Javier Romualdo
Rome (EFE) novel by the writer and priest from Extremadura Jesús Sánchez Adalid, “A light in the night of Rome”.
“Everything had so many doses of romanticism, heroism and generosity that I found it novel and interesting for a plot,” says the author in the heart of the Italian capital’s Jewish quarter during an interview with EFE shortly before presenting his book, published by HarperCollins. .
Renowned author of historical novels, awarded prizes such as the Alfonso X for “Alcazaba”, Sánchez Adalid (Don Benito, 1962) received the first clue to the story in 2019, after the Vatican declassified new documents referring to the papacy of Pius XII .
Those papers described the sophisticated plot hatched by doctors Adriano Ossicini and Giovanni Borromeo, from the Fatebenefratelli Hospital, with the complicity of the Holy See, while Rome was plunged into horror by the arrival of Hitler’s troops.
Syndrome K, the invented pandemic that saved the Jews in Rome
In the autumn of 1943, weeks after the Italian capitulation, the peculiar medical building anchored on the Tiber River, which tourists photograph daily in the direction of the popular Trastevere neighborhood, welcomed dozens of Jews infected with a virus, just as unreal as dangerous, which prevented German soldiers from identifying the patients.
“The hospital is a reference point in the city, all the Romans have known it for centuries. The cure for pandemics, moments of warfare, was developed there… It is more than a thousand years old, it is very old”, highlights the writer.
Some of the supposed patients, the luckiest, even managed to regain their freedom after they were pronounced dead and received documents with a new identity.
“There is still one survivor. He is over 100 years old. I spoke to him on the phone because he had met the protagonists of my plot, ”she recalls.
With the Vatican archives, until now hidden “by the inertia of the Church” regarding the secrets of the past, and the documents of the Steven Spielebrg Foundation and the Italian Government, Sánchez Adalid was able to recreate the life of some of the neighbors who avoided the raid on October 16, 1943, when Gestapo troops entered the Jewish ghetto in Rome.
This is how he found out about the romance between Gina and Betto, whose passionate love affair in one of the darkest stages of the “Città Eterna” ended up shaping the plot of “A light in the night of Rome”.
“At first I was more seduced by the history of the hospital -acknowledges the author, who is used to investigating the Middle Ages and the Golden Age-. But then the protagonists beat me ”.
Betto, one of the few who avoided deportation
Betto was one of the few Jews to avoid deportation. His Sephardic origin and command of Ladino, the Judeo-Spanish language, allowed him to obtain false documentation to pass himself off as Spanish.
After losing his family in a raid, who would later die in Auschwitz, he wandered around Rome until he found refuge in the hospital on Tiber Island.
“Meanwhile, Gina represents the other side of Rome, noble and bourgeois. Families that in some way had contributed to the enthronement of Mussolini and later realized that all the horrors had reached the city through him”, explains Sánchez Adalid.
“He was part of a band of partisans and she also belonged to the Travertino gang, an absolutely illegal association when Mussolini was still in power,” he points out.
In the midst of the tragedy, an intense and forbidden love story arose between them that the novel reconstructs from the testimonies, dates and anecdotes collected by their descendants.
“I have experienced this as a prodigy. I keep wondering how it is possible that he had access to the lives of these two characters ”, concludes Sánchez Adalid, ready to continue exploring contemporary history in his next books.