Read the first part of Olga’s story here at “Olga Samuels. Escape from Italy”
The villa we were to spend some time in consisted of three floors; it was on a steep slope, with an equally very steep garden descending towards the lake. The view from it was breathtakingly beautiful, with two terraces overlooking the lake and the mountains across it. Aunt Eugenia was already there with three of her sisters and her brother Marco. The five of them were probably not that old then, but they looked very old to me. My grand-mother Amelia had also arrived to shelter there, so that the villa seemed crowded with elderly people, with my mother being the only young one. There was no heating and the winters were extremely cold and we used to spend most of the time in the kitchen on the ground floor, where a fire was burning constantly. One of our activities there was to go up to the nearby woods to gather twigs and larger pieces of wood to burn in the open fire.
Food was scarce and difficult to find and my parents in turn travelled to Milan to find some to bring back; everything was rationed and I remember the very small green tickets used in the small shops in Carate, where we exchanged them for some meagre quantities of everyday provisions. My father, an engineer with Pirelli, had to leave his job, because of the new decrees against the Jews; he then found one or two more jobs, but after some months he also had to leave them.
I was sent to the local school for a little while, but was soon taken out of it, because some children had been abusing me as a Jewish girl, so that my schooling continued by post, where a cousin of my mother, a school teacher, regularly sent me work to do.
Whilst life was increasingly worrying and upsetting for all Jews and in particular for our crowded household, I remember having found in Carate a number of children to play with and our villa, being so big and complicated, with its arched cellar in the basement and two lofts, immediately became the chosen place to play hide and seek. I remember us children running through the villa and the irritated disapproving looks from my grand aunts.
Meanwhile the air raids on Italy continued and we used to hear airplanes flying over us. Lake Como was not a target for the British planes, but important ports, like Genoa, were carefully chosen for destruction. My grand-parents from my mother’s side and their younger daughter lived on the top floor of an apartment block just above Genoa’s port and, after one particular long night air raid, they emerged in the morning from the basement shelter in their pyjamas to see flames coming out of their top floor windows.
I do not remember where they first found shelter, but I do know that they lost absolutely everything they had and that they soon came to join us in Aunt Eugenia’s villa, whilst their daughter, my Aunt Renata remained in Genoa somewhere, since she was working there and managed to stay on a little longer.
To Switzerland
The news from the radio was becoming more and more upsetting and my mother was the first to understand the need to leave fascist Italy as soon as possible, whilst everyone else in the villa thought my mother was exaggerating it all out of proportions. She knew a local family with many small children, to whom she had passed on some of my clothes; the young father of this family was working in the local Fascist Town hall, but, at the same time, to earn some more money, he worked as a “contrabbandiere”, helping persecuted people to find hiding places or to leave Italy all together. We were not the only Jews, who had taken refuge on Lake Como and they all faced the same worrying situation of being taken prisoners by the SS, who had been provided with the addresses of Jewish families by local fascist groups. I remember seeing a small ship on the lake, which was recognisable as being the German Nazi ship, looking for Jews and, in those occasions, we used to quickly walk up to hide in the woods above the villa and then return down many hours later, when the danger seemed to be over. In those walks the only possession I wanted to save was my stamp collection, which regularly came with me to the woods.
The “ contrabbandiere” arranged to accompany us, with the help of a friend, to Switzerland, which was not too far away, just a night’s walk over the mountains, he told us. The day agreed for our night departure was the 30 November 1943 and I remember that just on that night, before we set off on our strange adventure, the radio announced that, from that day onwards, all Jews were to be considered enemies of Italy.
Read the next part of Olga’s story here, at “Entry into neutral Switzerland”
Comment on the story here.
