Il rischio dei "Giusti"

The Italian „Righteous Among the Nations“, those non-Jews who saved Jewish lives during the Nazi occupation and officially recognised by the State of Israel, number over seven hundred. According to the most recent historiography, only five of them lost their lives. The essay analyses the risks run by the „Righteous“ by reconstructing the laws passed by the Italian Social Republic between October 1943 and June of the following year, and reconstructing the entire legislative apparatus and the practice of repression against any opponent of Fascism and Nazism. The text then reconstructs the repressive practices of Fascists and Nazis, which often followed neither laws nor precise rules. The central section of the text is dedicated to some examples of individuals, some of them unknown, imprisoned and deported for helping Jews, with particular attention to Fernanda Wittgens, a Milanese intellectual who set up a group to help Jews escape to Switzerland in 1944. Wittgens and her collaborators were discovered by the Fascist police and sentenced to prison. The study reaches the conclusion that there were laws against those who helped Jews, and that in any case, though the practice of persecution was very haphazard and did not follow laws and regulations, anyone assisting Jews ran a very high risk of deportation and death