The History and Memory of the Holocaust in Italy: Fossoli Di Carpi, 1942 - 1952

The buoyancy and longevity of the “brava gente” ("good folk") myth in popular Holocaust memory has obscured Italian participation or, at best, relegated it to an abstruse footnote in the immense chronicle of the Judeocide. Instead, Italian heroism is often viewed as a beacon of light in a dark history. We have only to look to Primo Levi’s poetic reflection of Fossoli di Carpi (an deportation camp for Italian Jews during the Holocaust) to see the fault in such formulations. Entitled “Sunset at Fossoli,” Levi reflects: “I know what it means not to return./ Through barbed wire I have seen/ the sun go down and die”. For nearly every Jew who passed through it, Fossoli was an antechamber of death. And Italians, not Germans, erected the barbed wire fences that surrounded the Italian-built camp and then they eventually drove Levi to the train that delivered him to Auschwitz.

           This study of a camp, from its origins to its postwar functions, exposes not only the pattern of silence that facilitated mass murder, but also the national and international political motivations for that silence. Indeed, Italy’s wartime past is far from a single-note narration of benevolence. This emerges clearly as we scrutinize a decade of uses of Fossoli.