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Palatucci and the normality of Good

by Gabriele Nissim, Gariwo chairman

Giovanni Palatucci

Giovanni Palatucci

Following historical research carried out in the USA, journalist Alessandra Farkas questioned the myth aroused around the figure of Giovanni Palatucci in the Corriere della Sera of 23 May. The rescue of 5,000 Jews in Fiume (now Rijeka, Croatia), in a region inhabited by less than a half that number of Jewish faithfuls, would not be credible; the 800 Jews who travelled by sea towards Palestine would have not moved upon his stimulus, but rather under the supervision of the Jewish agency, which had to pay a lot of money to Palatucci’s superiors to obtain the authorization to leave; the percentage of the Jews deported from Fiume, while Palatucci worked as a deputy police superintendent, was one of the highest all over Italy; he was arrested and then murdered not for rescuing the Jews from Fiume, but for his attempts to negotiate the independence of Fiume with the Britons.

The debate about this case is still open and we are waiting for the reply of some scholars, such as Antonio De Simone and Michele Bianco, who have recently written a biography of Palatucci coming with the preface of Cardinal Camillo Ruini, in which they state that thousands Jews were protected by Giovanni and his uncle, Bishop Giuseppe Maria Palatucci, in the internment camp of Campagna – which historians usually protest instead, as its Jewish inmates were no more than 40. 

Yet, if we look at the motivations that have led Yad Vashem to honour Palatucci with the title of Righteous among nations, the fact that the deputy superintendent of the police helped numerous Jewish families is undisputed. Among them we can mention those of Elena Aschenasy Dafner and of Salvatore and Olga Hamburger.
 They were not thousand Jews, they were nearly ten people.

This is precisely the point. The late Moshe Bejski, who ran the Righteous Department of Yad Vashem for nearly 30 years, has struggled for a sacrosanct principle: remembering any rescue deed, without searching for figure of heroic people overdoing things. Absolute goodness did not exist in his opinion. Rather, he felt the importance of documenting the ambiguity of Good in the tales of the people who had performed even small, yet significant deeds. To him it was important to popularize even just the rescue of one single life, as this is precisely what makes the difference.

Instead, it often happens that around some figures of saviours and rescuers people create some unreal myths, almost as if society needed superheroes in order to celebrate goodness. A Righteous thus becomes worth mentioning only when the number of the people he rescued is multiplied or his contradictions are veiled with silence. Maybe this is what happened also in the case of Palatucci, but the value of his deeds is not diminished, had he rescued even just one family. Quite the opposite, the recognition of normality without rhetoric is what has the most chances of offering hope to today’s people. It means that everybody can do something against Evil in his/her own span of control. And this is of great import.

Don’t miss the story of the Righteous and the memory of Good

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