Rome mayor raises concerns about Morbo K series on eve of Holocaust Remembrance Day.
A debate has erupted in Italy over a new TV series by state broadcaster RAI that allegedly erases the role of Italian fascist collaborators in the infamous Nazi raid on Rome’s Jewish Ghetto.
The raid, which occurred on 16 October 1943, resulted in the deportation of more than 1,000 of the city’s Jews, including 200 children, to the Nazi extermination camp at Auschwitz. Only 16 made it back to Rome alive – one woman and 15 men – the last of whom died in 2019.
Critics of the new miniseries, scheduled to debut on Tuesday for International Holocaust Remembrance Day, allege that it sanitises history by omitting the role of Italian collaborators, portraying the raid on the Jewish Ghetto as an exclusively German operation.
Titled Morbo K, the series centres on how heroic doctors at Rome’s Fatebenefratelli Hospital saved dozens of Jewish citizens by inventing a fake, highly contagious disease to deter Nazi officers from searching the wards.
However the flagship production has become mired in controversy over allegations of historical revisionism, first highlighted in an article by La Stampa newspaper last week.
Rome mayor Roberto Gualtieri added his voice to the debate on Monday during a public meeting for high school students with Holocaust survivor Sami Modiano, 95, at the Teatro Vascello.
“I have read, and I hope it’s not true, that there’s a TV series where the fascists aren’t even visible, they’re not there” – Gualtieri said – “only the Nazis are there.”
The mayor, a historian and former history professor at Rome’s La Sapienza University, said: “As witnesses know, the fascists actively collaborated in Hitler’s criminal decision to exterminate all the Jews”.
“They expelled them from schools, compiled lists, helped capture them and take them to the camps, where humanity’s barbarity later revealed itself in its most ruthless and incredible form”, Gualtieri said, stressing that “evil emerged from apparently normal people, and this means that the danger of it returning is without end.”
There were 300 students present at the talk with Modiano while a further 400,000 students from across Italy participated in the initiative, which was built around the direct testimony of one of the last Holocaust survivors.
Born on the island of Rhodes, when it was under Italian occupation, Modiano was deported to Auschwitz in 1944 with his father Giacobbe and his sister Lucia, neither of whom survived the horrors of the Nazi death camp.
