Analysis Of Susan Zuccotti's The Italians And The Holocaust

Published in the same year, Susan Zuccotti’s The Italians and the Holocaust: Persecution, Rescue, and Survival focuses on the 15 percent of Jews who did not survive the Holocaust during German-occupied Italy, and asked how such was the case. Although Zuccotti is suspicious of apologizing for Italy’s Holocaust by arguing that “despite its ninetieth-century ghettos and the promptings of its Fascist rulers, had no significant anti-Semitic tradition,” and by suggesting that only a minority of non-Jews in Italy collaborated with the persecution, The Italians and the Holocaust on its own had no apparent intention to serve the national ideology. What makes the book part of this trend of mystification of Holocaust rescue is its introduction, which
structurally influences the reader’s impression of the book. Written by Furio Colombo, a public figure and a democratic political activist, the introduction mainly highlighted the noble actions of the Italians, talking about how the silence in Italy about the Holocaust had prevented the stories of the heroic rescuers to be known. Shifting Zuccotti’s own statement of intention to exam the expired, Colombo argues that her book “is in substance a recognition of Italian good will and of the noncollaboration of a majority of Italians with the racial laws and with German demands.”