DELASEM
In 1942, the "DELASEM dei Piccoli" was founded in Florence, with the specific purpose of giving assistance to children internees, offering them books, medical care, toys and clothes.
At Villa Emma Nonantola, the delegate DELASEM Mario Finzi, in collaboration with Father Arrigo Beccari and the Dr. Giuseppe Moreale organized an orphanage model that, for about a year, welcomed a group of a hundred children from Germany and the Balkans.
Defined by the Italian Social Republic as "foreign enemies" in November of that year by the Manifesto of Verona, over 6,000 Jews (men, women and children) would be deported from Italy and murdered in the extermination camp at Auschwitz.
[1] Lelio Vittorio Valobra, helped by Raffaele Cantoni and Massimo Teglio, made contact with Cardinal Pietro Boetto, who headed the diocese of Genoa, and he instructed his secretary Father Francesco Repetto that the work could continue and DELASEM be provided with material assistance and shelter Jews, both Italians and foreigners.
The office Lungo Tevere Sanzio had to be closed but DELASEM continued to operate in Rome until the liberation under the leadership of the Jewish delegates Septimius Sorani, Giuseppe Levi, and the Capuchin Father Maria Benedetto.
The Convento dei Cappuccini (Capuchin Convent) became the headquarters of the committee and the flow of funding was restored by using the mediation of the ambassadors of Great Britain and the United States of America at the Vatican, in addition to Father Maria Benedetto going twice to Genoa, returning to Rome with large sums of money.
[5] The collaboration between Massimo Teglio (a Jewish leader) and Cardinal Pietro Boetto of the Genoa Curia functioned as the central deployment of international aid to the Jews in north-central Italy during the entire period German occupation.
[5] To act as couriers between Genoa and the Jews in central and northern Italy were Raffaele Cantoni (until his expatriation), Mario Finzi (until his arrest and deportation) and Giorgio Nissim (that continued to operate in Tuscany throughout the war period) and a group of priests for which Father Repetto dispose a precise program of travel to deploy funds received from Switzerland.
Even amid many difficulties, DELASEM showed great effectiveness in providing assistance for the maintenance, housing, and in many cases the illegal emigration to Switzerland of some 35,000 Italian and foreign Jews who survived persecution in Italy.
Due to the efforts of Father Arrigo Beccari and Giueseppi Moreali, in less than 36 hours upon arrival of the Germans in September 1943, more than a hundred residents of the DELASEM orphanage were hidden among the families of the area and subsequently transferred illegally to Switzerland.
The book Fields of the Duce: the civilian internment in Fascist Italy (1930–1943), by Charles Spartacus Capogreco, details this escape, and 2004 television movie The Flight of the Innocents was made by European station RAI.
