Virginia Gattegno

Virginia Gattegno (born July 31, 1923 in Rome ) is an Italian Holocaust survivor.

Life

Virginia Gattegno is a daughter of Shalom Carlo Gattegno and Marcella Luzzatto. Her family moved in 1936 to the island of Rhodes , which has been in Italian possession since 1912 , where they lived in the Jewish quarter of the city of Rhodes . Her father, who died in 1941, was the director of the Jewish school there. The living conditions of the Jews deteriorated with the introduction of the Italian race laws of 1938, when the governor Cesare Maria De Vecchi closed the school for racist reasons. After Italy retired as an ally of the Axis during World War II and the Italian army surrendered, Rhodes was occupied by the German Wehrmacht. Wehrmacht units imprisoned the 1,600 Jewish residents on Rhodes. On July 23, 1944, Gattegno was deported to the Auschwitz concentration camp on Transport 44R ; the rail transport lasted over three weeks. In the concentration camp she was selected for forced labor and the inmate number A-24324 was tattooed on her. When she was liberated from Auschwitz on January 27, 1945, she still weighed 30 kilograms. Her younger sister Lea survived the concentration camp imprisonment , she lives today (2016) in Belgium , her brother perished in the last days of imprisonment, her grandmother, mother and two younger siblings were probably gassed immediately upon arrival .

Gattegno moved back to Rome in July 1945 and then followed her husband Ugo Cipolato, whom she had met as an Italian soldier in Rhodes in 1941, to his Catholic (and formerly fascist) family in Venice . He died in 1964 and they have two daughters. Gattegno worked as a teacher in Venice. In contrast to Primo Levi , she avoided talking about her imprisonment and the murder of relatives until the 1980s. Under the impression that anti-Semitism was rising again in Europe, she spoke as a contemporary witness in public and in school classes and was interviewed for Holocaust research .

In 2007 she moved to a retirement home run by the Jewish community in the former ghetto nuovo . In 2016 she was the last survivor of the Holocaust among the residents of Venice.

literature

Sabrina Sinigaglia; Davide Jona Falco: Testimonianza di Virginia Gattegno Cipolato . Interview. December 1993. In: Marco Abbina (ed.): Meditate che questo è stato: testimonianze di reduci dai campi di sterminio . Federazione giovanile ebraica d'Italia, 1996., pp. 57-63 Link
Roberto Ferrucci : Auschwitz al Lido di Venezia , interview, January 26, 2003, blog

Web links

Virginia Gattegno , at Centro di Documentazione Ebraica Contemporanea (CDEC)
Arturo Marzano: “Prisoners of Hope” or “Amnesia”? The Italian Holocaust Survivors and Their Aliyah to Israel. , in: Quest, issues in contemporary jewish history, April 1, 2010
Last Living Venetian Ghetto Member to Survive Auschwitz Tells Her Story , at JP Updates, May 26, 2016

Individual evidence

↑ ^a ^b ^c ^d ^e ^f ^g ^h Hannah Roberts: I survived due to will and instinct. In: Financial Times , May 28, 2016, p. 2.
(Hannah Roberts is a freelance Italian correspondent for British media based in Rome, link at the Daily Mirror )
↑ Aron Rodrigue: Rhodes. In: Dan Diner (Ed.): Encyclopedia of Jewish History and Culture (EJGK). Volume 5: Pr-Sy. Metzler, Stuttgart / Weimar 2014, ISBN 978-3-476-02505-0 , p. 217.

personal data
SURNAME	Gattegno, Virginia
ALTERNATIVE NAMES	Gattegno, Virginia Cipolato
BRIEF DESCRIPTION	Italian Holocaust survivors
DATE OF BIRTH	July 31, 1923
PLACE OF BIRTH	Rome

[FT2016-1] ↑ ^a ^b ^c ^d ^e ^f ^g ^h Hannah Roberts: I survived due to will and instinct. In: Financial Times , May 28, 2016, p. 2.
(Hannah Roberts is a freelance Italian correspondent for British media based in Rome, link at the Daily Mirror )

[2] Aron Rodrigue: Rhodes. In: Dan Diner (Ed.): Encyclopedia of Jewish History and Culture (EJGK). Volume 5: Pr-Sy. Metzler, Stuttgart / Weimar 2014, ISBN 978-3-476-02505-0 , p. 217.