Isola Maggiore
Arriving at the truth
Luigi Lana, commander of the internment camp
On the back cover of my novel An Honourable Man appears the following resumeé.
According to the former mayor of a small town in Umbria, in a daring escapade carried out on a June night in 1944 in German-occupied Italy, he and a group of fellow partisans rescued some Jews from a concentration camp on a small island in the middle of Lake Trasimeno, thus saving them from deportation to the gas chambers of the Third Reich.
But history is always written by the victors, and the son of the Fascist camp commander, who knows that the truth was quite different, is determined to make his voice heard before he dies. His political opponents have always shrugged off his testimony and it is only after an enquiry sparked off by the chance discovery of an early Jewish manuscript in the University of Perugia that they are finally forced to face up to the truth.
According to the former mayor of a small town in Umbria, in a daring escapade carried out on a June night in 1944 in German-occupied Italy, he and a group of fellow partisans rescued some Jews from a concentration camp on a small island in the middle of Lake Trasimeno, thus saving them from deportation to the gas chambers of the Third Reich.
But history is always written by the victors, and the son of the Fascist camp commander, who knows that the truth was quite different, is determined to make his voice heard before he dies. His political opponents have always shrugged off his testimony and it is only after an enquiry sparked off by the chance discovery of an early Jewish manuscript in the University of Perugia that they are finally forced to face up to the truth.
An invaluable testimony
Guido Lana 2002
When collecting material for The Trasimene Line in December 1999 I had the privilege of interviewing Guido Lana. From the end of February 1944 until June of that year his father Luigi had been the commander of the internment camp for Jews and political prisoners which had been established on Isola Maggiore, an island in Lake Trasimeno. I reported the results of the interview in my book and by May 2004, when the Italian version came out, what Guido had said was available for all to read. The problem with the testimony was that it challenged a version of the events which had taken place on the island in June 1944 and which for sixty years had been the cornerstone of Resistance literature in the Trasimeno area.
When late in 2005 a volume by Leopoldo Boscherini called La Persecuzione deli Ebrei a Perugia, sponsored by the Comune of Castiglione del Lago in the series 'Storia e Territorio', put forward the old story once again I decided to challenge the status quo. I wrote to a local newspaper, Prima Pagina, suggesting that it had been Luigi Lana who had actually saved the internees on Isola Maggiore from deportation. This led to a threat being made against me and the newspaper editor - we would be taken to court.
Fortunately before writing to the newspaper I had contacted the priest of Sanfatucchio, don Remo Serafini, a local historian. He told me that two other persons who were also investigating the matter – Gelardo Radi, ex-sindaco of Tuoro, now unfortunately deceased, and Gianfranco Cialini, Curator of the Ancient Books Collection at the University of Perugia. Radi had collected a considerable number of testimonies which have since been published, all of which substantiated what Guido Lana had told me. Dottor Cialini was in the process of conducting an in-depth investigation, during which he unearthed invaluable documentation in the National Archives in Rome and the Diocesan Museum in Perugia. For my part I visited the National Archives in London and found the exact date of the arrival of the allies at Sant'Arcangelo. In brief, the threat of court action dissipated into thin air.
My book Gli Ebrei di Isola Maggiore (The Jews of Isola Maggiore) is a presentation of the evidence found by all three of us. There have been no more threats, but I was told in March 2011 at the opening of the Museo della Memoria at Assisi (devoted to how various people in the town had helped the Jews to stay undetected there between '34 and '45) that the time is not yet ripe to state that the Jews on Isola Maggiore were actually saved by a Fascist. Moreover, the co-operative which ran the Lace Museum on the island, after initially agreeing to sell my book, e-mailed me to say that they had had to withdraw it because I wasn't registered for VAT. I asked the Muesum, run by another agency, to consider putting it on sale in the same way that it is already on sale in local bookshops.They never replied.