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The Good Italian, The Bad German, And The Survivor: Narratives And Counter-Narratives Of The Shoah In Italy, John Barruzza

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The study herein explores the history and memory of the Shoah in Italy through the eyes, primarily, of survivors themselves. Pairing witness testimonies (memoirs and oral interviews) with government records, I show how Italy’s Jewish survivors, for many decades after World War II and the Shoah, continued to invoke the national myths of the ‘good Italian’ and the ‘bad German’ in their recollections, despite their frequent persecution at Italian hands. This tendency, I argue, stems from their past experiences of acceptance and integration in Italy after national unification and emancipation, experiences which extended to foreign Jews residing in Italy, as …