I thought you might find this interesting, bearing as it does on earlier topics:
holocaust-heroes.com
The Catholic church played a major role in rescuing refugees in Italy, says Mordecai Paldiel, research chief of Yad Vashem. "Much of the credit for the rescue of Italy?s 45,000 Jews is due to the clergy," he says.
MAJOR CREDIT FOR THE RESCUE OF ITALY'S JEWS
GOES TO CATHOLIC CLERGY, YAD VASHEM SAYS
Although the Vatican was justifiably criticized for its deafening silence during the Nazi deportation of Jews, a loud chorus of refugee assistance resonated in its monasteries, convents and churches. A large number of priests, monks and nuns sheltered and fed desperate Jewish men, women and children, a chapter in the Holocaust that too many historians have over-looked or minimized.
In Italy, the clergy played a major role in rescue activity, according to Mordecai Paldiel, research chief of Israel?s Yad Vashem, which uses stringent standards to honor Holocaust heroes. Paldiel, who himself was hidden as a child by Father Simon Gallay of France, says that much of the credit for the rescue of most of Italy?s 45,000 Jews is due to the clergy.
"There can be little doubt that the rescue of 85 percent of Italy?s Jews," he says, "can be safely attributed to the massive support extended to fleeing Jews by the overwhelming majority of the Catholic clergy (without in most cases even waiting for clearance by their superiors) as well as of persons from all walks of life, even of officials and militiamen within the more intensely Fascist Salo regime."
These are powerful words of recognition and support from an authority with impeccable credentials, and a revelation that should have inspired a mini-series, if not a mega-series, on TV. And is even worthy of a major motion picture by Hollywood. But so far their response has been as deafening as Vatican?s reported silence.
Despite the Vatican?s official aloofness from the Holocaust question, many were surprised to learn after the war that 450 Jews were hidden in its vast enclaves during the Nazi occupation. And hundreds of priests and bishops throughout the Italian peninsula put their lives in jeopardy to shelter, feed and clothe the countless refugees.
One of the earliest organized rescue efforts unfolded in Assisi, the birthplace of St. Francis, the founder of the Franciscan order. Shortly after the Nazis occupied Italy, Padre Ruffino Niccacci of the Damiano monastery received an unusual assignment from his bishop: Find homes and hiding places for more than 300 Jews who just arrived from Trieste.
Padre Niccacci, a peasant turned priest, managed to have many of the refugees sheltered in buildings on the monastery grounds and dressed them as monks and nuns to hide their true identities during frequent Nazi searches. Others were placed in parishioners? homes and blended into the community. He also provided them with false credentials to speed their journey to other monasteries and convents, where it been reported the nuns prepared kosher meals for their Jewish guests. Not a single refugee was captured while staying at Assisi.
Maria Benedetto (known as Father Marie Benoit when he was in Marseilles) transformed his monastery in Rome into a way station and rescue center to aid hundreds of Jewish and anti-Nazi refugees. When Delasem (Delegazione Assistenza Emigranti Ebrei), the highly-efficient Jewish service agency, had to go underground during the Nazi occupation, it carried out operations from Father Benedetto?s monastery. Here, Delasem stored its archives, held meetings, processed refugees and provided hiding places. In just 12 months, the number of refugees receiving shelter and meals at the monastery swelled from a few hundred to over 4,000.
In the strategically located city of Turin, Monsignor Vincenzo Barale conducted rescue activity for Jews streaming into Italy from France. The refugees received food and money and were assisted by priests from surrounding villages. However, one refugee who had received aid, informed on him. Monsignor Barale was arrested and thrown into jail.
High level Catholic officials as well as ordinary clerics extended a helping hand. Monsignor Quadraroli, a secretary at the Vatican, issued countless false IDs to refugees and sent them to the convent on Via Cicerone to be fed and sheltered. And in northern Italy, Abraham Cohen, on the run from the Nazis, recalled the assistance he received from unknown clerics: "The Catholic Church helped me a lot. They found a place for me to stay and a priest went with me from Ivrea to Azeglio on a bicycle. . . There we found another priest who arranged a place for me to hide."
Susan Zuccotti, Holocaust historian, gives a very balanced view in assessing the overall picture: "When the Germans finally retreated from Rome after nine months of occupation, at least 1,700 Jews arrested in Rome had been deported. Over 10,000 had survived. Every survivor owed his life to one, and usually to several, heroic non-Jewish supporters. But except for those caught in that first, unexpected roundup in October, most deportees could also trace their tragedy to non-Jews who had, in the last analysis, failed to provide support."
However, there?s no denying that the network of Catholic institutions played a significant role in providing asylum for Jewish refugees.
"In no other occupied Catholic country," says Paldiel of Yad Vashem, "were monasteries, convents, shrines, and religious houses opened to the fleeing Jews, and their needs attended to, without any overt intention to steer them away from their ancient faith, solely to abide by the preeminent religious command of the sanctity of life. Through this, they epitomized the best and most elevated form of religious faith and human fidelity."
Church groups spoke with a louder voice in France and turned the nation?s monasteries and convents into clandestine factories for turning out false ID documents, birth certificates, baptism and marriage certificates.
C H U R C H M O R E V O C I F E R O U S I N F R A N C E
pproximately 80,000 Jews in France ? about 25 percent of its
pre-war population of 330,000 ? were murdered in Nazi death camps, executed in French prisons, or died from starvation, exhaustion and disease in French internment camps. However, two thirds of the Jews survived, primarily due to the aid given by French men and women from all segments of society.
Other reasons cited for keeping the death figure relatively "low" (compared with Poland and Holland), was a smaller German military presence, a vague goodwill by French officials and a more vociferous church.
When the Vichy regime took over in June 1940, many Catholic prelates embraced the new administration because its Premier, Marshal Petain, spoke in theological terms of repentance and expiation of sin. And they were quiet as a church mouse when Vichy issued its anti-Jewish decrees four months later.
But their indifference took a dramatic turn in the summer of 1942, when Jules-Gerard Saliege, archbishop of Toulouse, lashed out at Vichy?s anti-Jewish measures. In his now famous pastoral letter, the archbishop said: "There is a Christian morality, there is a human morality that imposes duties and recognizes rights. . . Why does the right of sanctuary no longer exist in our churches? . . . The Jews are real men and women. . . They are our brothers, like so many others."
The letter galvanized the faithful and helped to influence and shape public opinion and action. Sheltering refugees and children in monasteries and convents became a church industry. Besides feeding and clothing the Jews, the church institutions became clandestine factories turning out identification documents, certificates of birth, baptism and marriage to show "Aryan" lineage, ration books and even driver?s licenses.
One of the highly-organized rescue networks was operated by Father Marie-Benoit, a Capuchin monk in Marseille, who coordinated the refugee activity with frontier smugglers, guides and rescue groups, and is credited with saving thousands of Jewish children.
In the mountain town of Ville-la-Grand near the Swiss border, the fathers of Ecole St. Francois, a Catholic seminary, shepherded hundreds of refugees safely around German guards and into Switzerland. One of the teachers, Father Louis Favre, would place the refugee children in his classroom and disguise them as pupils, with the adults posing as visiting parents. But Father Favre was arrested by the Gestapo, tortured and shot in July 1944.
The widespread rescue activity by Catholic institutions drew this strong accusation from Jacques Marcy, a pro-Nazi journalist: "Every Catholic family shelters a Jew. . . Priests help them across the Swiss frontier. . . Jewish children have been concealed in Catholic schools; the civilian Catholic officials receive intelligence of a scheduled deportation of Jews, advise a great number of refugee Jews about, and the result is that about 50 percent of the undesirables escape."
Paulette Fink, originally from Paris and an active member of the French underground that saved Jewish refugees from Poland, Hungary and Romania, recalled the reception and aid of the Frenchmen: "We were passing the children from one to the other, a chain with many links ? priests and nuns, monasteries and convents, Catholic schools, some on farms to work as farmhands with no pay. The Catholics were fabulous, the Protestants too."
The experience of Denise Caraco provides keen insight into the workings and psychology of rescue operations. The daughter of Jewish parents from Marseille, the university student joined Eclaireurs Israelites de France (Jewish Boy Scouts of France). Her task was to search the surrounding countryside and find families willing to take and hide a refugee child. At first, she placed the children with French Jewish families. "But," she explained, "not all French Jewish families wanted to be bothered. Far from it."
She later met Father Marie Benoit and Pastor Jean S. Lemaire, both of whom provided Jewish rescuers with personal letters of introduction that facilitated movement from one hiding place to another. She also worked with scores of assistants, both Jewish and non-Jewish who supplied and delivered food to the sheltered refugees.
Summing up her first-hand experience in the field, Caraco offered a
penetrating analysis of rescue work:
"No matter how effective Jewish rescue organizations were in helping people escape the camps, in finding hiding places, in supplying food and false papers and visiting people in hiding, and in obtaining funds, especially from the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee in the United States, they could never (italics are hers) have worked without the help from thousands of non-Jews. Where else could we have hidden our people?"
A number of Protestant and Catholic clergy protested Hitler's racial decrees and the rising tide of intolerance in Nazi Germany, but paid the price. Too many Germans, seduced by a new sense of nationalism, were unmoved by the arrest of pastors and priests who spoke out. It was this moral apathy that fueled Hitler's war plans for the conquest of Europe.
The name of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, one of the few clergymen who spoke out against Hitler and assisted in the rescue of 14 Jews, is still missing from Yad Vashem's honor roll of heroes. Eberhard Bethge, German author who has made a life-time study of the pastor's risk-taking efforts, tells why Bonhoeffer deserves to be recognized as a "Righteous Gentile."
There was "room at the inn" at the hundreds of convents, monasteries and other church institutions throughout occupied Europe for refugees escaping Nazi terror. For the first time, this segment reveals the magnitude of the large-scale rescue activity by the church. Just in Rome alone, more than 150 church institutions provided shelter for 4,300 Jewish refugees.
Remote villages in Europe attracted refugees who found safety and support in their isolated settings. The close-knit villages also offered a shield of silence and protection. Le Chambon, a Protestant village in central France, provided a safe haven for more than 5,000 Jewish refugees, many of them children, escaping Nazi terror.
The Quakers, only one of two churches which extended help to Jewish refugees in distress as a formal church policy, won a Nobel Prize for their humanitarian efforts during World War II.
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