Society / Memoria al Futuro - Remembrance Day In NYC
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Tutti da Stella
(January 26, 2009)
Stella Levi meets her sisters and nephews in Los Angeles after surviving the concentration camp (1948)
Four students of the "Scuola d'Italia Guglielmo Marconi" meet Stella Levi, one of the Italian deportees from Rhodes who survived the Nazi concentration camps.
We accompanied four students and their principal, Anna Fiore, from the Guglielmo Marconi School of Italy to meet Stella Levi, one of the Italian deportees from Rhodes who survived the Nazi concentration camps. What these students made at the Primo Levi Center,
where they also met with Executive Director Natalia Indrimi, is a real interview.
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As Italians living abroad, in a multicultural metropolis such as New York, we were extremely interested in visiting such an intercultural institution where Jewish culture and our culture meet. Here at the Primo Levi Center we were lucky enough to meet Stella Levi, a member of the board and Holocaust survivor.
Stella Levi was born in Rhodes, at the time occupied by Italians. When her parents had the opportunity to choose between Italian and Turkish citizenship, they chose the former. Later on, this choice gave her the possibility to embrace Italian culture and literature. Rhodes, an island off the coasts of Turkey, was a merging point between western and eastern culture. After having explained the mission of the Primo Levi Center, she allowed us to ask her a few questions.
Stella Levi’s story was both upsetting and captivating. During her life, she was influenced by countless cultures that she preserves together with her painful and unbelievable experiences. Interviewing her inspired extraordinary emotions within us: despite the pain the memories gave her, Stella Levi handed them down to us with vigor while sharing a piece of history. Keeping these memories alive with the new generation is necessary if we want young people to commit themselves to preventing similar events in the future, in the name of justice and the protection of human rights.
Mrs. Levi, could you give us an overview of your life?“The best years of my life were definitely the years in which I went to school in Rhodes, a French-Israeli school which became an Italian school. In 1938 we couldn’t go to the Italian schools because of the new racial laws, but we were able to find three professors who were willing to privately tutor me and four other boys, but that didn’t last very long. We stayed in Rhodes until 1944, and in 1943 the King of Italy and General Badoglio surrendered. The Italians on the island, however, stood their ground and fought against the Nazis for three days, until the Governor of Rhodes gave up the island for fear of German brutality if the island were to fall, and every Italian was taken as a prisoner.
What happened in 1944?
“In July 1944, the Nazis took us by boat to Pireo, the port of Athens. From Athens, I traveled for at least 14 days while standing for the entire time. Seventy or eighty of us were packed in each cattle car. Fortunately, I was next to a window, from where I could see a guard wearing an Italian uniform. I asked him: ‘Are you Italian?’ and he answered: ‘Yes, Miss. Stay next to the window; I’ll bring you a loaf of bread.’ It was my destiny to find generous, giving Italians along the way. They were always kind, altruistic. The only other thing we had on the train was a barrel of water, which finished almost immediately. I was 19 when this happened.
Was your family with you?
“Yes, of course, the whole Jewish community was there; there were about 1,700 of us.
For how long were you imprisoned in the camps?
“I was in Auschwitz for two months. We arrived there on August 16. In October 1944, they took us to Landsberg, a camp near Dachau, because the Russians were coming. In Auschwitz, they killed parents and old people as soon as we got there. We had no idea what was happening. We thought: ‘They will send us to work, but the families will remain together and the parents will stay at home.’ Afterwards some French women who were also prisoners at the camp told us about the showers and the ovens. Auschwitz was an extremely dreary place. Even on sunny days everything was grey, even the sky. You felt like you were trapped in a black hole.
How did you get to Dachau?
“On foot. When they say that people didn’t know what was going on, they are lying. They saw us thousands of times, in the trains and in the stations. In Dachau I worked in the kitchens for a bit, and it was really a blessing because I could eat whatever I wanted. I always put something under my armpits, or I would stuff my pants with potatoes.
When were you freed?
“I was released on May 1, 1945. The Americans were afraid to approach us; we must have looked terrible. At first, they threw candies and chewing gum over the fences. Then they freed us and asked us where we wanted to go: ‘To Italy,’ we said.
How did you end up coming here to New York?
“I came to the United States because my uncles lived in Los Angeles. I was almost ready to go back to Italy, when I met someone who told me: ‘Why do you want to go back to Italy? The country is destroyed; there is nothing left there.’ This convinced me to remain in New York.
In your opinion, what should be done after so many years to remember?
“It’s important to pass on memories of the past to new generations. Genocide should never happen again. One life is worth as much as the whole of humanity: if you kill one person, you kill the whole of humanity; if you kill a culture, you kill the whole of humanity. Also, modern society has to be controlled and protected from even the smallest errors, to prevent at all costs that something like this will ever happen again.
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