Women and Hidden Jews under Fascist Rule: Roberto Bassi’s Evidence

After spending his working life as dermatologist, Roberto Bassi (born in 1931) wrote a memoir, Scaramucce sur Lago Ladoga, which was published in Italian in 2003 and which also exists in an unpublished English translation entitled Skirmishes on Lake Ladoga. Bassi, the grandson of a rabbi, recounts the life of his family in Venice, from the time of his birth, through the period when Italian Jews lived under the racial laws which were enacted in 1938, and during the years, 1943–44, in which he lived under a false identity in a secular orphanage in Rome. In each phase of the memoir, Bassi recounts the central roles played by the women in his life, his mother and grandmother, of course, as well as the directress of the orphanage who agreed to hide him and his sister from the Nazis.