Few people know about the courage and determination of the Italians — from ordinary citizens to the highest levels of Italian dictator Benito Mussolini’s government — to save Italy’s Jews from extermination.
Walter Wolff, a German Jew, came to Milwaukee last Sunday to change that.
Speaking to about 50 people at Festa Italiana on Sunday, Wolff, who now lives in New York, recounted how luck and the “humanity of Italy’s citizens” saved him, his brother and his widowed mother from the Nazis.
He does so, he said, to give hope to young people, so that they will know that even in the worst of times, there are good people, and to help prevent a Holocaust from happening again.
Born in 1917, Wolff said he and his brother were arrested by the Germans the week of Kristallnacht in November 1938 but were released a year later on condition that his family leave Germany.
Wolff had hoped to attend a Hebrew college in Chicago, but he and his family were denied visas to the United States and turned instead to Italy, which they entered shortly before World War II began.
By June 1940, said Wolff, when Mussolini entered the war, the Wolff family joined Italy’s Jews in being sent to internment camps in the country, where families were kept together or reunited. They were treated relatively well and could “come and go as we pleased” within the surrounding town.
When Hitler’s armies invaded Italy in 1943 and the arrest of Jews was ordered, few Italians responded, said Wolff, and many risked their own lives and the lives of their families to help save Jews.
When asked why he thought Italians were willing to do so, Wolff said, “Because of their devout religious upbringing, the Italians truly believed the words of the Bible, ‘Love thy neighbor as thyself.’”
He said that during his years in Italy, many people knew who he was, but no one ever turned him in to the authorities.
He believed, he said, that many of them acted on a lesson he had learned during his own religious instruction: “God will forgive you if you don’t say your prayers on time. But He won’t forgive you for not helping someone in need.”
“A bystander who doesn’t do anything when someone is being persecuted is just as guilty as the perpetrator,” Wolff said. “If society had stopped Hitler, we wouldn’t have had World War II with the death of 55 million people, not to mention the Holocaust.”
Wolff travels frequently on the east coast to tell his story, which can be read in his book, “Bad Times, Good People” (Whittier Publications, 1999). His visit to Milwaukee was arranged by the Italian Community Center of Milwaukee and its president, Dominic Frinzi, who is also chair of the Festa Italiana steering committee.
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