A Time to Remember

The year was 1939, the city Rome.

Amadeo Bondi, an Italian Jew, had fallen for Edith Katz, an Austrian Jew.

Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini had begun targeting foreign Jews, forcing the Katzes, who lived in the port town of Ostia, to move to Rome. No foreigners could live by the ocean, the laws stated, because they might send signals to the enemy.

When the eight Katz family members arrived in Rome without lodging, the Bondi family took them in. For several days they lived piled atop each other in the cramped Roman apartment, makeshift beds everywhere.

The daughters of the two families, 9-year-old Ann and 11-year-old Lotte, became friends, eating grapes and pumpkin seeds and going to American cowboy movies in the afternoons.

“We had beds all over the place,” Ann, now 70, recalled Friday. “But we had a lot of fun. Life was normal at the time.”

Lotte’s family eventually moved on. Ann’s, too.

The two girls never saw each other again until Valley Beth Shalom synagogue in Encino began searching for Italian Christians who helped Jews during the German occupation of Italy during World War II.

It turns out Lotte, whose last name is Singer, lives in Beverly Hills, and Ann, whose last name is now Signett, in Sherman Oaks. The two were recently reunited after more than 50 years.

Signett said she remembers every detail of the two families’ time together as if it occurred yesterday. “It was wonderful,” she said.

Singer, 72, recalls the time less clearly.

“I was a couple of years older,” she said. “I didn’t pay much attention to her. We weren’t so friendly when we were kids, you know what a difference two years can make at that age. But it was a wonderful surprise to find her.”

They were guests Friday night at Valley Beth Shalom, where congregants marked Yom HaShoah, Holocaust remembrance day.

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Every year Valley Beth Shalom honors people who helped Jews during those dark times. This year, they honored sympathetic Italians who saved thousands of Jews.

Those include ordinary Italian citizens, as well as Catholic clergy who transformed their monasteries and abbeys into shelters, and members of the armed forces who risked their lives to help Jews, even after the German occupation of Italy. Many Jews initially fled to Italy from other parts of Europe because it was seen as safe.

But in 1938, Mussolini began targeting foreign Jews in Italy. And when Germany occupied Italy, even Italian Jews were forced to flee to the hills where some were taken in by non-Jewish families.

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Rabbi Harold Schulweis estimates there were 50,000 Jews in Italy before World War II, and 85% of them survived.

Until the Germans occupied Italy, Schulweis said, not a single Italian Jew was deported from Italy.

“That’s a record,” he said. “It indicates what happens when people simply care. It raises a mirror to yourself. What would you do? Would you hide and protect individuals, recognizing that that revelation would result in dire consequences to you and your family?”

To prepare for Friday night’s dinner, Valley Beth Shalom ran ads in local Italian-language newspapers searching for Italian Christians who had sheltered Jews.

Both Singer and Signett--Jews whose families had been sheltered by sympathetic Italians--responded.

Maria Julianelli, an Italian Christian, also responded.

Julianelli grew up in a small town in the Abruzzi region, deep in the Appenine Mountains, far off the beaten track. She said American soldiers often parachuted into her village, and many Jews hid in her hometown and in caves in the nearby hills.

Her family took hundreds of Jews into their home during the war, covering every inch of floor space with beds.

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Sometimes she and her aunts would take food and clothes to the Jews hiding in the caves--carrying the goods in baskets on their heads to look like laundry--while teenage boys kept a lookout for Germans, she said.

She was so protected by her parents and relatives that she did not understand who these wandering strangers were, why they spoke a different language or where they came from.

Julianelli said she once watched German guards beat her aunt because she was helping Jews. Another relative was imprisoned for helping Jews.

But overall, she said, for a 9-year-old child protected by loving parents, it was a game.

“I never really took it seriously. Our aunts and uncles and neighbors did to us exactly what the gentleman in ‘Life Is Beautiful’ did for his son,” she said, referring to Roberto Benigni’s movie about the Holocaust. “It was fun. We were never really mentally scarred.”

She said she once asked her grandmother why they were helping the people who arrived in bunches on the dusty road.

Her grandmother replied: “ ‘Because they are Christiani’--and in Italian that word does not mean Christians--’because they are children of God. We have to help them.’ That’s how I grew up. Knowing people were children of God, and there was no separation between us.”