It was a Saturday — Shabbat — in October 1943. The Nazis had been occupying Rome for a month. An hour before sunrise, they surrounded the Jewish ghetto and began la razzia. The roundup.
Within a few hours, more than a thousand Italian Jews, mostly women and children, had been herded together a few blocks from the walls of Vatican City. As one Nazi ambassador later put it, the Jews were loaded into trucks and taken away “under [the pope’s] very windows.”
Whether that pope witnessed the deportation or not, he said nothing. Only 16 of those Jews would survive.
