Italiani Imperfetti. Storie ritrovate di una famiglia di ebrei napoletani

Luciana Pacifici was just eight months old when, on 30 January 1944, together with 604 other people, she was swallowed up by a convoy of ten cattle wagons travelling from Milan to the slaughterhouse of Auschwitz. With her were also her little cousin Paolo Procaccia, four months older, her parents (Loris and Elda, aged 33 and 24), her uncles and aunt (Aldo, Milena and Sergio, aged 39, 28 and 33) and her grandparents (Amedeo and Jole, aged 62 and 59). Nine people in all. Nine Jews from Naples, the city where three of them (Luciana, Paolo and Elda) had also been born and from which they had fled because of the devastating bombings a few weeks before the arrival of the Allies. Their tragic and mocking story is not only that of three generations broken by the policies of extermination of the Jewish people, in which the Repubblica Sociale founded by Mussolini on the shore of Lake Garda was an active protagonist, but also that of the small Neapolitan Community which, only through a fortuitous series of coincidences, did not come to know the grim meaning of the German phrase Endlösung der Judenfrage (final solution of the Jewish question). The backdrop to a story of ordinary daily life, which in the space of just five years would turn into tragedy for three families (Procaccia, Pacifici and Molco), is the Naples of the black twenty years of Fascism, of the war and of carpet bombing. But also that Italy which has always refused to come to terms with its own past, leaving us as a legacy a false and misleading narrative that – with rare exceptions – has very little in common with the reality of the facts