated the conquest of Addis Ababa—Italy’s victory in the war with Ethiopia and the birth of the Fascist empire—along with the jeunesse dorée of Turin’s Jewish community. In no hurry to settle down, Elena refused to make do with the several dull Jewish suitors the family turned up for her, and instead continued to flirt with various young model Fascists, tennis pros, ski buffs, and track and field champions.29
Bardonecchia, Sestrière, Courmayeur, Cervinia: so many pages of Elena Bachi’s diary were dedicated to her holidays in mountain resorts before the summer of 1938. Elena, like Primo Levi, spent that summer in Cogne, a mountain town south of Aosta. In July there was the Hotel Miramonti, the lawn, tennis matches, mountain hikes with the Gran Paradiso glacier as a backdrop. The newspapers, meanwhile, printed the “Manifesto of the Racial Scientists” and brought news of the Racial Laws. “We are all very worried,” wrote Elena in her diary, “that we, too, may be forced to leave the country, as has happened to the German Jews.”30 On July 31, Primo Levi celebrated his nineteenth birthday.31 He was at Cogne with his family, and many relatives and friends were nearby. His holiday followed his first year of university, which had been quite successful, but “beyond the walls of the Chemistry Institute,” he would write in The Periodic Table, “it was nighttime in Europe.”32 Elena Bachi was aware of this too, in her own, exclamation-pointed way. “Very down because of the terrible anti-Semitic campaign of which I don’t wish to speak, for I would have to write about it for a thousand hours on end. It is a dreadful thing, and on October 1 there will be further provisions. Certainly it means no more dances, no more parties and carefree fun! Who knows how all this will end!”33
Police Directive Number Five
For the hundred or so inhabitants of Amay, as for the 2,000 who lived in Saint-Vincent and the 90,000 in the entire province of Aosta, the fact that a few dozen Piedmontese Jews had sought refuge from the Nazi-Fascists in the mountains in September 1943 was far from their main concern.
The war had been raging for three years, the defeats of the Italian armed forces had spread panic; the losses in every household, the difficulties of every family were so great that even Mussolini’s fall had not distracted the “miserable populace” of Valle d’Aosta from “everyone’s nightmare,” the “animal anxiety to procure food.” Such was the impression of Émile Chanoux, the anti-Fascist notary who would be the most distinguished martyr of the Valle d’Aosta Resistance, and there is no reason to think he was mistaken.34 As it happens, Chanoux’s view of things finds an indirect (if politically opposite) confirmation in the report of Aosta prefect Cesare Augusto Carnazzi, who had been installed by the Republic of Salò in October 1943. The population, he wrote, cared nothing for politics, or foreign affairs, or anything else beyond ravenous self-interest. “The cornering of the market for milk products and their hyperbolic prices is for them the most interesting aspect of the war.” For the people of Valle d’Aosta, world war and civil war came down to a matter of milk, butter, and cheese.35
In those first months after the Germans moved in, the mortal danger facing Italian Jews was perfectly evident, if administratively vague. In late September, the Reich Security Main Office had ordered German police in Nazi-occupied Rome to “expel eastward” all Jews who were Italian citizens. The relative lethargy of the Republic of Salò moved the Germans to carry out anti-Jewish actions on their own, for the Italian police were not very efficient collaborators. The Nazis carried out their first roundups and massacres between September and October around the cities of Bolzano and Cuneo and on the Piedmontese shores of Lake Maggiore. There was also the devastating operation in the Rome Ghetto, where a thousand Jews—men, women, the elderly, children—were arrested and deported to Auschwitz. But it was not until November 30 that the Interior Minister of the Social Republic issued Police Directive Number Five, which decreed that all Jews within the territory of Salò, whatever their nationality, be arrested and confined in internment camps awaiting deportation to the Lager.36
The population of Valle d’Aosta reacted ambivalently to the influx of Jews and foreigners seeking a chance to cross the border into Switzerland, or merely to be less visible than they were in the city. On the one hand, the locals considered these extra people a further problem, because the Jewish refugees were extra mouths to feed and risked making already scarce resources even more so. On the other, the people of Valle d’Aosta also recognized that this was an unexpected economic opportunity, the Jews being all the more willing to pay for their food and lodgings because they were not tourists but people fighting for survival. The locals’ sentiments were also ambivalent. The situation of the Jews spurred some to sympathy and mercy. And yet wartime needs pushed others to extract the most profit from the Jewish drama, so that some of the fees imposed for board and rent were little less than usurious.37
Contrary to what one might expect, the people of the small Valle d’Aosta town of Saint-Vincent had already become rather familiar with displaced Jews during the war. This had been an indirect result of the occupation of the Balkans by the Axis powers. During the second half of 1941, the roundup and murder of Jews in Serbia and Croatia by the Germans and their Croatian fascist ally, the Ustasha, had provoked thousands to flee to the zone of Italian occupation, in the reasonable expectation that the soldiers of Mussolini would treat them somewhat less barbarously than did those of Hitler. About 2,000 of these Jews were in fact deported from Dalmatia to Italy, and about 250 of these were assigned by the government to be interned in Aosta and its province. Of these, 101 were in turn sent to reside in “hotels or furnished rooms” in Saint-Vincent, where, in late 1941 and early 1942, they settled in.38
Considering that the total population of Saint-Vincent was only around 2,000 inhabitants, it is obvious that the sudden arrival (and prolonged presence) of such a large number of foreign Jews would have an impact. Most of those 101 foreigners would remain until February 1943, when the Interior Minister ordered that they be transferred to a civil internment camp in Calabria. Twenty-nine of them were exempted from leaving Saint-Vincent on account of their “advanced age” or their “grave” health conditions. All of these were, of course, to be kept “under tight surveillance” to prevent any “subversive propaganda.”39 Up until the eighth of September 1943, the prefect and police chief of Aosta were fairly lenient with the Yugoslav Jews in their territory. They had even resisted the Interior Minister’s orders to send all of them south independent of their age or health conditions.
Cesare Augusto Carnazzi, the new prefect of Aosta under Salò, took a very different line. A zealous anti-Semite even before the Germans arrived, he had warned the previous prefect in a top-secret missive that “hundreds of Yugoslav and Croatian Jews along with their families” had “meticulously” staked out “rentals, cottages, and hotel rooms, that is, all the best lodgings that are usually reserved for Turinese families during the summer season.” That was not all that the Balkan Jews were guilty of. “Being well furnished with cash,” they were buying up various food items, “whether they had ration cards or not.” And worse: “Among them some who can speak, even badly, a bit of Italian, find ways to make clever anti-Axis propaganda, suggesting they were forced to leave their country of origin because German officers had carried out atrocities.”40
A lawyer by trade, Carnazzi was an energetic twenty-nine-year-old who knew the area well because he had been Fascist Party secretary of Aosta between May 1941 and July 1943. Nor did he lack military experience, for he had the stripes of an air force lieutenant and had volunteered for combat both in East Africa and in the Balkans.41 When Carnazzi became prefect of Aosta at the end of October 1943, he was determined to be a Nazi-Fascist patriot.
As of November 19, 1943, some seventeen of the twenty-nine Yugoslav Jews who had not been transferred to Calabria were still interned at Saint-Vincent. “They have not moved beyond town limits even during and after the recent circumstances,” wrote the deputy sergeant who’d been left to oversee the local carabinieri barracks, discreetly alluding to Mussolini’s fall and the armistice.42 Only a few days remained until November 30, when Police Directive Number Five would be issued by the Salò Interior Ministry: a blanket arrest warrant for all Jews in the Salò territory, including those last Yugoslav refugees at Saint-Vincent. And including those three Italian Levis who, two and a half months before, had found a hiding place nine hundred meters farther up, at the Hotel Ristoro of Amay.
We can try to imagine the life of Levi, his mother, and his sister in that little hotel, but there are few documentary traces to fill out the picture. One is Levi’s signature as a witness to a marriage celebrated at the town hall of Saint-Vincent on October 23. The couple—both of the “Jewish race,” as the mayor of Ivrea dutifully informed the prefect and police chief of Aosta, and as the marriage certificate also specified43—were Giorgio Fubini, an engineer at Olivetti, and Lia Segre, resident of Turin. The bride was Levi’s cousin, and the other witness was a longtime friend of his, the engineer Livio Norzi. The wedding banns had been published in the usual manner. And the signatures at the bottom of the marriage document were firm and clear: bride, groom, two witnesses. It was a wedding like any other, as Italian Jews struggled to maintain an impossible normality even while the Final Solution was materializing around them.
Indeed, although the guests at the Hotel Ristoro did not know it, the extermination machine had already overtaken and crushed a piece of the Levi family. On September 15, Primo Levi’s paternal uncle Mario Levi, an eye doctor in Turin, and his son Roberto, Primo’s cousin, were arrested by the Germans on a main street in the town of Orta, in the Lombardy lake district. Transferred to Meina on Lake Maggiore, Mario and Roberto Levi were murdered on September 23 along with several dozen Greek, Turkish, and Italian Jews whom the SS had captured in the town’s most elegant hotel. The victims’ bodies were then tossed into the lake, a stone tied to each of their necks.44 Mario Levi’s wife, Emma Coen, and Roberto’s wife, Elena Bachi, were spared. The same Elena Bachi who just a few years before had chattered on in her diary about tennis with Primo Levi or skiing with Emilio and Guido Bachi: in short order she had become a reluctant bride, and then a young widow.
At Orta, for whatever reason, the SS had not treated the two women as desirable prey. But the Jews killed alongside Mario and Roberto at Meina included men and women both. And two weeks later, at the beginning of October, the SS officers who captured an entire family in Valle d’Aosta—father, mother, daughter, son—showed no leniency to the women. The Ovazza family had been the incarnation of those Turin Jews loyal to Fascism during the 1930s.45 Arrested at the Hotel Lyskamm in Gressoney-Saint-Jean, where they were trying to secretly expatriate to Switzerland, they were quickly robbed of a small fortune, taken to Lake Maggiore, shot in the basement of a school, and incinerated in the school furnace.46
Neither of these early tragedies involving Jews from Turin, however, became widely known at first. News traveled haltingly in occupied Italy. Collaborationist newspapers, of course, wrote nothing of German atrocities. And the Jews themselves, refugees, hidden, and in disguise, were often unable to share information, even the most grievous.
Word of Police Directive Number Five, however, seems to have circulated with lightning speed to every corner of occupied Italy where one or more Jews had hidden themselves away hoping better times would come.47 And that included the town of Saint-Vincent and the village of Amay. According to Anna Maria Levi, she and her mother left the Hotel Ristoro in Amay on December 1—the day after the directive was issued. Her brother opposed their decision to abandon the mountains and seek refuge in some small country town outside Turin, hoping to evade the Italian and German police. “Primo was not really in agreement,” Anna Maria would recall in 2009. It seems she organized their departure in secret to avoid his protest.48
Primo Levi’s dissent certainly reflects an elder child’s uneasiness about not being able to look after his widowed mother and younger sister directly. But perhaps it also reflects a reluctance to be the only member of the family left in the mountains. So long as his mother and sister were there in the hotel, Levi was a Jew from the city who had evacuated with his family to an Alpine village to evade the Nazi-Fascist predators. But the day the two women left, what would he be? A Jewish refugee rather lamely hidden in rented rooms in Amay—or a partisan fighting for what was not yet called the Resistance, a rebel with the band that was forming just ten minutes up the mountain, in the shepherd huts of Frumy?
Beyond their numbers
After the armistice on September 8, young non-Jewish Italian men of combat age faced a stark set of choices: remain at home, sign up for military service with the Social Republic, or join the partisans in the hills or in the cities. Jews had a different decision to make. For them, enlisting with Salò was out of the question: the Social Republic only wanted to deport them. Nor could they merely stay at home; discovery meant a fatal transfer to the sealed train. Although non-Jews were also at risk if they stayed at home and failed to respond to the ever-more-threatening enlistment calls, in practice the German and Italian police had neither the political interest nor the means to hunt down and punish hundreds of thousands of service-dodgers.49 For Jews, though, the effective options were two: hide, or become partisans.
The narrowness of that choice helps to explain why Italian Jews were so numerous in the Resistance, far beyond their proportion of the overall population. When it was all over, about a thousand were officially recognized as Resistance fighters (another thousand were recognized as “patriots”): remarkably many, considering that the entire Jewish population—men, women, and children—was no more than 35,000.50 As Primo Levi did in Amay after the promulgation of Police Directive Number Five, many Jews who were fit to do so opted to take up arms.51
We can borrow more than one page here from Emanuele Artom’s Diaries of a Jewish Partisan. The older brother of one of Primo Levi’s classmates, the diminutive, bookish, and timid Emanuele had been the butt of jokes from adolescence. At the D’Azeglio liceo in the early 1930s, the name Artom signified a hopeless and unmanly nerd.52 Yet ten years later, facing the German occupation, Artom left Turin for the valleys of Piedmont at the service of the anti-Fascist Partito d’Azione.53 He overcame his condescension toward comrades wilder and less intellectual than he. He learned how to handle weapons.
On December 1, news of Police Directive Number Five threw Artom into dismay at the thought of his parents, who had remained on the Piedmontese plain. What would become of them; what would be the point of surviving them? “In that case,” he wrote, “I will ask my commander to be sent on a mission in which I’ll be killed.”54
But Artom’s engagement in the partisan struggle was to grow tougher and more urgent. The Nazi-Fascist “hunt for the Jews”55 turned him into a man ready to fight to the end—not to sacrifice himself, but to kill. On December 20 his band raided Cavour, a town where the Republic of Salò was enrolling soldiers (“slave trade,” Artom called it, “in males born in ’24 and ’25”). It was his baptism by fire: “I understand now that I wasn’t born to be a professor, but a gangster.” The engagement was quickly over. “Gunfire from the truck, and when I jumped down, all I could see were disappearing trouser hems as the Fascists bolted out of the doors of the covered market.”56
Fighting alongside Artom was Giorgio Segre, a young Jewish doctor, also from Turin, who had just gotten his degree. And later in that winter of 1943–44 one of Artom’s comrades in arms would be yet another Jew from his hometown, Franco Momigliano. One of the founders of the Partito d’Azione in Piedmont, Momigliano was romantically involved with Luciana Nissim, and Segre with Vanda Maestro.57 The world of Primo Levi’s generation of Turinese Jews, the ones who took to the hills after the armistice, was small indeed.
Beyond those human ties were political ties linking the rebel bands of the Valle d’Aosta with the movement then springing up in the Waldensian* valleys west of Turin. Links were also being forged that fall between Valle d’Aosta and the plain, as anti-Fascists established contact with each other. The young Fiat manager Aurelio Peccei climbed the mountains several times between October and December 1943 on behalf of the Partito d’Azione.58 Vincenzo Grasso, an engineer working in Turin, also seems to have played a role,59 while attorney Camillo Reynaud60 collected funds, made contact with clandestine organizations, and sent early rebels to the Col de Joux. He went with them, in fact, to the Frumy lodge, where Guido Bachi was then in charge, “around the twentieth of September.”
That, at any rate, was how Bachi remembered it just after the war, in an October 1946 report to the Piedmontese regional committee certifying partisan credentials. The report lauded Peccei as the man responsible for linking up “the patriot unit of Amay” and the military command of the Piedmontese National Liberation Committee. And it praised another “valuable contributor” leading the group in Amay, “second lieutenant Aldo Piacenza.”61 Who, I discovered, was still alive.
As chance would have it
Maurizio, Aldo Piacenza’s son, was encouraging. “My father’s over ninety, he’s hard of hearing, and his recent memory can be faulty sometimes. But his memory for the past is excellent, and you can certainly go see him if you like.”
The house faced onto Piazza dei Gardini Lamarmora, one of the many beautiful squares in the center of Turin: elegant apartment buildings, the usual monument to a Risorgimento hero, plane trees all around. I had crossed that square innumerable times on my way to the library or to the archives since I began to research the story of the partisans. But I hadn’t known I was walking right by an important historical personage, sitting there behind the windows. Aldo Piacenza was confined to a wheelchair but otherwise alive and well, his mental faculties as bright as the tip of his cigarette.
About to ring the bell, I made another discovery: in that same building also lived Primo Levi’s close friend Bianca Guidetti Serra, a trusted anti-Fascist in the 1930s and a major progressive figure in postwar Italian politics.62 Again—small world.
When I was taken in to see Piacenza in his studio overlooking the gardens outside, he had his back to the door. He was facing the window, with a blanket over his knees. Waiting for me, it seemed, and perhaps for something more. I was touched by the sight of him, in part because it made me think of the wheelchair used for so long by my mother; in part because the man before me was the very image of the stalwart old partisan. For a second I felt like a character from the period I had studied for my thesis many years before, like one of the French Republicans who during the 1820s and ’30s—battling the enemies of the Revolution—would go to visit old Montagnards, the last Jacobin survivors of 1793, and collect their memories as a sign of gratitude. Seated there beside Aldo Piacenza, I was briefly a son who had recently lost the mother who once read him the last letters of partisans condemned to death—and a citizen infinitely grateful to an old man like Piacenza for having been a partisan in the hills in his youth, for having made Italy free. More than a few moments went by before I regained the more neutral guise of the historian.
“That we were up in the mountains was largely by chance; don’t think there was some great revolutionary plan behind it; we had been kicked up there by the eighth of September.” Piacenza’s very first words put history back in its place and recalled me to the present. He had been orphaned as a child and raised by his aunt and uncle, who owned a butcher shop; he had arrived at Amay in September 1943, after abandoning his army uniform, hoping to stay out of German hands. A driver in his unit had given him the idea; the fellow was a native of Valle d’Aosta and knew the area, “he knew that above Saint-Vincent, well above, there was a village where we might be able to stay out of trouble.” Especially because there was no road above Saint-Vincent up to Amay, just an Alpine path, a two-hour hike uphill.
When Piacenza arrived he had taken a room at the Hotel Ristoro. There he met Primo Levi. Or rather recognized him, for the two were almost the same age (Levi, twenty-four; Piacenza, twenty-two), and they had crossed paths in secondary school in Turin. Aldo had been a classmate of Primo’s sister, Anna Maria,63 and now they all were under the same roof, having fled from one danger or another, in that Alpine Eldorado without any gold. “Everything was chaotic, makeshift, dangerous,” Piacenza went on, “and we found ourselves there almost entirely by chance.”
If Levi had no military experience, Piacenza had had more than his share. In July 1941 he had volunteered for the Eastern Front with the Italian Expeditionary Corps and the following year his unit was absorbed into ARMIR, the Italian Army in Russia. He had thus fought the entire Russian campaign, “from Iasi in Romania right to the bend of the Don.” Not on the front line, though: “I was a driver; our job wasn’t to fire, it was to drive.” Certainly, Piacenza said, “I saw things, yes; but not everything, not being at the front.” In Moldavia, Bessarabia, Ukraine, “what I saw was behind the lines.” And there, Piacenza saw, or glimpsed, the effects of the Final Solution. “When we were withdrawing from Russia, I was struck, in a town I don’t remember the name of, that there were no adults there, only children. It was a Jewish town, I should say. There were just children, children destined to die.” As he tells me this I wonder whether he spoke about it to Primo Levi during their days together in Amay. I do know that twenty years ago, writing to an English biographer of Levi, Ian Thomson, Piacenza told him how in October 1941, with the Italian Expeditionary Corps at the Dnipropetrovsk bridgehead, they met a long column of Jews escorted by the Germans. “The machine gun fire went on for three days.”64Today scholars say that at least 12,000 Jews were eliminated in the Dnipropetrovsk massacre, shot in the back of the head and thrown into mass graves.65
In October 1943, when the combined efforts of Aurelio Peccei, Camillo Reynaud, and others linking Turin and Valle d’Aosta brought a dozen rebels to the area, Aldo Piacenza’s military experience earned him a role as one of the leaders of the band, a group that would enlarge only slightly in subsequent weeks. “The most I had under me were fifteen men,” Piacenza tells me. Outside the window, dusk is settling on the gardens, and his handsome old-man’s face is wreathed in cigarette smoke. Just above Amay was “a wide plain used for pasture,” he says, the plain of Frumy with its “shepherds’ huts and lodges,” and “it was there that I installed my men.” Piacenza speaks as if he had been their undisputed leader, but archival material suggests that the real chief—insofar as such titles make any sense in reference to the earliest days of the Resistance, when hierarchies were still to be worked out—was Guido Bachi. Or at least that Bachi was the political leader, with Piacenza at his side as military leader.66
Both of the Bachi brothers had the necessary qualifications to lead the Col de Joux band. They were more mature than Piacenza or Levi, a dozen years older. And though they had not fought on any front in World War II, they had real military experience. Before being “permanently discharged” as a result of the anti-Jewish laws of 1938,67 Emilio had been a reserve officer in the Alpine artillery, while Guido was a reserve officer in the Automotive Corps; both held the rank of lieutenant.68 After his military service, Guido had worked with his father, Donato, in the insurance business and then with a cousin in the paper industry. His passion was music. He had a diploma in piano and had been prominent in the university music society while studying economics; after the Racial Laws he taught music at the Jewish School of Turin.69
Emilio Bachi, his older brother, was an attorney who had refused to enroll in the Fascist Party in 1932. Two years later Emilio had approached the Turinese branch of the anti-Fascist movement Giustizia e Libertà, but he did not take the step into outright conspiracy. In 1939 he left Italy for France, where with a distant cousin he tried to set up a plastics works in Brittany. In the summer of 1940 he had experienced firsthand the fall of France under Hitler’s blitzkrieg. He would never forget it.70
How much of this human history Aldo Piacenza knew in the autumn of 1943 when, just back from the Russian campaign, he joined the Bachi brothers in organizing the Col de Joux band, I have no idea. The old partisan, speaking to me in 2011, seemed in no way keen to exaggerate his role in the Resistance or to minimize that of the brothers Bachi. Instead, Piacenza seemed to want to convince me that neither he nor the others had accomplished anything politically or militarily significant in those autumn months. “We hadn’t done anything much because we were still in the process of recruiting; all I had done was put the band together,” he told me. A statement that reminds me, in its mixture of modesty and pride, of something Primo Levi said in an interview in 1975 about The Periodic Table. “Really, we knew nothing. We had to invent the Resistance.”71
“Primo Levi, pretty much like me, did nothing … at least at the beginning,” Piacenza insisted. After those first few weeks they had undertaken a few actions, but hadn’t accomplished much. They tried to recruit several people, procure some weapons. “The main thing I remember was that Primo and I had heard of a guy in a far-off town who had weapons and was willing to give them to us.” One night the two young men set out for that town of Chambave, moving only along Alpine paths in order to minimize the chance of unfortunate encounters. “When we got there, we found out that this miserable fellow had only one gun, or maybe he only wanted to give us one. And so back we went—it was still night—and we spent the night inside the door of a church. It was damned cold!”
As a grown man, almost an old man, Primo Levi wrote that human memory was “a marvelous but fallacious instrument.”72 This comes to mind as I watch Piacenza’s face light up recalling that fruitless nighttime expedition of ’43; I’m unable to avoid comparing what he tells me tonight with what he told Carole Angier for her 2002 biography of Levi. In that account Piacenza also spoke of how word had reached Amay of arms to be had at Chambave, and of the night he and Levi spent on mountain paths. But in that other version they had found as many weapons as they could want: hand grenades, rifles, pistols—in short, manna from heaven! They loaded them on their backs and returned to Col de Joux. Piacenza was thrilled, and Levi too was happy. And yet (“and this was typical,” Piacenza told Angier), Levi was also unhappy. Bringing all those munitions back to the base had made him regret that men must take up arms against other men.73
As Piacenza finishes his tale yet another version of it occurs to me, this one Primo Levi’s, from a radio conversation of 1983. This time the two young men are directed toward the town of Nus, not Chambave. And the weapons they find are neither a great arsenal nor a single gun; the spoils are even slighter than what Piacenza has told me today. “We set out, on foot obviously, by night, and we covered all those kilometers between Col de Joux and Nus, and then from Nus up to the barn, and we emptied out the barn (and that was a grueling job) in the midst of the snow, and we found a wooden cartridge clip, the kind you use in military drill. One. And because we were civilized people we replaced all the hay before we went back down the valley.”74
As I gather up my notes and bid Aldo Piacenza farewell, trying to find a way to convey all my gratitude, I know I cannot take his words as the true story of true partisans. His memory is human, as memory is.
The war of Monferrato
History is written by the victors: the saying is a cliché, but it is not wrong. In the case of the Resistance, the more or less official reports on the actions of the partisan brigades, compiled after the Liberation by those brigades themselves, must undoubtedly be accepted with some reservations. The Resistance generated an enormous number of heroes and produced a broadly mythological story about their degree of political awareness and military preparation. But to criticize a myth is not to deny a reality: after September 8, 1943, there really were partisans in the hills. Were they no more than a few, poorly trained and poorly armed? All the more reason to credit them.
Just after the war, Guido Bachi wrote of his efforts to establish a partisan band at the Col de Joux, and like Piacenza he described serious problems recruiting enough members and gathering enough weapons. “During the month of October, the band remained small, about ten in number,” he wrote. “We already had some weapons,” but it continued to be difficult “to attract young people from the city and from the remains of the Royal Army.” In those weeks, Bachi got word that “another band composed of folk from Casale Monferrato was shaping up a few kilometers away,” at the Val d’Ayas hamlet of Arcesaz, near Brusson. And so Emilio Bachi was sent to “investigate how serious and effective they were.” The group from Casale Monferrato, a small industrial city in the Monferrato district of Piedmont, amounted to some thirty partisans. Were they to join forces, the bands at Col de Joux and Arcesaz could be far more effective in battling the Nazi-Fascists.75
As Bachi told it in 1946, the rebels from Casale Monferrato had their command post “in a boardinghouse–tobacco shop” in the center of Arcesaz, and most of the band was positioned up on the mountains over the town.76Other documents confirm this, including the police records provided to the authorities of Salò after the capture of the rebels. The boardinghouse in question was an Arcesaz inn called the Croce Bianca, then as now located on the main road running through the valley.77 Most of the band was lodged 250 meters higher up, away from the road, near the striking medieval castle of Graines. The castle still towers over Val d’Ayas.78
It seems the rebels of Casale Monferrato chose these hills because one of them, Francesco Rossi, lived with a woman who was a native of Arcesaz, and they owned a house nearby.79 In any case, the Rossi brothers Francesco and Italo, thirty-one and twenty-nine years old respectively, along with their brother Bruno (seventeen) and father Oreste (fifty-five) were instrumental in transferring the nucleus of Casale Monferrato’s Resistance some one hundred kilometers northeast to Valle d’Aosta. During the following twenty months the working-class Rossi family would pay a high price in blood for the cause and earn themselves a place in history.80 Until the end of October, though, the Casale resistance was hardly detectable.81
But in the region of Piedmont, as elsewhere, things changed after the first military call-up ordered by the Republic of Salò, dated November 4 and made public a few days later. This was the first of the Graziani Draft Orders (named after Salò Minister of Defense Rodolfo Graziani), and after the draft order the situation hardened. The confusion and uncertainty that had followed the armistice, the collapse of the Italian state, and the arrival of German occupiers now gave way to a tight collaboration between Salò and the German forces. That led to a bitter struggle between die-hard Fascists and early partisans. The war of liberation from the Germans had begun, however tentatively, on September 8, but the civil war pitting Italian against Italian only really got its start at this point, two months later.82
When the draft order was issued, the ranks of the Fascists at Casale Monferrato were at their lowest ebb. No more than 300 held party cards, as opposed to the 3,550 who had been members before Mussolini was ousted on July 25 that year.83 Luciano Imerico, local commander of the Volunteer Militia for National Security, himself admitted that the militia, once the pride of the regime’s military institutions, had no more than eight officers and twenty-two officials of lesser rank at its disposal.84 But as the Social Republic regrouped its forces, the call to close ranks, back the Germans, and pitilessly pursue the traitors to the Italian nation sounded loud and clear. Draft dodgers—those young men born in 1923–25 who in huge numbers had failed to answer the November 4 call-up—had to be hunted down. The prefects of Salò were zealous in devising punishments, such as arresting the parents of draftees who didn’t show up.85 Soon Commander Imerico had dozens, then hundreds of young men coming forward to serve in the Republican Army or in the Republican National Guard, as the volunteer militia had been renamed.86
The threats from Salò, however, also turned some evaders into active resisters. In the district of Monferrato it was almost a given that young men reluctant to enlist under the Salò flag would rapidly move to the ranks of the partisans. It was fruitless for one of the prefects to denounce “a thorough and secret propaganda campaign” in the province, which supposedly was leading young men to desert by “inviting them instead to join groups of rebels”—a campaign, he said, backed by persons “possessing large sums of money” and promising “rich rewards.”87 The draft evaders were not selling their souls. Instead, the war in occupied Italy had already begun to evolve into a civil war.
On November 30, 1943, Ferdinando Morandi, an officer of the Republican National Guard stationed outside Casale, wrote to Imerico reporting a scene he had witnessed one night. The description, however modest, clearly foretold the coming war of Italian against Italian, never fiercer than when the adversaries were neighbors who knew and recognized one another, the enemy next door. On the night between November 25 and 26, Morandi wrote, “eleven subversive typewritten messages” were affixed to “the doors and walls of Republican Fascists” in Borgo San Martino. The suspected perpetrators? “Around 1 a.m. a red Fiat Topolino cruised slowly around the streets of the town for half an hour,” and “the automobile was recognized as that of the Allara hauling firm of Casale Monferrato.” Morandi had good reason to think that those in the car had put up the signs.88
A red Fiat Topolino cruising around a small town designating enemies one by one; a man of order—Nazi-Fascist order—who knows the firm that owns the car: we see here, in miniature, the great split that was beginning to divide Italians. The anti-Fascists of Casale hadn’t limited themselves to that incident, in fact. Young people linked in one way or another to the Allara brothers, owners of the hauling company, had already begun to move back and forth between Casale on the plain and Arcesaz in the mountains, transporting rebels, food, and weapons. They were bringing young men avoiding conscription, as well as Allied prisoners of war (Englishmen, Australians, New Zealanders) who had fled from Italian camps after the eighth of September and did not want to be recaptured by Salò or Nazi forces. They brought provisions for the partisans in Val d’Ayas. They carried weapons, as many as they could, from the garrisons of the old Royal Army or the Republic of Salò.
Thanks to Imerico’s investigative zeal we can reconstruct some of these comings and goings, at least as they were reported to police by Federico Barbesino, a draft evader (class of 1925) who took part in two or three expeditions before quarreling with the others, turning himself in to the Republican National Guard, and providing them with the names of his former rebel colleagues. The group had been meeting at a café near Piazza Castello, invited by one Giuseppe Carrera, a machinist. (Barbesino had met him at the machine shop where both had worked.) Sometimes Carrera would offer money—“a good day’s pay”—to young men who were not only willing to ignore the draft call but ready to enroll in anti-Fascist activities. Barbesino said he had been offered a stack of thousand-lire notes to serve as driver of a small truck from Casale to an unnamed mountain village.89
In wartime, trucks had largely replaced automobiles for transporting people.90 Carrera was nineteen years old, a draft evader himself (class of 1924) whose home on Via Mantova had become something like a headquarters for the early resisters of Casale.91 It was there that he had taken Barbesino “during the first ten days of November” to introduce him to the head of the expedition to the mountains, Italo Rossi. A few days later they met at the café and, “after spending a few hours together,” went to the garage of the Allara brothers to load a Fiat-SPA 38 truck with foodstuffs, military overcoats and jackets, and arms and munitions, including a Tommy gun, three assault rifles, and a case of hand grenades. Thanks to a pass shown by Rossi at the guard post on the Po River, the men were able to cross and head toward the city of Ivrea, although it was now long past nightfall and the area was under curfew.92
About halfway there a priest signaled his presence by crossing the road as the truck approached, and after speaking to Rossi brought out five former English prisoners who jumped aboard. Just outside Ivrea, in front of a sawmill, the group met up with some fellow Casale natives. Barbesino recognized a couple of young men of Carrera’s age, “who told us they had come to Ivrea to attack the carabinieri barracks but had put off the action because the sentry detail that they were in league with had not appeared.” This second group of Casale rebels also had a truck, and they too were transporting English prisoners. By the time the two vehicles handed off the prisoners to a construction worker who was hiding runaways at his farmhouse, it was morning. Barbesino also informed police of another construction worker and two millers nearby who would supply the rebels with cash and 100 kilos of flour.93
Ivrea was not just any place on the road from Monferrato to the Valle d’Aosta. It was also home to the factory owned by Camillo Olivetti, who, according to Barbesino, had already donated “between 10,000 and 20,000 lire to the cause.” These were hard times for Olivetti, however, a Jew hounded by the Germans, seventy-five years old and in poor health. Trained as an engineer and fluent in several languages, he was an unusual entrepreneur by any standards. Born in 1868, he had visited the United States in 1893 to meet Thomas Edison and learn about electric-powered industrial production. Back in Italy he founded a company in his native Ivrea and during World War I made high-quality aeronautic parts. In the 1920s, joined by his son Adriano, he started producing typewriters. A Socialist, Camillo ran factory schools for his workers, developed a strong research division for science and technology, and published reviews devoted to social and political questions until those were silenced by the regime. He would die in December 1943 and be buried in the Jewish cemetery of Biella, mourned by workers who rode their bicycles from Ivrea to his funeral, defying the pouring rain, the switchbacked mountain road, and the Wehrmacht.94 Whether what the informer Barbesino told the authorities was true—that during the last months of his life, hiding from the Germans in the hills of Biella, Olivetti was still able to help the partisans with a generous donation—we have no way of knowing.
The men of Casale (so Barbesino’s statement continues) then took off from Ivrea toward Arcesaz, where they arrived around 5 p.m. The Fiat went there directly, while the other truck, now carrying Italo Rossi and Carrera, stopped to rob the old Fascist headquarters before leaving Ivrea. But the haul was unspectacular: one typewriter, one calculating machine, one bicycle, “some fencing weapons,” and one box of munitions. The following morning Carrera and Rossi drove the new recruits up to Graines, “the training camp for rebel forces.” That afternoon Barbesino took the bus down the mountain and a train back to Casale.95
There is something poetic—or so it seems to me today, if I shed for a moment my role as historian—in small, epic deeds like those of the partisans of Casale in November of 1943. It was the dawn of the Resistance: when the partisans’ activities were already dangerous and yet not grave and solemn but seemingly heedless and unself-conscious. Truly, as Primo Levi wrote, a Resistance still to be invented. A year later, Francesco Rossi, now head of a partisan division with the Socialists’ Matteotti Brigade, would send a report to the Turin command describing the performance of the Arcesaz group in those early days in glowing terms: they were said to have accomplished some thirty-nine military actions and lost just one man, against some twenty dead “between Republicans and Germans.”96 The truth seems to have been somewhat different: less a tale of invincible partisans and vanquished foes than a few risky adventures aboard a red Topolino or a Fiat-SPA 38.
Hunters of Jews
Commander Luciano Imerico was not merely a hunter of draft evaders, he was also a hunter of Jews. In Casale Monferrato, a handful of elderly men and women, many ailing, were all that remained of a flourishing nineteenth-century Jewish community that was rapidly shrinking: from 300 members in the 1920s, to 123 when the Racial Laws were imposed in 1938, to 79 in 1940, and no more than 30 by September 8, 1943.97Shopkeepers, housewives, retired teachers—such were the “well-known scoundrels” against whom the local Salò newspapers had mounted a brutal campaign98 and whom the Republic of Salò’s most eager functionaries could pursue following Police Directive Number Five. Not that the last Jews of Casale were hard to flush out. Those who remained in town, who hadn’t even tried to hide elsewhere or flee to Switzerland, were of course the least combative and the weakest; they were already the “drowned” of Casale.99
Artom, Carmi, Fiz, Foà, Jaffe, Jarach, Levi, Morello, Raccah, Salmoni, Segre, Sonnino, Treves: the surnames of the nineteen Jews who would be arrested in Casale between February and April 1944—surnames we’ve already seen among some of the partisans in the mountains of Valle d’Aosta—go deep into Italy’s history. These were families promised a future as Italians by the reformers of the Risorgimento, by the Italian state at unity in 1861, and by Fascism itself, and then consigned to their destiny as Jews by Salò and the Final Solution.100 It was a fate Imerico did all he could to hasten, using the combined forces of the Republican National Guard and other Salò and German forces to draw the last Jews of Casale into a trap so that none could escape deportation.101 And not only that; Imerico profited from his position as an agent for the insurance company Assicurazioni Generali to lay his hands on the property of the deported.102
On his return from Auschwitz, perhaps as early as 1946, Primo Levi wrote a first draft of “Argon,” the ironic memoir of his Sephardic forebears in Piedmont that later would become the first chapter of The Periodic Table.103 It was a work of Levi’s imagination, not a factual account of his genealogical origins. Some of his “ancestors” were borrowed from close friends, and he made them into characters à la Calvino: non-existent knights, cloven viscounts, barons in trees.104 We would be wrong to read “Argon” literally and believe that relatives like great-grandfather “Nonô” Leônin and great-uncle Barbaricô really did come from Casale Monferrato. And yet Levi’s pages are as good a place as any to begin to learn about Casale’s tiny Jewish microcosm in the late nineteenth century and how the twentieth century destroyed it. “The little that I know about my forebears reminds me of these gases,” writes Levi: like argon they were noble, inert, and rare. “It can hardly be by chance that all the deeds attributed to them, though quite various, have in common a touch of the static, an attitude of dignified abstention, a voluntary (or accepted) relegation to the margins of the great river of life.”105
More combative than the last Jews of Casale during the autumn and winter of 1943 were those Italian and foreign Jews in Valle d’Aosta, near the Swiss frontier that promised salvation. But Switzerland would be a mirage for many who dreamed of crossing over.106 As autumn gave way to winter, the Alpine passes grew ever more difficult to negotiate. And in the city of Aosta, Prefect Cesare Augusto Carnazzi was determined to show no mercy.
As in every city under the Salò regime, the prefecture of Aosta was responsible for all kinds of matters, military and political as well as social and economic. It had to cope with the fact that the Fascist Party of Salò enjoyed far less popular support than the one-time National Fascist Party, and it had to deal with the chaos that resulted when various repressive forces—the Guard, the Border Militia, the Italian SS—competed with one another instead of fighting united against the subversives. It also had to deal with perennially scant food supplies, a tottering transportation system, industries and tradesmen’s shops that lacked supplies, and all the other problems that made daily life under Salò even more precarious than it had been during the final years of the Fascist regime.107 You might even say there was something horrifically impressive about men like Carnazzi, raised in Il Duce’s Italy, who remained steadfastly loyal to the cause even after the Germans arrived, when the agenda suddenly became an all-out war against the rebels and a merciless manhunt in search of Jews.
“Our dead await the supreme test of our courage Stop”: Carnazzi, telegraphing the local authorities in Aosta province to urge maximum zeal in conscripting young men born in 1923–25, sounded even more Nibelungian than the Germans.108 The reprisals for draft evasion that he ordered were harsh, but no harsher than those ordered by other Salò prefects in November and December 1943: the parents of evaders were to lose their business permits and ration cards, and they could be arrested themselves in place of the missing young men.109Carnazzi, however, seems to have been stricter in applying these penalties than other prefects. At the end of December, Mussolini himself urged Carnazzi to be less assiduous, suggesting that he “release, a few at a time and discreetly, the parents of draft evaders.”110 For the prefect of Aosta the reprisals were not merely to be threatened, they were concrete punishments.
Carnazzi was equally enthusiastic in pursuing Jews. Immediately after he was named prefect, he went to work ferreting out those Jews who had suddenly disappeared after September 8. To the authorities of Ivrea, he wrote seeking word on various Jewish employees at Olivetti. What had become of the engineer Riccardo Levi and his family, for example? They were not in Macerata, in Le Marche, where they had notified the authorities they intended to move. So where were they?111
Carnazzi was never able to solve that particular mystery. Today, we know that Riccardo Levi first took refuge in Issime, a mountain village in Valle d’Aosta, then hid his family at Torrazzo in the hills of Piedmont and went down to Turin himself to join the Resistance with the Partito d’Azione forces.112 His experience was almost happy compared to that of other Jews who hid in the same valley. The Ovazza family, as we’ve already seen, was arrested at Hotel Lyskamm and murdered at Lake Maggiore. Remo Jona, a lawyer from Turin, also took refuge at Issime, where he had spent his holidays with his wife and children from the mid-1930s; it seemed natural to hide away there, where he considered he had quite a few friends.113 The entire Jona family, however, was arrested by Italian police on December 7, 1943.114 They were sent to the Aosta prison, then to the transit camp at Fossoli, then deported to Poland on the same train as Primo Levi, Luciana Nissim, and Vanda Maestro. Like Levi, Remo Jona would be among the “saved.” But his wife, Ilka Vitale, and their two sons, twelve-year-old Ruggero and seven-year-old Raimondo, would not be. They were gassed at Auschwitz on February 26, 1944, the day of their arrival.
Copyright © 2013 by Arnoldo Mondadori Editore S.p.A
Translation Copyright © 2016 by Frederika Randall