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Italian Righteous among the Nations

they helped the Jews by disobeying "racial laws"

The "Righteous Among the Nations”, recognized by Yad Vashem, are over 20,000. Among them the Italian Righteous have now reached the threshold of 500 names.

Many of their stories are told in the book Good people of Italy. Non-Jews who saved Jews. 1943-1945, edited, for the Italian version, by Liliana Picciotto, historian at the Contemporary Jewish Documentation Center in Milan.

The book highlights that "the percentage of survivors in Italy was high because of the great wave of solidarity and active participation of the Italian population to the rescue actions. Many Italian opposed to the persecutions by the occupants and did many acts of generosity by saving the Jews in different ways: from the spontaneous hospitality given by farmers and ordinary people to the creation of clandestine rescue networks".

The figures listed by Liliana Picciotto for the period after 8 September 1943 are already significant: about 43 million Italians in the regions remained under the regime of the German occupation and of the Italian Social Republic, compared to 32,300 Jews trapped in same regions. Of these, about 8,000 were arrested and nearly all deported. The remaining 23,500 escaped the raids. The Italian Jews, completely assimilated to the rest of the population, did not distinguished themselves in any way and could therefore easily “camouflaged themselves". In those years they added to the number of those who, for a thousand reasons, needed help: deserters soldiers after the armistice, partisans, allied prisoners fled from internment camps.

Without the help of the Italians who lived a normal life, all these clandestine groups could have not survived: it was necessary to obtain ration cards for food, documents to move freely, shelters to hide, money for daily needs.

The help to the deprived and the opponents can be counted into the category of "civil resistance", understood primarily as "moral resistance", declined in the various forms of militant civil opposition, dissent or hostility to the occupiers, or even of humanitarian relief or attempt to escape forced labor recruitment.

The stories of the Righteous tell us the extremely precarious conditions in which the actions of concealment and rescue of the Jews took place and the tools needed to implement them; they describe the different levels of intervention of the social actors involved; they indicate the mechanisms that favor the mobilization of various forces driven by a common moral feeling and the political implications arising therefrom.

The narrative of the Righteous thus becomes a form of historical, political, social and moral in-depth analysis particularly suited to youth sensitivity, able to hit emotionally and catch the attention for educational and cognitive purposes. An exercise of educational memory of great civic thickness.

Gardens that honour Italian Righteous among the Nations

Italian Righteous among the Nations are honoured in the Gardens of Milan - Monte Stella e Yad Vashem.

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Righteous Encyclopedia - Shoah and Nazism

There are many stories about people who saved the Jews from the Nazi atrocities in WWII, many of which are still little known or even unknown.

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