Italy: Pasta and Amnesia, Served al Dente
Yesterday: Italians blocked trains for Gaza.
Yesterday’s yesterday: Italians kept trains running to Auschwitz.
It’s a shame, really. There is so much to love about Italy: the beauty, the food, the art, the warmth of its people (and I have a very special Italian I love very much who joined our family). But then I see the streets flooded with protesters, rails shut down yesterday in the name of “genocide,” and I can’t ignore the hypocrisy.
Less than a century ago, those same Italian rails didn’t stop. They carried Jews to Auschwitz, packed into cattle cars, with plenty of help from ordinary Italians. Neighbors who denounced neighbors. Police who rounded them up. Drivers and guards who made sure the trains arrived on time.
Out of 46,000 Jews in Italy, about 30,000 managed to flee or survive — some escaping across the Alps into Switzerland, others finding refuge in Bulgaria or Greece, and many surviving in hiding inside Italy itself. But for the 16,000 who couldn’t escape, the fate was grim: over 40% were murdered. Six thousand eight hundred Italian Jews, exterminated with local complicity.
Simon Levis Sullam’s book The Italian Executioners lays it bare: Italians weren’t “good bystanders.” They were participants.
Now the grandchildren shout “genocide” over Gaza. But this is war, not genocide. And the war is against an enemy no less evil than the NZS, an enemy that butchered babies, burned families alive, and filmed its massacres with pride.
So yes, protest if you must.
But know your own history before you lecture the world about genocide. Yesterday’s protesters stopped trains in solidarity. Their grandfathers kept them running, straight to the gas chambers.
Never again begins with honesty.
Out of 16,000 Jews who couldn’t flee, over 40% were murdered WITH Italian help.
Genocide isn’t a slogan. It’s your history.
