Portico d'Ottavia
As Gin and Tonic was telling us about the Fish Market, an older Italian man sporting a trim grey suit and yarmulke (apparently leaving the Saturday services of the nearby Tempio Maggiore, the Great Jewish Synagogue), stopped...
5/13/20241 min read
He explained to our guide that his shoes became unlaced as Nazis poked rifles to contain the Jews within the Piazza Gerusalemme before forcing them to board lorries lined along a nearby street, the Lungotevere de Cenci. When he knelt to tie his shoe laces, he saw a path to escape and hid, avoiding deportation after his account of his miraculous escape. After his account of his miraculous escape, he rushed off, so we had no time to get more information or find out what happened to his parents. His father was a rabbi, so he was likely related to one of several real-life rabbis depicted in my novel.
As Gin and Tonic was telling us about the Fish Market, an older Italian man sporting a trim grey suit and yarmulke (apparently leaving the Saturday services of the nearby Tempio Maggiore, the Great Jewish Synagogue), stopped. The two men began a lively exchange in Italian, after which the Jewish man departed. He’d been a young child on October 16, 1943, when the Gestapo rounded up 1,259 men, women, and children to deport to Auschwitz.