Days of Memory: Listening to Jewish Italians who lived through Fascism and the Holocaust

It takes victims, blood, and years to rid a country of tyranny.

Those are words of a Jewish Italian woman who lived during Fascism and the Holocaust.

Italian Fascism was thuggish and promised order during the chaotic post World War I period. But in its rise, it did not signal what it eventually would aim to destroy, including the lives and livelihoods of Jews. Early on, Italian Fascism was not explicitly anti-Semitic. But 11 years after Mussolini cemented his dictatorship, he began to dismantle the professional and personal lives of Jews in Italy. Then, during the German occupation, in 1943, these Italians experienced the threat of deportation and genocide.

Judith Monachina listened to individual stories, often in the homes of those she interviewed. She also met historians and others dedicated to meticulously documenting and communicating this history. Her journey through this project took years to trace, with one Fulbright period to conduct intensive research and live in the place of memory. Now, the individual accounts in Days of Memory bear witness to how people coped with the collapse of civil society, carried on with their lives as well as they could, and made life-or-death decisions. These stories show us their resilience.