Duel in the ghetto. The challenge of a Jew against the Nazi-fascist gangs in occupied Rome

Moretto in Rome still remember him. His real name is Pacifico di Consiglio and in 1943 he was the only Roman Jew who stayed in the city during the Nazi occupation to hunt down his persecutors. Amateur boxer, Moretto’s life, like that of many Roman Jews, changes after 1938. But unlike others, Moretto finds a way to rebel. He makes the niece of Luigi Roselli, one of the most ruthless and dangerous Italian collaborators of the Nazis, fall in love and, thanks to the young woman’s information, he challenges the gangs commanded by Colonel Kappler, head of the German police in Rome.

Arrested twice, he always manages to escape by implementing tricks and other intrigues, continuing to fight against hundreds of fascist spies, informers and policemen. The duel in the Ghetto of Rome between Moretto and Roselli is all played out in the Jewish quarter near the Tiber. A handful of streets until a few years before the pride of coexistence and then became the scene of a hunted world: large families hidden in fear of capture, heads of families forced to pay staggering rents to pimp-exploiters, women and children refugees in convents where they often they try to convert them, who survived by chance or luck on October 16 and returned to reside in the Ghetto, challenging fate. For them there is a shortage of food, death is lurking, they cannot trust anyone but the rumors about Moretto show that they can continue to resist.

Amedeo Guerrazzi Osti

Historical. Among his books we remember Cain in Rome. The Roman accomplices of the Shoah (2005) and occupied Rome 1943-1944 (written with Anthony Majanlahti, 2011).