I dedicate this short essay to Karl Akiva Schwarz, interned at Ferramonti di Tarsia in 1942 after a long Odyssey in the Mediterranean aboard the boat Pentcho and a participant in the creation of the State of Israel, a dear and affectionate friend who guided me in discovering many aspects of life in the camp and of Life itself.

On the morning of 4 June 1940 a short man carrying an order from the Ministry of the Interior entered the municipality of Tarsia, a small and quiet farming town 40 km north of Cosenza. He was Eugenio Parrini, a personal friend of Mussolini and of Ciano, one of the most prominent state contractors, to whom Fascism, in 1936 alone, had awarded public works worth 156 million lire and whom it had named a Cavaliere del Lavoro. Parrini was demanding from the municipality of Tarsia the handing over of a further plot of land in the Ferramonti public estate, a marshy area a few kilometres from the town centre «[...] to build barrack huts there [...] adjoining the worksite of the Impresa Parrini & C [...] for an extent of four and a half hectares and bordering to the west with the said worksite». With this simple request for barrack huts begins the peculiar and little known history of the Ferramonti di Tarsia camp, the largest internment camp for Jews purpose-built by the Fascist regime in the wake of the racial laws. In what follows I will try to outline the origins, the main features and the historical peculiarities of this concentration camp, which represents, in many respects, a unicum in the history of the Shoah and which, in its folds, also sums up some of the contradictory aspects of how Italy and Italians confronted the Jewish question in those years.
Before turning our attention to the Ferramonti di Tarsia camp, one point must be clarified: why were no Italian Jews confined there, but only foreign Jews coming from various parts of Europe? To answer the question we must take a few steps back and connect it to the phenomenon of the forced emigration of Jews that took place in the 1930s in many European countries. In 1903, with the publication by the Tsarist police of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a forged document intended to prove the existence of a Jewish conspiracy to dominate the world, a new wave of antisemitism gradually spread throughout Europe and the United States, but found in Germany its most widely receptive centre. Already in pre-Nazi Prussia, Jews could gain access neither to state offices, nor to the administration, the army or the university. According to Bismarck, a Christian state such as Prussia could not tolerate Jews in its ranks, only then to make use of Jewish bankers to restore its own finances. In this context, Italy stood in a decidedly different position: the Risorgimento at once granted Jews equal dignity, and at the beginning of the last century numerous Italian Jews held high institutional offices: three prime ministers (Fortis, Luzzati and Sidney Sonnino), a mayor of Rome (Nathan), and during the First World War our army counted as many as fifteen Jewish generals and three admirals. At that time, in Italy, the main adversary of the
Jews was the Catholic Church and certainly not the Italian state or its people.
Nevertheless, the advent of the totalitarian regimes, of fascism and of nazism, completely changed the face of antisemitism throughout Europe. In 1933, when nazism came to power, a little more than half a million Jews were living in Germany, many of whom began to emigrate towards states considered safer, such as France, the United States, Palestine and South America. Until September 1941, nazism itself chose the path of the forced emigration of Jews out of its own territories rather than that of internment. Although the fascist ideology contained within it a clear antisemitic strain, Italy was the setting of a more modest Jewish immigration, in fact tolerated by fascism itself which, unlike Germany, allowed foreign Jews the possibility of integrating into professional life, of studying at the university and of earning the necessary means of subsistence. The absence, moreover, of a widespread antisemitism among the Italian population made the Italy of those years a sort of "precarious refuge" for Jews seeking salvation from nazism. However, the Italian racial laws of 1938 radically changed this attitude of substantial tolerance and forbearance: Italian Jews, just as had happened in Bismarck's Prussia, were excluded from every civil right and kept separate from the population of "pure Italian race", but they were not captured and imprisoned; foreign Jews who had immigrated to Italy after 1 January 1919 lost not only their civil rights but also the right of residence, with an order of expulsion within six months of the publication of the racial laws. Paradoxically, on the other hand, in the following year, 1939, a decree was issued granting a tourist visa to foreign Jews who intended to travel to Italy for business, medical treatment, study and embarkation. In short, from the advent of nazism about 9,000 Jews immigrated to Italy: many of them left Italy after the racial laws, but in May 1940 about 4,000 foreign Jews were still in Italy. In that month, before Italy's entry into the war, fascism decided to capture and intern all the foreign Jews who had not complied with the expulsion decree. It is a paradox to think that Italy, initially more tolerant than Germany, issued an order to capture foreign Jews more than a year before the same decision was taken by Nazi Germany, which began the round-up of all Jews only after September 1941. Another of Italy's many contradictions regarding the Jewish question.
How and where were the captured foreign Jews to be placed? The solutions were various, but always within the framework of pre-existing structures adapted for the purpose. Only Ferramonti di Tarsia was a partial exception. To fully understand the genesis of the choice of the Ferramonti di Tarsia area for the building of a large internment camp, another element must also be introduced: the great land reclamation works carried out by fascism. Perhaps not many people know that, after Holland, Italy is the European country with the largest amount of farmland reclaimed from marshland and drained by modern methods. In 1928 Mussolini declared that his regime would reclaim 8 million hectares. By 1933 about 5 million hectares had been drained, but from 1935 the financial demands arising from the "colonial wars" left many reclamation works unfinished. Ferramonti was a marshy area in the vicinity of the town of Tarsia, where a reclamation had been begun by Parrini's firm, the man who entered the municipality of Tarsia to request four more hectares of land around the barrack huts that had previously been occupied by the reclamation workers. The area, still marshy and malarial, did not at all match the characteristics indicated by the ministerial regulations for the choice of places in which to house the captured Jews, and the medical reports themselves advised against such a choice. Nevertheless, the sordid business interests and the friendships that Parrini enjoyed overcame every obstacle and, after a series of initial contracts, on 9 December 1941 the Ministry of the Interior awarded Parrini the contract for the construction of the Ferramonti internment camp for the sum of 7,419,905 lire (about 5 to 6 million euros today), at a time when having "a thousand lire a month" was the unattainable dream of many Italians. Thus the only building work resulting from the racial laws started from an ideological principle only to sink wretchedly into that chapter, ever current in Italy, of corrupt entrepreneurship and corruptible state officials. Parrini, given the closing down of the reclamation works, used the huts of his worksite as the first nucleus of the internment camp, imposing on the first Jews who arrived on 20 June 1940 the burden and toil of building others for the arrivals that followed. Yet it was not enough for Eugenio Parrini to place thousands of men, guilty only of having been born, in an unhealthy spot: he imposed on the camp his own food store, with prices set by him, where all the internees had to buy their food.
Did Parrini pay for this? Certainly not! After the war he took off his black shirt, put on a white one and became a major building contractor specialising in the reconstruction of churches. He received an honour from the Vatican and, at the end of his long life, he wrote for the Edizioni Paoline (1975) a biography of his own entitled Per chi vuole divenire qualcuno in which (I quote his words) «[...] a man who has lived with serenity and commitment [...] wishes to pass on the best of himself to those young people who [...] want to wage an honest struggle against the mediocrity of a life lived without purpose». It gives food for thought that Parrini is still today a Cavaliere del Lavoro of our democratic and free Italy, and that in his biography, visible on the website of the Cavalieri, nothing is said of his work as a builder of concentration camps (he built not only the Ferramonti camp but also another at Pisticci (Matera) for opponents of the regime, and he used Jews for forced labour on his personal lands near Rome. Still untouchable. Yet another Italian contradiction.

The Ferramonti di Tarsia internment camp thus began its activity in June 1940 with the arrival of the first group of foreign Jews, made up of professionals who had already been residing in Italy for several years. This initial group was followed by numerous other groups of Jews fleeing from various parts of Europe, who had, more or less by good fortune, reached Italian territory. Small groups of non-Jewish religion also arrived at Ferramonti: a group of Greeks, one of Catholic Slavs and one of Chinese. All of them imprisoned because they were considered citizens of nations at war with Italy. The percentage of non-Jewish internees nevertheless always remained very small.
Before entering into the specific features of this camp, let us note some of its general historical firsts. Besides having been the only building work created ex novo as a consequence of the racial laws and, in numerical terms, the most populous Italian internment camp for Jews (over 3,000), within the more general history of the Shoah and of the Second World War Ferramonti was the first concentration camp to be liberated (14 September 1943) and, paradoxically, the last to be closed (11 December 1945). The peculiar human and social history of this camp will explain this apparent discrepancy well, and why an article in the "Jerusalem Post online" describes it as «Unexpected Haven» and the Jewish historian Jonathan Steinberg defines it (somewhat boldly and provocatively, given that it was in any case a place of detention) as «the largest kibbutz on the european continent».
The camp consisted of 92 huts set within a perimeter of about 16 hectares (Parrini asked for and paid the municipality of Tarsia for 4 hectares, but then occupied 16). The internees were subject to the authority of a police commissioner, under whom were a few officers and a PS marshal. These police forces were flanked by a squad of fascist militia recruited locally and organised within the MVSN.
Although the outward appearance of the camp undoubtedly recalled that of a German Lager, nothing of what happened there could be even remotely likened to a Nazi camp. As an English officer would write in his report, the Ferramonti camp seemed more a village than an extermination facility. Anyone who imagines a story of "Italian do-goodery" is mistaken from the outset: these are generalisations that are not only wrong (see the example of the utterly Italian Parrini), but that above all obscure the considered choices of many of the Righteous who knowingly opposed fanaticism and racism, working for the salvation of those unfortunate people.
In the history of Ferramonti four key elements are interwoven: the tolerant and non-fanatical attitude of Paolo Salvatore, the first and most important director of the camp; the intelligent and cooperative attitude of the Jewish community, which included a good number of high-level professionals; the positive and welcoming attitude of the inhabitants of Tarsia and of the peasants of the surrounding area; and finally the work, more pragmatic than spiritual, of Callisto Lopinot, a Capuchin friar sent to the camp by the Vatican. Among these four elements, by virtue of his institutional office and authority, that of Paolo Salvatore was the pivotal factor that allowed the other three to develop and cooperate so that the internees of Ferramonti could have the best possible life that their situation and the historical circumstances could allow.
Salvatore was a police commissioner who had arrived at Ferramonti having already had experience of direction in the political confinement colony of Ventotene and Ponza, where he met Giorgio Amendola, who remembers him and cites him in his book Un'Isola for his tolerant and humane qualities. Salvatore was one of the boys of '99, with a strong and determined character that led him to enlist as a volunteer in the First World War and then to take part with D'Annunzio in the Fiume enterprise. Despite this past, there is no record of any later membership of the fascist party. Having left behind the idealistic ventures of his youth, Salvatore became a resolute, dutiful and pragmatic state official who in current historiography might fall into that category of Italians, introduced by Renzo De Felice, of the "a-fascists", that is, of Italians who took a certain distance from fascism and from its fanatical orthodoxy without this, however, translating into the explicit opposition to fascism practised by the anti-fascists. Given his office and the contingent circumstances, if Salvatore had wanted to use violence and kill people confined at Ferramonti he could have done so with impunity, as so many other Italian directors of concentration camps did, but Salvatore did not do so, showing on the contrary an attitude that was always tolerant, non-ideological and non-fanatical. An attitude recognised by very many Jewish sources and testimonies gathered in the "Fondo Kalk" at the CDEC in Milan, the most important Jewish documentary source on Ferramonti.

On the one hand Salvatore adopted an iron and very restrictive set of rules (three roll calls a day, no possibility of reading, no possibility of gathering, and so on), but on the other he substantially disregarded it, careful to ensure that what really went on inside the camp did not leak out and force him into more coercive action. He adopted an intelligent strategy of "letting things be" to the extent that this was pragmatically possible in an internment camp for Jews, during fascism, under the racial laws and during a world war that saw the Germans on our soil. What strikes one about his figure is a constant tendency to interpret and then apply the rules in the most humane way possible: leaving the camp was certainly not permitted, but authorisations were not hard to obtain; one could not listen to the radio, but the Jews themselves testify to his habit of placing the radio near the open window of the building where he lived; owning a camera was forbidden, but the professional photographers present in the camp took several hundred photographs. Salvatore allowed the creation of a school and, even today, all those who were the "children" of Ferramonti remember him with great affection for his habit of taking them about in the official car or motorcycle and buying them an ice cream in the village. Family units were not separated but lived together in the same hut and had a kitchen of their own. Reading was formally prohibited, but in the camp there was a library of several hundred books kept by two internees who had been librarians, and a small newspaper was printed. Paradoxically, there survives documentation of the small bank deposits at the Banco di Napoli in Cosenza opened by about a hundred internees who had managed to bring some money with them. He thus left the Jewish community the possibility of managing itself in all those forms that would not have created problems for him with the higher authorities which, in their turn, turned a blind eye, well content not to have to deal with further troubles and problems. His warrior spirit came out, however, when he had to confront and keep in check the only truly orthodox and fanatical fascist present in the camp: the centurion Zei, a Florentine belonging to the Dumini gang, the one behind the Matteotti murder. He himself in his diary, and many Jewish testimonies confirm it, recalls the quarrels and the public fistfights with Zei. It was precisely one of these clashes that in the end brought about Salvatore's removal from the camp, guilty of having defended a Jew beaten by a militiaman for not having stopped during the lowering of the flag: Salvatore publicly struck the blackshirt responsible for the incident. This could not be forgiven him, and he was thus transferred to northern Italy. If Parrini still remains today on the Albo d'Oro of Italians, the Italian State has forgotten Salvatore, even though his "guests" (as he calls the internees in his diary) never forgot him, and in many documents confirm the humane and tolerant way in which he ran the camp.

How did the Jewish community of Ferramonti use this degree of freedom? To understand the solutions adopted, one preliminary aspect must be considered. To speak generically of a "Jewish community of Ferramonti" is in many respects inaccurate: religion and traditions were certainly unifying elements, but not necessarily sufficient to hold together groups of hundreds of people with very different language, social background, nationality, life prospects and culture. Beside a well-known doctor from Berlin lived a Yugoslav or Polish shoemaker; beside a Zionist Jew whose only aim was to return to Eretz Israel was someone who simply wanted to go back to his European city of origin and carry on the work he had left off. That the religious aspect was not wholly unifying is proved by the fact that at Ferramonti there were three synagogues: an Orthodox one, a Reform one and a specific one for a Zionist group belonging to the Betar organisation.

To grasp first of all the lack of homogeneity of the interned Jewish population makes one understand better, and heightens, the social miracle that took place at Ferramonti. The first element was set in place by the director Salvatore when he granted the internees the possibility of gathering in some form of representative assembly. From this was born the Parliament of Ferramonti, which was the most important social and organisational structure of the camp: all the occupants of each hut elected their own representative, and the body of all the representatives elected a single "chief of chiefs" who was the highest in rank in the Parliament and the one who had direct dealings with the camp administration.

For his part Salvatore never influenced the free elective decisions of the internees or their "parliamentary" resolutions. Whoever represented a hut was therefore not a figure similar to the kapos of the German camps, but a freely elected person. It is paradoxical to consider that in an Italy where parliament was an institution emptied of every semblance of democracy, and where freedom of vote and of opinion no longer existed, in a rural town of southern Italy, in an internment camp for Jews, there existed perhaps the only democratically elected Italian social structure, a Parliament with a capital "P". The Parliament of Ferramonti regulated the social life of the camp and took care to settle the various disputes, from personal ones to those between groups. Above all it aimed to organise life in the camp so as to make it resemble a normal life as closely as possible, to create this illusion and semblance of everyday life that might help the population to survive while waiting for better times.
Studying the memoirs written by the internees about their life in the camp and, above all, looking at the hundreds of photographs that were taken in those years, it is possible to identify the two simple strategies that the Parliament of Ferramonti sought to promote as social glue among these disparate groups: culture and sport. Among its internees the Ferramonti internment camp had numerous musicians, painters and singers who were already professionally established and who organised many cultural activities in the camp: music concerts, theatrical performances, composition and poetry competitions. A grand piano also arrived at Ferramonti (to this day no one knows how), and it is visible in many pictures of the concerts. Present at Ferramonti was Michel Fingesten, perhaps the greatest engraver of the last century and certainly the greatest artist of the ex-libris. He was granted an entire hut, which was used as the artists' atelier. I have found the programme of a concert where, among the various pieces played, the last was a piece by Wagner. Incredible!

At Ferramonti an elementary school was set up, complete with end-of-year report cards. In that camp 21 children were born. In the field of sport, apart from the chess matches played by the older internees, the main sport was football. There survives a great deal of documentation attesting to the enthusiasm for the football championships that took place in the camp, to which the population of Tarsia was also invited. Teams made up of young men of the same nationality of origin faced one another: at Ferramonti, in effect, the European Football Championships that the war had halted were played out. There still survives a typed "match report" of a game between the "national teams" of Yugoslavia and Poland in July 1943.

Concerts, football matches, schools and the birth of children... so was Ferramonti a five-star resort spared the horrors of war? Obviously not, exactly the opposite: it was a place of detention and of loss of freedom for those whose only fault was to have been born. Hunger was endemic and the climate unbearable, with the presence of malaria and of all the insects that populate a marsh. The moments of distraction were interspersed with days of despair over their condition as prisoners, over the anguish of thinking about the situation of the relatives left behind in their countries of origin. Many at Ferramonti had understood that something tragic was happening to the Jews at the hands of the Nazis. Behind every smile that appears in the photographs there is always the shadow of anguish, and the people of Ferramonti went through truly dramatic moments, such as the passage, in front of the entrance to the camp, of the German army retreating from Sicily between the end of August 1943 and the beginning of the following September. In those moments, among the most dramatic in the camp's history, the last two significant elements in the story of Ferramonti intervened decisively: the population of Tarsia and Father Callisto Lopinot. During the fifteen days in which the German army passed in front of the camp, these two elements became a real source of salvation. Aware of the danger, the new camp administration and the PS marshal Gaetano Marrari decided to have all the internees who had the capacity and the youth to remain hidden flee into the surrounding woods or be sheltered in the houses of the Tarsia peasants. Had the Germans entered, they would have found only a few hundred internees and not thousands. In that moment the miracle occurred of an entire local population that decided to house and protect in their own homes the people with whom they had previously had dealings, bartering food in exchange for clothing or professional services (at Ferramonti there were many doctors who began to treat the inhabitants of Tarsia in a clinic within the camp). The difference from the German situation is significant if one considers that the population living next to the infamous German camps remained indifferent and declared that it knew nothing of what was happening a few metres away. As the German army was passing, in front of the gate of Ferramonti, beside a yellow flag marking an epidemic, Father Callisto Lopinot took up his position: a long white beard, a hieratic appearance, who in perfect German, his mother tongue, explained to the Nazis, who were asking what that camp was, that it was a simple camp of displaced refugees where an epidemic of typhus was raging: if they wished to enter, they would do so at their own risk! No one went in to investigate further. No one was ever deported from Ferramonti: Salvatore, with various excuses, always declined the requests that came from the Gestapo through the Ministry of the Interior. The good Marshal Marrari, Father Lopinot and the inhabitants of Tarsia saved more than 2,000 internees present at that moment. Anyone who thinks that their salvation derived from the camp's location in a remote spot far from the theatres of war is mistaken; on the contrary: the Ferramonti camp stood opposite State Road 19, the main route of communication in the Calabria of the time. The passage of the German army proves it. The Jews were thus saved by the courageous decisions of the camp's leaders, by the spontaneous and instinctive solidarity of the population of Tarsia, and by the courageous and determined work of Lopinot. Lopinot was indeed a central figure in the camp, no less so than Salvatore. This Capuchin friar left us a very detailed personal diary, written in the camp, on the events that took place at Ferramonti. Contrary to what one might think, Lopinot never engaged in any proselytism, and conversions at Ferramonti were very few. He respected and was respected by the whole Jewish community. Through his contact with Karl Weirich, a young non-Jewish Czech journalist who lived in Rome and was accredited to the Vatican, he channelled money and medicines with which he could provide supplementary meals and supply the infirmary of Ferramonti. Lopinot went so far as to drive out of the camp a local priest who gave sermons with an antisemitic slant, and he was always interested in the Jewish perspective of the Bible. There exists a highly symbolic photograph in which around the Bible sit a Rabbi, an Orthodox priest and a Catholic.

Also famous at Ferramonti was a harmonium sent, through Lopinot, by Pius XII: the testimonies of the time recount how this harmonium was used both for Jewish ceremonies and for Christian ones. The harmonium still exists today in a Capuchin convent in Cosenza.
Where, in this context, could the internees freed by the British in September 1943 go? Many of them tried in vain to emigrate at once to Israel, but this time it was the British who hindered their plan; others joined the Jewish Brigade, which at Ferramonti had its first action on Italian soil; the greater part remained in the camp awaiting the end of the war: they organised themselves by renting land from the local peasants and set up an agricultural enterprise (hence Steinberg's definition of Ferramonti as a Kibbutz). This is the simple reason for the closing of the camp on a date even later than the official date of the end of the Second World War.
What remains today of the Ferramonti camp? Practically nothing. Immediately after the war and until the 1970s the local peasants used the huts as agricultural storage, then progressively dismantled them and destroyed everything to gain land to cultivate. The local and regional authorities were never interested in the history of the camp, and everything of Ferramonti vanished in the most total neglect of the institutions. In the early 2000s the few original structures remaining were so brutally restored by the local authorities as to provoke a vehement protest from Italia Nostra and from Jewish journalists, who called it a reconstruction in "farmhouse-holiday style". The present Museum of Ferramonti contains almost exclusively photographs donated by the former internees themselves.
If locally no one cared to preserve the Memory of Ferramonti, it is even more serious to note that Italian historians too never concerned themselves with Ferramonti: on the reasons for this absence many disturbing scenarios might be opened up, considering the historical importance of the camp and the enormous quantity of documentary and photographic material available. The two main books on Ferramonti were in fact written by two physicians linked by birth to the neighbouring territory.
Perhaps the reasons are others. Did the absence of violence and of killing make its story less appealing? Are the decisions and the positive actions taken by an a-fascist less worthy of being remembered and commemorated than those taken by an anti-fascist? Another Italian contradiction, which bears witness to how current historiography is still unable to look serenely at its own most recent past: did the equally extraordinary story of Perlasca come to light because Italian historians made it known and disseminated it, or because a television drama was made of it? Parrini is a cavaliere del lavoro, while Salvatore, Marrari, Lopinot and Weirich... are unknowns who have never received any recognition.
No matter! As has happened with so many other events, History has its uneven and asynchronous timings, its often unexpected ways. The women, the children and the men of Ferramonti are patient and are still waiting to tell, in Kalk's words, the «story of the wandering Jew who arrived at Ferramonti in chains».

Bibliography consulted

The two main books with a historical approach on Ferramonti are:

Mario Rende, Ferramonti di Tarsia. Voci da un campo di concentramento fascista, Mursia, 2009.

Carlo Spartaco Capogreco, Ferramonti. La vita e gli uomini del più grande campo d'internamento fascista, 1940-1945, Giuntina, 1987.

Alongside these we point out several books and texts written by the internees during their stay in the camp:

Ernst Bernhard, Lettere a Dora dal campo di internamento di Ferramonti (1940-41), Biblioteca Aragno, 2011.

Georg, Ferramonti, Prometeo, 2003.

Nina Weksler, Con la gente di Ferramonti, Editoriale Progetto 2000, 1992.

Evangelos Averoff Tossizza, Prigioniero in Italia, Longanesi, 1977.

The quotation taken from the historian Steinberg is in his book:

Jonathan Steinberg, All or nothing: the Axis and the Holocaust 1941-432, Routledge, London, 1990.

The most important Jewish documentation on Ferramonti is that held in the Fondo Kalk of the CDEC in Milan.

On YouTube there is a channel entirely dedicated to the Ferramonti di Tarsia camp. Among the various video documents available I point out the original footage filmed by the British just after entering Ferramonti, and a film inspired by the events that took place in the camp, 18.000 giorni fa.

Mario Rende was born in Rome in 1958. A graduate in Medicine and Surgery, he is currently full professor of Human Anatomy at the School of Medicine of the University of Perugia. He is the author of numerous international scientific publications in the field of the Nerve Growth Factor and has collaborated on the writing of textbooks in the anatomical field. His family comes from Tarsia, the municipality where the Ferramonti camp was located: hence his historiographical interest in the camp. In 2004 he found, at the Imperial War Museum in London, the original footage filmed by the British at Ferramonti, and in 2009 he published a book on this camp with Mursia.