Fantasmi del Cilento. Da Altavilla Silentina a Lenti un’inedita storia della Shoah ungherese

On the eve of what was one of the greatest massacres in the history of humankind – the deportation of almost half a million Hungarian Jews to the extermination camps of the General Government in Poland, in the summer of 1944 – thirty Jews from Lenti, a small town in Hungarian Western Transdanubia, came into possession of as many certificates, probably stolen from the town hall of Altavilla Silentina, in the province of Salerno. Who brought them all the way to that tiny village, close to the border of three states (Slovenia, Croatia and Austria), how and why, is probably destined to remain an enigma. A mystery that none of the thirty Jews of Lenti will ever be able to reveal, their lives having tragically come to an end before the war was over. The backdrop to the story, which unfolds along an ideal Budapest-Fiume-Campagna route, is the human and political story of a young bishop, Giuseppe Maria Palatucci, who, together with his nephew Giovanni, head of the Foreigners’ Office of the Questura of Fiume, may have been the main architect of a plan that was only partly carried out