History

Rome remembers Nazi raid on Jewish Ghetto

16 Oct, 2019

Rome commemorates 1943 deportation of Jews.

Rome's Jewish community commemorates the 76th anniversary of the deportation of more than 1,000 of the city’s Jews to the Nazi extermination camp at Auschwitz, on 16 October.

The raid occurred at dawn on 16 October 1943, when 1,023 Roman Jews, including 200 children, were rounded up in the city’s Ghetto district and taken across the Tiber to the Collegio Militare on Via della Lungara. Two days later they were sent to Auschwitz on a sealed train from Tiburtina station.

Only 16 were to make it back to Rome alive: 15 men and a woman, Settimia Spizzichino, who died in the Garbatella neighbourhood in 2000. The white steel bridge connecting the Ostiense and Garbatella districts was named in Spizzichino's honour when it opened in 2012.

This is the first year that the anniversary occurs without any of the 16 survivors, the last of whom, Lello Di Segni, died on 26 October last year.

Rome's mayor Virginia Raggi was among the 2,000 people to attend a silent candle-lit procession in memory of the victims, held in Piazza S. Maria in Trastevere on 12 October.