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An unexpected Haven
In collaboration with ITALYITALY Magazine

At recent ceremonies in memory of the Jews who were interned in a camp in Calabria during World War II, the town of Tarsia named a street after Rabbi Riccardo Pacifici, who was part of the camp's history.

Yellow signs on the motorways in Italy signal places of special interest - this one reads "Ferramonti di Tarsia." It is no church or villa or castle but something much rarer in Italy: it is the site of a World War II concentration camp for Jews. Ferramonti is almost unique in another sense, not only in Italy but in the whole of continental Europe. It was a camp which actually became a haven for the in-ternees, a place where they could avoid the horrors of the German concentration camps.

In September 1943, units of the Fifth British Infantry Division and the Eleventh Canadian Tank Regiment of the Eighth Army liberated Ferramonti as they advanced northward through Calabria. This was the first Axis internment camp to be liberated by the Allies, and the biggest Italian one. There were 2,000 inmates, most of them Jews from Germany and central Europe. But it could hardly have been more different from the ones which were to follow.

Mussolini had passed anti-Jewish laws in 1938 and began interning foreign Jews as soon as war broke out. The first "Ferramontini" were Germans, Austrians and Czechs, most of whom had left their own countries after discriminatory laws had been passed there. The camp was built on low-lying ground near the river Crati, 30 miles north of Cosenza in Calabria, deep in Italy's toe. From the Italians' point of view of security it was a perfect setting - miles away from anywhere, no military installations, no important roads or railways, and impervious mountains all around. Interior Ministry regulations stated that camps should be placed "in salubrious settings," but this was hardly the case, as the marshy valley made malaria endemic in the 1940s. But isolation and malaria apart, conditions were far from harsh. From the beginning the Italians allowed internees to regulate the life of the camp.

Very soon there was a synagogue and school, an infirmary and a kosher butcher. School report cards were printed up: "Scuola del Campo di Concentramento / Lagerschule." Contacts with the locals flourished. Domenico Zazzaro, who was thirteen in 1940, still lives within spitting distance of the camp. He remembers, "There was a Czech who came every day to buy milk. He used to take manure as well from the cowsheds for their vegetable plots." But the contacts were not just practical and down-to-earth. Among the internees were specialist doctors whose like had never been seen before in Calabria; Hungarian surgeon Ladislao Schwarz even managed to carry out internal skull surgery. Francesco Marturano from Tarsia remembers how a school friend of his hit him in the eye, blinding him. The local GP did not know what to do and suggested that the family try Ferramonti. "I remember the hut it as if it was today - the second one on the end row on the Tarsia side - and the doctor had little glasses and a pointed beard," he adds, smiling. "I was quickly back to normal."

Culture too was exchanged. Viennese painter Michel Fingsten continued his work in what became known as the "studio-hut," and one of his canvases, a large Martyrdom of Saint Bartholomew, is today the altarpiece in a nearby church. This was not the only ecumenical touch. Obviously, there was no Jewish cemetery in Tarsia, as the Jews were expelled from southern Italy in the 16th century. So inmates who died in the camp, and there were not many, were buried in the Christian graveyard a couple of miles from the camp. It is strange to see tombs with Hebrew inscriptions among the cypresses, with very non-Calabrian names and birthplaces: "Rosa Freidmann, born in Dobropole, 24 October 1879," "Max Mannheim, born in Mosciski, 23 September 1897." That is, apart from one: "Leo Wellesz, born 2 January 1943 at Ferramonti, died 4 April 1943." Little Leo was an exception, though. Other babies born in the camp survived, and the first one was even given the name "Benito" in honor of Mussolini. Professor Benito Erlich is now a consultant in an Israeli hospital.

Most of the original internees were Jews who had had enough money and prescience to leave their native countries in time, but they were not necessarily politically active. The political complexion of the camp changed brusquely in February and March 1942 with almost five hundred new arrivals. They were the survivors of the shipwreck of the Pentcho, a weird craft with an epic story. In 1939 Alexander Citrom, a Zionist from Bratislava, managed to purchase an ancient, Glasgow-built, Naples-registered 250-ton Danube riverboat in Rumania. The Slovak Zionists had the boat converted. It was ready by January 1940, but the river was still iced up. In the meantime, they recruited the crew - a mixed bunch of Greeks, Turks and Bulgars - and then the captain, an officer from the Czarist navy. In April the Pentcho set sail upriver to pick up its passengers. When Citrom saw it arriving in Bratislava, he remembered, "Rather than a ship, it looked more like the caricature of a submarine." They had to have visas, and the only ones available were highly improbable: they were for another land-locked country on the other side of the world. And so five hundred passengers boarded the ship armed with visas for Paraguay, with the intention, obviously, of not going to South America but aiming for the aliyah bet, or illegal immigration into Palestine. By all the laws of the sea and the river, natural and manmade, the Pentcho should never have left Bratislava, but it did. First the Russian skipper was dragged off with a morphine overdose, then the Rumanians kept the boat from entering the country and then, with no fuel, the Pentcho drifted downstream, with Bulgarians and Rumanians taking potshots at her to keep her from mooring. Despite these hazards, they reached the Danube delta, and a vessel that was unsafe on a river took to the high seas at the beginning of autumn. Their luck held out. They reached Istanbul and the Piraeus and then crossed the Aegean, where luck finally gave out. A boiler blew up and the passengers of the Pentcho found themselves shipwrecked on the Italian Dodecanese Islands, between Crete and Asia Minor, in October 1941.

Most of them were interned at Ferramonti and, as Cambridge historian Jonathan Steinberg put it, "turned Ferramonti into the largest kibbutz on the European continent." In time, two other synagogues were added to cope with religious differences; there were three levels of schooling (with foreign languages taught from the elementary level, a piece of progress which only reached other Calabrian schools in the 1990s), and a library with thousands of volumes. There were debates and plays, football matches, chess tournaments and literary competitions. One German Jew told Lord Rennel of the Allied Control Commission immediately after liberation, "The Italians could not be cruel, because even if they tried they would be so inefficient that we could get round it." Right from the beginning, regulations were relaxed; there were supposed to be three roll calls a day. Very soon they were reduced to two, then one and then normally every two days‹the unpronounceable foreign names were more than the Carabinieri could cope with. In March 1942, the camp commandant was explicit in his policy when he told a visitor, "The internees can do what they want as long as appearances are kept up and I don't get into trouble with the Ministry." In practice, Ferramonti turned out to be the salvation of the Jews interned there. They spent up to three years there (while sharing the sufferings of the general population, especially cold, malaria and insufficient food). But they were saved from deportation to Germany. It was, given the circumstances in the rest of Europe, in some respects an idyll. Many Ferramontini stayed in Italy after the war. One even remained in Cosenza, where he founded the town's only publishing house. Others stayed in Italy in Rome or Milan, and the Pentcho people not surprisingly went to Palestine even before the war ended. Almost without exception they have very positive memories of Ferramonti. The Ferramonti Foundation was started in the 1980s by Calabrian pediatrician Spartaco Capogreco. Twenty years ago or so, Capogreco, who is neither Jewish nor even from Cosenza, "discovered" Ferramonti and was shocked that it was not part of the local memory. Since then he has written a book about Ferramonti, started the foundation and worked indefatigably to put Ferramonti on the map, as part of Italy's history and as an important positive episode in the Shoah. One of his successes was to persuade the Ministry of Transport to put Ferramonti literally on the map by giving it a yellow motorway sign. Last year he finally succeeded in having the site legally protected by the Ministry of Culture, though it was too late to prevent the destruction of one of the last remaining huts.

ItalyItaly Magazine
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