Scholars Reconsidering Italy’s Treatment of Jews in the Nazi Era
Italians took everything from Ursula Korn Selig’s family during World War II, including a hotel the family owned on the Riviera and the money they carried after fleeing Germany’s persecution of Jews in 1938.
Italians also saved her family from almost certain death in Nazi concentration camps, Mrs. Selig said, hiding them in a succession of secret shelters in Italy between 1938 and 1944, often at the risk of the Italians’ own lives.
The two faces Italy displayed toward Jewish citizens and refugees just before and during World War II have become the focus of recent historical research that both undermines that country’s wartime image as a nation of benign captors, and rekindles memories of heroic Italian individuals.
Mrs. Selig, 85, who has lived in Manhattan since 1950, offered her double-edged testimony after a panel discussion on the new scholarship at the Museum of Jewish Heritage, in Battery Park City, on Wednesday evening — days before Jews commemorate Kristallnacht, the night of deadly attacks by German Nazis in November 1938....
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Italians also saved her family from almost certain death in Nazi concentration camps, Mrs. Selig said, hiding them in a succession of secret shelters in Italy between 1938 and 1944, often at the risk of the Italians’ own lives.
The two faces Italy displayed toward Jewish citizens and refugees just before and during World War II have become the focus of recent historical research that both undermines that country’s wartime image as a nation of benign captors, and rekindles memories of heroic Italian individuals.
Mrs. Selig, 85, who has lived in Manhattan since 1950, offered her double-edged testimony after a panel discussion on the new scholarship at the Museum of Jewish Heritage, in Battery Park City, on Wednesday evening — days before Jews commemorate Kristallnacht, the night of deadly attacks by German Nazis in November 1938....