ACROSS THE ROOFTOPS OF THE GHETTO OF ROME

By Linda Lee Greene, Author & Artist.



My eldest son, Sabato, he is like a goat since he took his first steps—climbing whatever has been before him. In the beginning, he scaled the furniture in our little home. As he grew older, he scooted a chair to a window, slinked up and through it, and made his way outside. My wife, she could not control him. Whenever she turned her back, he scurried away to climb something. Most of the time, it was the wall in which the window is located that gives onto a tall tree beyond arm’s reach of it. The limbs of the tree provide him the means of disappearing among the rooftops of our cramped neighborhood. He is one of an ancient breed of climbers among our people, myself included when I was young, spawned by the stifling four walls that enclose us in this Ghetto of Rome, which has been our people’s prison during much of the time between the middle of the sixteenth century and now.

Jews have been counted among the population of Rome since a century and a half before the birth of Jesus, the Christian’s Jewish savior, and the ironies of our history here are ceaseless. First we were in favor, and then out of favor—in and out, in and out, our fortunes have varied over two millennia according to the mood and the politics of the separate ruling powers of the times. It is the same throughout this hemisphere of the world, where there are also Jewish ghettos—many of them—but the Ghetto of Rome holds the dubious distinction of being the oldest. Like its history, its boundaries are irregular, comprising about two thousand Jewish people at its inception in 1555, the whole of them shut behind a gated trapezoidal urban enclosure measuring a cramped, four blocks in size. At its longest border, edged up against the Tiber River, the quarter was then and is to this day perpetually damp and murky, our narrow streets, homes, and businesses infested with vermin inhabitants of waterways and their nearby areas. The river also guarantees that the ghetto is subject to incessant flooding. Diseases wrought by the forced overcrowding and unsanitary circumstances are rampant. Crushing poverty is our lot as well, because gainful employment among the larger society is denied to us. To state that our close and substandard living conditions are inhuman, is merely a restatement of our situation during most of our history.

            The very night of his Bar Mitzvah five years ago, not only did Sabato become a man, but he also transformed into a cat-burglar. I do not suggest that he indulges in breaking and entering. Certainly not! Soon after the authorities shut us inside the ghetto behind locked gates, as they do each evening, donned head to toe in black, Sabato creeps across the rooftops of adjoining habitats of our neighbors, drops to his feet outside the boundary wall, and slinks into the wider city. Darkness comes early at this time of year and the curfew hour begins soon afterwards. The darkness is intensified by the mandatory blackout—all windows and doors are shrouded in black cloth or by other means. Keeping to the shadows, and being careful to avoid the armed patrols that like cockroaches infest every corner, Sabato scours the sinister streets and alleyways for whatever he can find. That first evening upon his return, his black eyes shining triumphantly, he said to me, “Papa, look what I found for you! Now you will have many nights of good light as you study the Torah.” And from behind his back he produced four tall and thick, white candles, only slightly used. “I found them in the dust bin behind the Cathedral,” he informed me. The Cathedral has become one of his regular foraging sites. There he gleans an assortment of treasures, including medals of the saints, candelabras, and other religious articles. We trade them on the black market through a friendly Roman Catholic who acts as our trusted agent, which contributes greatly to the livelihood of our family. One of Sabato’s happiest finds was for his sister, Ada. The day of her Bat Mitzvah looming before her, she was mortified that she lacked a nice pair of shoes for the small ceremony we planned for her. God Himself, with the help of Sabato, provided. As Sabato stole down a pitch black street a few nights before, a pair of barely-used girl’s sandals beckoned to him on a doorstep of a house. He snatched them up and stuffed them in his rucksack. Later that evening, like the prince kneeling before Cinderella and placing the glass slipper on her foot, Sabato lowered to his knees and slipped the sandals on his sister’s feet. They were just the right size!      

Since Nazi Germany seized Rome two days after the Italian surrender to the Allies on 8 September, 1943, discrimination against us has been at a fever pitch yet again. Many of my close friends and associates have escaped the persecution by pulling up stakes and moving south in search of protection among places now occupied by the Allies. I am skeptical of such a drastic measure. After all, several non-Jewish Romans pooled their resources and helped us to meet the Nazi demand that we Jews hand over 50 kilograms (110 lbs.) of gold to them, a sum that we were promised would insure the freedom of 200 family heads marked for deportation to a concentration camp. It shows to me and many of my neighbors that the Nazis are only after loot, and as long as we can fork over commodities, we will be safe. Sabato sees it differently. He begs me to leave, but I cannot find my way to ripping my sickly wife and our other six children, the youngest of whom is still a babe in arms, from the only home they have ever known. I recognize that restless look in Sabato’s eyes—he is ready to go, to climb through the window, to scale the tree, and to escape across the rooftops and over the walls of this ancient ghetto once and for all, and it terrifies me. It terrifies me because I fear that if he leaves, we will lose him forevermore.

Even as I come to the end of this writing in my journal, the German security and police forces have sealed off the ghetto and announced that our final removal will soon be underway. “Papa!” my son exclaims. “Please, Papa come with me. I can get all of us to safety. We will go south and find protection among the Allies.” But it is too late. My wife and baby daughter would never survive such a journey. I feel certain that a concentration camp is our better option.

“I must go, Papa. I must join the co-belligerent forces and fight the Nazis.” His rucksack filled with his scant possessions strapped to his back, Sabato takes my face in his hands and kisses my cheeks. And then he bundles his mother in his arms in a goodbye embrace. One after the other, he kisses his brothers and sisters, and then he turns from us and disappears through the window. I run to it and through misty eyes watch my son scale the tree and step foot onto our rooftop.© 

Note: On October 16, 1943, the German Gestapo raided the Ghetto of Rome. At its outset, 363 men, 689 women, and 207 children, mainly of Jewish persuasion, were rounded up. Among that number, 224 non-Jews were released. It is recorded that two days later, 1,035 Jews were loaded onto Holocaust trains and shipped off to the Auschwitz Concentration Camp in Nazi-occupied Poland. Only fifteen men and one woman survived the bloodbaths of the deportation and internment in the camp. If the narrator of my story of historical fiction had actually existed, it would have been a miracle if he and his family had been among the survivors. Sabato, on the other hand, because I sent him south to the Allied encampments, very well might have escaped. I like to think that he would have made it to one of the British Isles or the United States soon after the end of the Second World War.



Image: LIFE IN THE GHETTO OF ROME - 1880 Watercolor by Ettore Roesler Franz