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עמוד:*30
* 30 Reflections My interest in Italian Jews who fled their native homeland for the U . S . is personal, given my identification as a second - generation of Holocaust survivors . I was attracted by Benigni's alternative experience, so completely different from the family narratives I was used to hear . To an extent, I had been exposed to other side of the Holocaust, a positive facet . I heard the dramatic vicissitudes recounted time and again by my parents during my childhood . As an assimilated and secular Italian, prior to the discriminatory race laws of 1938 – they knew they were Italian . My North Italian parents survived Salò’s Republic and the Nazi invasion of September By the age of eleven, my mother's family left Milan for a village in Piedmont, adopted an . 1943 alternative identity and pretended to be evacuees from Allies airstrikes . They revised their identity presenting themselves as Southern Italian refugees, from the territories occupied by the Allies . Everybody had to be an actor, a good Catholic actor . At the age of 21, my Jewish socialist father accompanied the first anti - fascist brigade under the command of Socialist leader Duccio ( Tancredi ) Galimberti in south Piedmont Alps ( Russell, 2005 ; Feldman, 2001 ; Cavaglion,1991 ) . As with many second - generation children to Holocaust survivors, I never had the option to receive a clear image in order to know what really happened to my parents . The terms of Shoah, Holocaust or genocide were never used . They called it “the war” . Sometimes stories were told by accident or in an anecdotal and vague way . Sometimes events changed their plot, combining reality with reveries . I never got a clear gestalt, with a defined chronological sequence . These were like “complicate stories where the time doesn’t go straight [ seldom ] for those who can sleep in the nights” ( Guttfreund, 2000, p . 74 ) . Presumably, they wished to protect me, yet they left me in a state of ambiguity and cognitive dissonance ( Wardi, 1992 ) . I was convinced that they had manipulated and embellished the end of the drama . For my mother, staying in a countryside village was a long vacation of sorts . For her, pretending to be a Roman Catholic believer who assiduously attending church – knowing Latin prayers by heart – was a playful performance . My father, on one hand, was discriminated against and every Italian University wasn't denied him access, despite his ambitions . But, on the other hand, as a Jew he wasn't called up by the Italian Army . He maintained, time and again, that race discrimination probably saved his life . That, because 90,000 conscripts, chiefly from his South Piedmont cohort, soldiers of the 8 th Reggimento Alpini, lost their lives in the Russian Campaign . Moreover, the shocking events of this period changed his attitude toward traditional Judaism and made him a fervent enthusiast of the State of Israel .
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אדמוני, אריאל
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