My Father’s Italian Garden

My father prized his little crop of tomatoes and green peppers grown in the short summers of our modest backyard garden in Toronto, a memento mori from an earlier time in his life when he learned to grow them in an Italian refugee camp in southern Italy.  It was there that up to 4000 Jewish refugees from Europe were harboured and protected from the dictates of Mussolini and the invading Germans until their liberation by the British Army in 1943.

My father’s Italian sojourn would be the unexpected result of an escape begun three years earlier in Bratislava where he, Stephan (‘Pishta’) Kohn, boarded the ‘Pentcho’, organised by Betar as the last escape boat to Mandate Palestine. The story of how this refitted old paddle steamer with its 400 passengers, later increased to 500, sailed down the Danube to the Black Sea and out through the Dardanelles to the Aegean has been told in a detailed account by the British journalist John Bierman in the book Odyssey: The Last Great Escape from Nazi Dominated Europe (1984).

 The perilous five-month journey through enemy territory looked to be a gamble won until the Pentcho’s boiler exploded and it ran aground on Kamilla Nissi a rocky island in the Aegean. Everyone clambered to safety before the boat sank. It was Yom Kippur and two cantors held services. British planes sighted them but offered no help.  Five men in a small boat seeking help rowed for days to a convoy of British ships only to be taken to Egypt. The Italians flew overhead and rescued the castaways, bringing them to the isle of Rhodes, occupied by Italy, and a year later transferring them to an internment camp in Ferramonti de Tarsia in southern Italy.

My father’s Ferramonti memories were told to me with a certain fondness that only now I fully understand in the context of Italy’s remarkable rescue efforts, which, despite sending more than 8,500 Jews to Auschwitz-Birkeneau, resulted in 40,000 of its Jews saved.  And this does not account for the thousands of Jews of Croatia, Bosnia and Serbia who also were saved due to the Yugoslav Partisans’ co-operation with the Italian people and their army, who provided safe-haven in their Dalmatian territories, such as Split, Sibinek, Trogir, Mostar, and the islands of Brac, Hvar, Korchula and Rab, an extraordinary and complex history investigated by Esther Gitman in When Courage Prevailed: the Rescue and Survival of Jews in the Independent State of Croatia 1941-1945, published 2011.

These places, five of which I have just visited, were often temporary refuges during a time of unpredictable developments, such as, when the Jews of Mostar in Boznia Herzegovina, under Italian rule, lived relatively safely because the Chief of Staff refused to obey Nazi directives to deport Jews which he believed violated Italian principles of equality.  Consequently, many Jews (as well as Partisans) fled there from areas under the control of the Ustashe (Croatian collaborators with the Nazis), but when it became increasingly dangerous over a thousand Jews were transferred to the safer island of Rab, where they were dispersed among the peasant population. After Italy’s capitulation to the Allies in September 1943, and the Wehrmacht’s claim of Italy’s former territories including Rab, a supreme struggle to save the Jewish refugees ensued, involving the Italians, the Croatian partisans, Jewish organisations such as the World Jewish Congress, and the American government. The latter was reluctant while Britain refused to help in any way, including to allow them entry to Mandate Palestine.

Some things don’t change as Britain’s current sanctioning of Israel demonstrates, its recognition of the non-existent state of Palestine and its lax response to the antisemitic actions that have taken the lives and the peace of mind of many British Jews.  But so too does the Italians’ relationship to Jews continue today, often in marked contrast to their ambivalent government which is prepared to halt its defence cooperation agreement with Israel but has so far not jumped on the recognition of Palestine bandwagon.

Again and again, I experienced how the Italian people today are keen to show their affection and appreciation for the Jews who were an indelible part of their nation’s history.

In Puglia’s southern town of Lecce, a Jewish museum was established in 2016 by two non-Jewish families who were curious about the street names that indicated Jews lived adjacent to the Cathedral, not in a confined ghetto but in an open ‘Giudecca.’  Located on the remains of a medieval synagogue, the museum’s young enthusiastic guide, Michaela, took us through its holdings, which included a moving film about local Jews and the Holocaust, showed us its mikvaot and, most prized of all, an indentation for a mezuzah that was carbon dated back to medieval times. The museum is just one of the many towns in Puglia with Jewish history going back centuries.

At the other end of Italy, in Trieste, where Jews were prominent in the commercial and cultural life of that city during the reign of the Hapsburgs, a Museum of Trieste Literature celebrates its most beloved authors.  Two dominate the space and they are Jewish, the poet Umberto Saba (aka Umberto Poli) and Italo Svevo (aka Aron Ettore Schmitz) who became a friend of James Joyce when he lived there for 16 years. It is believed Joyce modelled the character of Bloom in Ulysses on Svevo, who died in 1928.

Ten years later, Mussolini declared the racial laws in Trieste’s Piazza Unita d’Italia, after which about half of Trieste’s 5000 Jews left, including Saba who fled to Paris and then to Rome and Florence where he was protected by fellow Italian writers. But as the Carlo and Vera Wagner Jewish Museum of Trieste attests, about 1,200 Jews were rounded up and sent to Auschwitz. The Wagners fled and returned to Trieste after the war, like Sabo, who reclaimed his famed antiquarian bookshop. Today about 700 Jews live in Trieste, and both the Museum and the rose-windowed Great Synagogue, built in 1912, which holds daily services, were guarded by armed soldiers before and during October 7^th.

Of all the Italian Jewish museums, it is the one with the most recent history that has the greatest relevance to me. Ferramonti de Tarsia is also the most well documented of Italy’s many wartime internment camps, because it was where thousands of Jews were sent to safety when other camps proved unsafe.  When I visited in 2018, a local Italian volunteer proudly took me through the Museum replete with a large collection of photographs in which I searched for my father. Only one image of a man with a cap looked like him in a photo of men hoeing a patch of ground. But then one day, while idly putting ‘Pentcho’ into a search engine, I was overjoyed to see a photo of my father with his familiar cap, tending his beloved vegetable patch in Ferramonti.  He was looking straight up at me.

Dr Rachael Kohn AO, FRNS is a broadcaster and author.