Robbins: A journalist’s quest to document evil & courage

The eruption and metastasis of anti-Semitism emanating from both far Left and far Right has prompted some to point to the poor and worsening state of Americans’ knowledge about the 20th century’s genocide against the Jews. The ignorance, particularly woeful among younger Americans, is widespread.

A Pew survey found that fewer than one-half of Americans knew that six million Jews were murdered in the Holocaust. Barely four in ten knew that Adolf Hitler had come to power through a democratic political process. Anyone with even an attenuated relationship to our educational system knows how miserable a job we do teaching our children about the genocide of European Jewry: how it came about, how it was justified, how it was implemented and how many people looked the other way while it occurred. Like a chicken returning to roost, the effects of these failures can be seen all around us today – on social media, on campuses and in the streets.

When local journalist Judith Monachina began interviewing Holocaust survivors in her native western Massachusetts 20 years ago, she didn’t imagine that what began as her personal curiosity about their lives would lead to a groundbreaking book on Jewish Italians who had survived Fascist Italy during World War II. Monachina’s book, “Days of Memory: Listening to Jewish Italians Who Lived Through Fascism and the Holocaust,” is a testament to her ability to earn the trust of survivors who were traumatized by enduring what no one should endure. “I didn’t know how much a person could hurt,” Monachina says about those who had loved ones slaughtered, and who had flee from those who would slaughter them if they could. “In order to do these interviews with me, they’d have to relive it.”

But though she’s disinclined to be the story, Monachina’s book is inevitably also the personal story of a community journalist’s rather gritty and somewhat improbable determination to document the history of a segment of Fascism’s victims whose lives have garnered relatively little attention. Monachina is not herself Jewish. She had few resources and no connections with which to commence her research and conduct the interviews necessary to complete this increasingly personal project.

She read books and attended programs in her spare time, asked virtual strangers if they knew people she could talk to, and scraped together the funds with which to make over 15 trips to Italy to ask the questions she had wanted to ask of the people she learned about. Over the two decades she made this her life’s work, she had plenty of reason to doubt that it would come to fruition.

But it has.

Monachina, the daughter of a Catholic father and an Episcopalian mother, was animated by one particular question: “Who were the adoring people in the squares when (Italian Fascist leader Benito) Mussolini jutted his chin and talked of glory? How does something like this happen?” Asked how she persevered on a project that seemed so quixotic, Monachina invokes those who had opened themselves up to her in the last phase of their lives, recounting what they had experienced 60 or 70 years earlier, so that they could be heard and so that it did not happen again. “I felt responsible because people had sat with me, and I felt that I should do something,” she says. “It didn’t feel right not to do anything.”

Unsurprisingly, Monachina thinks a good deal about creeping Fascism at home. “It occurred to me,” she writes about one story, “that the Holocaust, associated with brutal arrest and transport to death camps, began also in peoples’ living rooms.” And Italians’ support for Mussolini and what he offered feels too close to home. “There are,” she says, “similarities with our current time, and that is haunting. The Left was unreasonable and the Right was unreasonable, and I see that here.”

Jeff Robbins’ latest book, “Notes From the Brink: A Collection of Columns about Policy at Home and Abroad,” is available now on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Apple Books and Google Play. Robbins, a lawyer, is a longtime columnist for the Herald, writing on politics, national security, human rights and the Mideast.