Required Reading for Italian-Americans...

Sicilian Culture: News & Views

TV Drama Honors Italian Fascist Who Saved Jews
By Raffaella Malaguti

ROME (Reuters) - The story of an Italian Fascist who saved over 5,000 Jews from the Holocaust might sound like a far-fetched Hollywood plot, but it really happened and Italy is about to celebrate it in a two-episode television series.

Forgotten for four decades at home and abroad, the strange story of Giorgio Perlasca emerged only in 1987 thanks to the Hungarian Jews he saved fromdeportation disguised as a consul.

Perlasca died at 82 in 1992, just in time to receive long-overdue honors from Hungary and Israel. Ironically, Italy was the last country to honor him.

But now the televised version of Perlasca's dangerous months concealed as a Spanish diplomat in Budapest will be part of events to mark this year's Holocaust Memorial Day on January 27.

The drama was screened in parliament earlier this week and watched by members of Italy's center-right government including post-Fascist deputy prime minister Gianfranco Fini and Lower House speaker Pierferdinando Casini.

It provided food for thought in Italy, where the Fascist regime of Benito Mussolini deported thousands of Jews.

``This film...re-unites us...with the Jewish population which was badly hit in World War Two and also unites us Italians, divided during Fascism and now united again in the memory of those moments,'' Casini said.

Perlasca never found anything odd in the fact that he -- an early supporter of Fascism who fought with nationalist troops in the Spanish civil war -- risked his life to save Jews.

``I could not bear the sight of people being branded like animals. I could not bear seeing children being killed,'' Perlasca told the Italian journalist who first told his story a decade ago in a book called ``The Banality of Goodness.''

``That's all there was to it. I don't think I was a hero. At the end of the day, I had an opportunity and I seized it. We have a saying here: 'opportunities make a man a thief', well, they made something else out of me,'' he said.

``JORGE'' THE DIPLOMAT

In 1944 Budapest, no one who met the Spanish consul ``Jorge'' Perlasca had realized he was neither Spanish nor a diplomat and in reality bore the all-Italian name of Giorgio.

In fact he was a meat trader who was under the protection of the Spanish embassy when the real ambassador left the country.

Seeing his chance to help, he appointed himself consul and with the aid of embassy staff ran a protection program for Jews, organizing safe houses on territory protected by the Spanish embassy and providing food and false documents.

Described as an elegant man with perfect command of Spanish, Perlasca fooled everyone, even the Hungarian foreign minister.

When the author, Enrico Deaglio, ``discovered'' him, Perlasca did not have a phone and led a modest life in northern Italy.

Perlasca said in those days he often met famous Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg, who helped tens of thousands of Jews escape Nazi death camps by giving them Swedish passports.

But while Wallenberg's story was internationally renowned, when Perlasca returned to Italy, no one, not even his wife believed him. So he simply put his story to rest.

Some, including Deaglio, say Perlasca's tale was ignored because in a postwar Italy trying to deal with its Fascist past, forgetting was easier than remembering.

``There was a great desire to forget and not much desire to draw comparisons. If a modest man -- alone and without a solid political representation -- had managed to carry out those deeds, why then hadn't others done the same ?'' Deaglio wrote.

The television drama, called ``Perlasca,'' will be aired by state-owned network RAI on January 28 and 29.

© Copyright 1999-2002 (MCMXCIX) Cristaldi Communications Web Design, Hosting & Promotion - - February 19, 2002