Anime Nere Due Donne e Due Destini nella Roma nazista by Anna Foa e Lucetta Scaraffia

 You musn't be too surprised, it is a sad story this one of the last World War Second: jewish people betrayed for the most diversified reason, but substantially for one, money, by other Jewish ones.

In this new book by Marsilio Anime Nere Due Donne

e Due Destini nella Roma nazista by Anna Foa e Lucetta Scaraffia a little big story I didn't know sets in Rome.

It is a story that I am sure will capture your attention.

It will, because we are in the heart of Rome, in the Jewish ghetto, where that community had more than friendship relationships with the rest of the citizenship: better, there was a fusion with the catholic population, where differencies didn't exist, and where, also after the racial laws of 1938 catholics and jewish continued to interact as they did in the past.

Said that, in a time of war there are many spies, but when these spies are snakes of your same community, it is more frustrating and horrible. 

One of them was a certain Celeste Di Porto. In good relationship with the enemy, every Jewish she met along the street was signaled with a gesture for being captured, put in jail and internated.

No one could see this girl, the rest of the community was all scared of her; Celeste a person who grew up in the same nest of the rest of jewish people: once that they completely  understood her game they tried to escape from her.

Once a boxer Lazzaro Anticoli, in jail, wrote - the message is still visible - : "I am Anticoli Lazzaro, said Bucefalo, boxer. If I won't see anymore my family (he wrote in roman's dialect) it's all fault of that traitor calls Celeste..."

Celeste was terrible, most of the people she signaled were killed also at the Fosse Ardeatine.

Another character close to her, because in jail at the same time was the one of Elena Hoehn. This German lady married a man, became the lover of another one breaking his relationship with the husband and then she returned in the hands of her husband.

Member of the so-called Focolarini, she was a controversial woman: she was a spy and, when her lover mr.Frignani, the guy who participated at the arrest of Mussoni, asked her a way for going somewhere else, she won't hesitate, giving to him protection and a roof where to stay.

Pity that later, she will tell everything to the Gestapo and they arrested everyone (but she said that it was all fault of other people and in particular she pointed the finger on her servant) : she also tried, look at the infernal behavior of this lady, of keeping at home her husband the day of the arrest. The husband, the arrest was on Sunday, was a devoted of mass and at 12 o'clock he loved to attend the saint event. Said this, although she insisted, the husband preferred to go. And he was right! So right that once he returned home noticing all that turmoil, preferred to ask the protection to a guy well-known in the city, who found for him a place in a convent of the city. The husband of Elena stayed there for more than 6 months and intimated to his friend, he had to have a great trust on his wife, I thought!, of not telling her for any reason where he stayed in. 

It wasn't at all a great story, the one of these two ladies. They tried all their best for cleaning their acts, but history is telling what they tried to bury. 

Great book for everyone and for remembering what it meant the last second world war.

I love the cover!

Highly recommended.

I thank Marsilio for the physical copy of the book.

Anna Maria Polidori