Rome: Holocaust (and other) Reminders Are Often Best When Unexpected

Rome, Italy. Stazione Tiburtina Binario 1, Memorial Plaques. Photo: Samuel D. Gruber 2024.

Rome, Italy. All Potential Targets. Photo: Samuel D. Gruber 2023.

Holocaust (and other) Reminders Are Often Best When Unexpected:

Then Stop, Look, Remember, Think, Act!

by Samuel D. Gruber

Binario 1

I only passed through Rome this summer to change trains at Roma Tiburtina Station, but since my first train was cancelled, I had a little time to look around. My rule of Rome applied, that is, if you look at almost anything you will find something new. Even when jet-lagged and sleep deprived.

There along the wall of Binario (track) #1, where I disembarked from the train from the airport, were a series of inscribed plaques. One of these was in memory of the more than 1000 Jews who were deported to death camps via this station in October 1943.

 

Rome, Italy. Stazione Tiburtina Binario 1, Memorial Plaque for Deported Roman Jews.. Photo: Samuel D. Gruber 2024.

At the top are inscribed the shapes of two concentration camp badges – the six-pointed star for Jews, and the triangle with the letters “it” worn by Italian prisoners. Beneath is inscribed in large letters the dedicatory inscription that begins with a line from Primo Levi’s poem Se questo e un uomo (also the name of his memoir about survival in Auschwitz) - "Meditate che questo è stato” (Meditate that this was).

Here is a translation of Italian text of the plaque: 

"On October 16, 1943, more than a thousand Roman Jews, entire families, men, women and children, were torn from their homes, guilty only of existing. From this station October 18, enclosed in locked wagons, they were deported by the Nazis to the extermination camps. Sixteen men and only one woman returned. Their memory and that of all the Roman deportees, Jews, politicians, military, workers, will be a perennial warning because similar tragedies everywhere they must not be relived. Never again. / Municipality of Rome and Jewish Community of Rome, 16 October 2000."

 

Rome, Italy. Stazione Tiburtina Binario 1, Memorial Plaques. Photo: Samuel D. Gruber 2024.

Rome, Italy. Stazione Tiburtina Binario 1, Memorial Plaques for Anti-Fascist Railway Workers. Photo: Samuel D. Gruber 2024.

Other plaques commemorate the heroic actions of anti-fascist railroad workers, including some, like Michele Bolgia, who risked their lives to force opened train wagon doors to allow some of the Jewish prisoners to escape. These anti-fascist workers were all arrested, imprisoned and then executed at the Fosse Ardeatine.

I shouldn't have been surprised to find these plaques. For the last two years I've been documenting holocaust memorial monuments around the world for the International Holocaust Memorial Monument Database, and in Europe one of the most frequent public locations for these memorial monuments is at train stations from where Jews were deported. These include Milan, Prague, Thessaloniki, Berlin, L’viv, and another remarkable memorial I saw last year at Borgo San Dalmazzo in Piedmont.

 

Rome, Italy. All Potential Targets. Photo: Samuel D. Gruber 2023.

Rome, Italy. All Potential Targets. Photo: Samuel D. Gruber 2023.

Tutti Potenziali Bersagli / All Potential Targets

Last summer, I was headed to another train station, Rome’s Ostiense Station at the Piazzale Ostiense, outside the Porta San Paolo. Even though I had been documenting several memorials in Rome that same week, I wasn't thinking about Holocaust monuments when I hurried to the train at this century-old station. On that hot day most on the train were headed to the beach, but I was going to the Roman port city of  Ostia Antica to see the ancient synagogue. But there, in front of the train station in a small Piazza, was an curious and eye-catching sculptural installation called 'Tutti Potenziali Bersagli' (All Potential Targets).

A close look (and some further research) let me know that this is a memorial for all victims of Fascists and Nazis, but also a call to anti-fascist vigilance and action. We see a row of chained silhouettes, with bound hands and targets on their backs. They are cut out of a large sheet of metal in which is inserted mirror glass, in which we see ourselves, so we know that we too, are – and can be – the target of fascism. The work was made in 1995. The threat seems even more real today. All the silhouettes wear triangular badges of the types required of different categories of concentration camp prisoners.

 

Rome, Italy. All Potential Targets. Photo: Samuel D. Gruber 2023.

Rome, Italy. All Potential Targets. Photo: Samuel D. Gruber 2023.

Rome, Italy. All Potential Targets. Photo: Samuel D. Gruber 2023.

Rome, Italy. All Potential Targets. Photo: Samuel D. Gruber 2023.

Created by socially and politically engaged artist Emilio Leofreddi, the 1995 work was built by political activists and artists as a temporary installation on the 50th-anniversary of the end of World War II in Europe. The monument who only received authorization the night before it was unveiled on April 25, 1995. It was only intended to be a 10-day installation, but it was never taken down. In 2007 it was included in Italy’s census of cultural heritage.

The location of the monument is significant. On September 8, 1943, Marshall Pietro Badoglio — who replaced Mussolini — announced that Italy negotiated an armistice with the Allies. The Germans immediately marched into the capital, prompting outbursts of resistance around the city, including three days of pitched battle between the Germans and Italian soldiers and armed civilians in the immediate area of the monument. It was this advance of the Germans that would soon lead to the round-ups and deportations of Rome's Jews.

Until 2018, All Potential Targets was the only Roman monument that also referenced and was dedicated to the homosexual victims of fascism. The inscription also mentions the victims of the fascist bombings and squadristi in the 1970s during the years of the strategy of tension [strategia della tensione]. It is not clear to me if the terrorism of the Red Brigades is included in this condemnation. I lived in Rome in the early 1970s and remember that period well.

 

Rome, Italy. All Potential Targets. Photo: Samuel D. Gruber 2023.

Rome, Italy. All Potential Targets. Photo: Samuel D. Gruber 2023.

It was hard to read the inscription, but here is my imperfect translation. Thanks to Shara Wasserman for some help with the last lines. Shara knew Leofreddi, and says he was a troubled soul, but a gentle and lovely person.

"To all the victims of fascist barbarism from the beginning of the twenties to today, from those of black shirts or double breasted black shirts, from the racial and political persecutions of the years of Mussolini and Hitler to the bombs on the trains and the piazze of the strategy of tension [strategia della tensione], of the murders of anti-fascist militants carried out in the 1970s by squadristi in and without uniforms, up to the assaults on social centers, nomad camps, and lynching of immigrants. To all free women and men transformed into target shooting silhouettes. To all those who opposed fascism and above all to those who will always oppose overt or disguised fascism. April 25, 1945-1995"

While not specifically a Holocaust memorial monument, we’ve included this in the Holocaust Memorial Monument database. Its specificity is a welcome contrast to the ambiguity and irony of so many German "counter-monuments" of the 1990s. These in time be included in the database, too.

For most passersby memorials and monuments are just background; they mean little to nothing.  Only when we stop to look are they animated, and do they have a purpose. So Stop, Look, Remember, Think, Act!

Rome, Italy. All Potential Targets as background. Photo: Samuel D. Gruber 2023.

Rome, Italy. Stazione Tiburtina Binario 1, Memorial Plaques as background. Photo: Samuel D. Gruber 2024