An unknown deadly disease, a community persecuted by a ruthless invader and some brave doctors and religious.
The above looks like the list of ingredients from a Hollywood movie, but they are part of a not-so-well-known episode of World War II and eight decades will be commemorated this year.
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It all happened in Rome at the end of 1943, when Nazi Germany troops seized the Italian capital after the overthrow of their allythe fascist Benito Mussolini, at the hands of a group of soldiers, businessmen and politicians.
After seizing the “eternal city”, Adolf Hitler’s soldiers began a hunt against the Jewish community of the city, which until then had been saved from the brutal persecution and annihilation registered in other parts of Europe.
To avoid being deported to the feared concentration camps, from which information had begun to arrivemany Jews took refuge with neighbors, but above all in churches, monasteries, convents and even in hospitals administered by the Catholic Church.
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In one of those health centers, three doctors welcomed dozens of people and diagnosed them with a terrible and deadly disease, of which no one had ever heard of. AND It could not be different, because the disease never existed.
An original and dangerous remedy
He October 16, 1943 the Italian capital woke up with a start. German soldiers poured into the Jewish ghetto, just three kilometers away from the Vatican; and they began to seize men, women, and children, capturing more than a thousand.
Some lucky ones managed to escape and arrived at the San Juan Calibita hospital, known to the Romans as Fatebenefratelli (Do good brother, in Spanish).
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The center, 437 years old and belonging to the Holy See, It is located on a small island in the middle of the Tiber River. and from it he sees the Great Synagogue of the Italian capital and what was the Jewish ghetto.
The Nazis soon arrived at the hospital to continue their hunt. The then director of the hospital, Giovanni Borromeo, a fervent Catholic with good contacts in the Holy See, received them and offered to show the compound to the uniformed.
However, upon reaching a room, he warned them that there were people isolated there for presenting the symptoms of a strange and dangerous disease that they were just investigating.
Borromeo told the Germans that it was K syndromea disease he described as highly contagious, affecting the neurological system and leading to death.
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“We call it K after Commander (Albert) Kesselring (responsible for the occupation of Italy): the nazis thought it was cancer or tuberculosis and ran away like rabbits“, the doctor Vittorio Sacerdoti told the BBC in 2004.
Sacerdoti was, together with Borromeo and the Italian doctor and anti-fascist Adriano Ossicini, the intellectual author of the deception that allowed dozens of Jews to be saved from certain death.
This doctor, who was Jewish by origin, was hired by Borromeo to work in the Roman hospitaldespite the fact that the racial laws approved by Mussolini in the late 1930s outlawed this.
There are also versions that ensure that the K with which the fictitious disease was baptized was also for Herbert Kappler, head of the feared SS in Rome, although other experts offer different explanations.
“to sickness They baptized it K syndrome to make an approximation to Koch’s disease (tuberculosis) that was causing a lot of problems for Hitler’s troops in Hungary and Poland at that time,” Spanish writer and priest Jesús Sánchez Adalid explained to BBC Mundo.
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Earlier this month the author published the novel “A light in the night of Rome”, a love story between a wealthy young woman and a Jewish boy, which takes place precisely during these historical events.
a great performance
Borromeo, Sacerdoti and Ossicini launched a great show. Thus they began to fabricate the medical records of the Jews who had supposedly contracted the mysterious disease, an operation that required the collaboration of many people inside and outside the center.
“There was a very large team that involved religious, including the superior of the order (San Juan de Dios) who administered the hospital“added Sánchez Adalid.
Other historical and journalistic investigations indicate that Monsignor Giovanni Battista Monti, the future Pope Paul VI and who at the time held a high position in the Vatican Secretariat of State, was aware of what was happening in the hospital and supported him. The then prelate signed several documents that facilitated Borromeo’s activities.
and although the version of the supposed lethal disease kept the Nazis at baythe doctors did not lower their guard and instructed the Jews on what to do in case they returned.
“The doctor had told us that if the Germans came we had to cough with all our might and give the impression that we were terminally ill“, Gabrielle Soninno, who was barely four years old when she was “admitted” to the Catholic hospital, declared on German public television in 2019.
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And the Nazis bought that story? “The Germans sent doctors to the hospital to corroborate the version of the disease, but they were satisfied with the explanations of the Italian doctors. Perhaps the fear of getting infected or the simple fact of not wanting to waste time in a hospital full of patients made them fall into deceit,” explained Sánchez Adalid.
“If the German doctors had examined the alleged patients, they would have discovered the liebut they did not do it”, finished off.
In May 1944, the Nazi troops returned to the hospital and inspected it, but when they passed the room where the Jews were isolated and heard them cough, they passed by.
A a month later the allied forces liberated Rome and the supposed patients remaining in the hospital were discharged.
the great mystery
The events that occurred in the Roman hospital have been corroborated by historians and different authorities.
Thus, Yad Vashem, Israel’s holocaust commemoration center, awarded Borromeo in 2004 the distinction, post-mortem, of “righteous among the nations”, an honor reserved for those people who saved or helped save Jewish lives during World War II.
How many lives did Syndrome K take from the Nazis? That remains unknown.
“We do not know the exact number of people saved in the hospital. We have not been able to get it, because the hospital was an escape bridge,” explained Sánchez Adalid, who spent two years researching the center’s archives, the Vatican, the Shoa Foundation and Yad Vashem itself to write his novel.
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“People who came to Fatebenefratelli, supposedly sick, were given false documentation so they could go to Switzerland or other countries. At one point there were 75 children,” said the novelist and religious.
Sánchez Adalid revealed that some of the “patients” ended up emigrating to Latin America after the war endedalthough he refused to give information about them, claiming that they wish to remain anonymous.
The hospital was just one of the places with which the Catholic Church saved Jews from extermination in Europe.
“The Church saved 4,480 Jews that we know of in this hospital, in churches, monasteries and convents,” said Sánchez Adalid.
“I have been told that when the Gestapo arrived in Rome they were surprised to see that in some convents there were up to 70 nuns, many of them were not nuns, but Jews in disguise, of course. The nuns invented crazy explanations to distract the Nazissuch as the fact that Rome is the capital of Catholicism, obviously it is where there are more nuns”, he pointed out.
Not just a shelter
The protection that the fictitious disease offered allowed the hospital to not only serve as a refuge for Jews.
“Thanks to the fear that the Nazis seized, the hospital was an espionage center, a communications base and place of meetings of the Italian resistance”, narrated Sánchez Adalid.
In the Fatebenefratelli, the so-called Victoria radio operated, a communications network operated by American soldiers of Italian descent that transmitted to the allies where the Nazi barracks and units were in Rome so that they could be bombed.
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The writer and religious assured that he did not seek to write “A light in the night of Rome” for the 80th anniversary of the events that occurred in the Roman hospitalbut the story was offered to him by the authorities of the center.
However, Sánchez Adalid admitted that his research allowed him to confirm that “in the worst moments in human history is when the best of the human being comes out and sprouts.”
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BBC-NEWS-SRC: https://www.bbc.com/mundo/noticias-internacional-64988428, IMPORTING DATE: 2023-03-26 12:40:06
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