Traditi. Una storia della Shoah napoletana

Non possono essere iscritti al Partito nazionale fascista i cittadini italiani che, a norma delle disposizioni di legge, sono considerati di razza ebraica». When Amedeo and Aldo Procaccia, two Florentine Jews who had emigrated to Naples twenty years earlier, realise that the sentence contained in the Royal Decree of 21 November 1938 marks the end of twelve years of party membership, they feel doubly betrayed. After the government, the party too has embraced the creed of race. Their drama as Jewish Fascists, repudiated by the King and by the Duce, has Naples as its backdrop. A city targeted by the bombs of the Liberators, besieged by hunger and poverty, from which they flee two months before the German retreat, together with nine other family members, among them two newborn babies and a five-year-old child. For eight of them the flight ends at Cerasomma, a hamlet of Lucca, on 6 December 1943. Trapped in the tragic and bloody farce of the Repubblica Sociale Italiana, they will be forced to suffer the humiliations of arrest, internment and prison. And lastly, deportation to Auschwitz, the extermination camp in Poland from which none of them would return