In Europe

away, from an acquaintance, during his morning prayers. Any number of trucks carrying terrified Jewish children drove almost literally past his window.
    That morning, pressure was put on Pius XII from all sides to issue a papal ban on deporting Jews from the ‘open city’ of Rome. Remarkably enough that pressure came from German circles as well, particularly from the civil authorities. Why, for heaven's sake, did the relative peace of Rome have to be disturbed by the psychotic Jew-baiters of the SS?
    The Pope, however, in the words of the German ambassador Ernst von Weizsäcker, would not let himself be drawn into ‘any demonstrative expression against the deportation of Jews from Rome’. Five days after their deportation, almost all those families were gassed at Birkenau. Only fifteen Roman Jews came back alive.
    In 1937, his predecessor Pius XI had voiced serious criticism of the deification of the German people, in his encyclical
Met brennender Sorge
. The papal letter was read aloud in Catholic churches all over Germany, and the Nazis did not impose a single sanction. A new encyclical against racism and anti-Semitism,
Humani Generis Unitas
, was being prepared whenPius XI died in 1939. Pius XII quickly withdrew his predecessor's draft. In his view it was not the Nazis but the Bolsheviks who formed the greater threat to the Church. In fact, in his eyes, Germany constituted the vanguard in the fight against the Red Menace.
    This fervent anti-communism was also probably behind another shameful episode from the pontificate of Pius XII: the Vatican's involvement in the escape of hundreds of German and Austrian mass murderers right after the war. Dr Josef Mengele, the notorious camp physician at Auschwitz, Adolf Eichmann, the organiser of the transport of the Jews, Franz Stangl, camp commandant at Treblinka, and many others received money, shelter, false documents and an escape route to South America from Vatican prelates.
    Roma, città aperta
. Mussolini's imperial fantasies were charted on great stone tablets on the wall at the Forum Romanum. They are still there today: the Greeks, the Roman Empire, only the plaque with the little Italian Empire of 1936–43 has been removed for decency's sake. The Olympic district close to the Ponte Duca d'Aosta still glistens in all its Fascist glory, and the same goes for several bridges over the Tiber. Here, history has not been polished away.
    I move with the flow of tourists down the Via Giulia. At number 23 there is a memorial plaque for Giorgio Labo and Gianfranco Mattei. This is where they were arrested by the Germans on 1 February, 1944, then tortured for days and finally executed, but they never spoke a word. In gratitude, from their comrades, a fresh wreath has been put here very recently.
    This country was forced to drink the bitter post-war draught in silence. ‘Of course the Allies treated us harshly,’ former partisan Vittorio Foa once told me. ‘But after all, hadn't we misbehaved badly?’ After 1943 the Germans, in turn, viewed the Italians as traitors. Had Hitler not been so fond of Mussolini, he would probably have given Italy the ‘Polish treatment’. Dozens of villages were wiped out anyway – around Marzabotto, close to Bologna, more than 1,800 civilians were massacred in October 1944. Jews – Primo Levi among them – were deported by the thousand. Some 600,000 Italians ended up as German prisoners of war, an untold number of them died. The women were left to fend for themselves.
    In March 1944, Ernie Pyle described how waiting American soldiers threw crackers and chocolate from a ship's deck to a group of hungry children on the dock at Naples. One little boy, wearing a pair of huge American GI boots, drew their attention by walking around on his hands. Then a few girls came for a cautious look. The sailors whistled and threw even more crackers. A skinny old woman stood a little to one side, until a seaman threw her a whole box of crackers. It was a good throw, and the old woman made a good catch. But she barely had it in her hands before the whole crowd pounced on her. ‘The poor old woman never let go. She clung to it as though it were something human. And when the last cracker was gone she walked sort of blindly away, her head back and her eyes toward the sky, weeping with a hideous face just like that of a heartbroken child, still gripping the empty box.’

Chapter FORTY-TWO
Vichy
    AT THE ENTRANCE TO THE FRÉJUS ROAD TUNNEL STANDS A TALL