Seventy-eight years ago on 'Black Saturday', one of the darkest pages in Italian history: at dawn on October 16, 1943, the Nazis began the round-up of the Ghetto of Rome. Not even other districts of the capital were spared, from Trastevere to Testaccio, from Monteverde to Salario. In 1259 - 689 women, 363 men and 207 children - they were forced to leave their homes, to leave behind all the things and memories of a lifetime. The SS chose that date specifically: it was the day of rest for the Jews who also celebrated the feast of Sukkot. In this way, the Nazi soldiers were sure to find them in the house.
They were taken by force to Palazzo Salviati, where the Germans distributed tickets written in Italian with instructions for the imminent deportation. Among them were also two pregnant women who gave birth to two girls in the courtyard of the former military college of the capital. 227 were released because they came from 'mixed' families, but more than 1000 Roman Jews - on the morning of October 18, 1943 - were taken by the SS to Tiburtina station and loaded onto a convoy with 18 cattle wagons headed for the extermination camps. Most of the people were deported to the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. For the victims of that raid it was a journey with no return: only 16 survived, 15 men and a woman, Settimia Spizzichino, who died in 2000. No child came out of that hell alive.To remember that wound that remains indelibly engraved in the city of Rome there is a commemorative plaque in the Tempio Maggiore.
But above all there are the voices and stories of those who lived that horror and dedicated their lives to keep the memory alive in the new generations so that such an aberration never happens again.
