On October 16th, 1943, the German authorities in Rome rounded up all the Jews in the city’s ghetto and transported them to Auschwitz, the Nazi concentration camp.
This was a profoundly shocking moment for the city’s Jewish population. It happened after the Italians had switched sides following the Allied invasion of southern Italy and Benito Mussolini had been deposed.
The Germans occupied Rome in September 1943 and ordered the Roman Jewish community to deliver 50kg of gold to them within two days if they wished to be spared. That was done, but the Germans went back on their promise and three weeks later they rounded up 1,023 Jewish people and sent them to the Auschwitz concentration camp.
Just 16 survived. Among them were Caryna Camerino’s grandfather Enzo, then 16, and Enzo’s brother Luciano (18). They were transferred to Buchenwald concentration camp and escaped shortly before the Americans liberated it in April 1945. As luck would have, they hitched a ride on an American army truck going to Italy with a consignment of coffee. The Camerinos owned a coffee business in Rome before the war.
Enzo and Luciano’s father Italo, his mother Julia, sister Wanda and two of their uncles perished in Auschwitz. Italo died from overwork. The cruelty of the camp guards meant Luciano was forced to shovel his father’s emaciated remains into a pile with other dead inmates at Auschwitz.
Enzo later married another Roman Jew, Silvana Pontecorvo, whose family had a received a tip-off and were absent during the German round-up.
Caryna Camerino’s maternal grandfather and grandmother are also Holocaust survivors. Gilbert Lobelsohn survived a work camp in Romania. Her grandmother Berthe Kaminski was sheltered in Vichy France by neighbours.
It is not unusual for the descendants of European Jews to have Holocaust survivors on both sides of the family, but it is unusual in Ireland where the country’s small Jewish population were spared the worst horrors of the second World War because of Irish neutrality.
Camerino was born in Montreal, Canada, where her parents met. She first moved to Ireland in 2002 during the Celtic Tiger era. What was meant to be a two-day layover from a European backpacking adventure has been a two-decade odyssey. She began “stress baking” after the Celtic Tiger collapsed using recipes from her cosmopolitan Jewish upbringing, took a stall in Ranelagh farmers’ market in 2008 and then opened a wholesale business in 2011, followed by the Camerino bakery in Dublin’s Capel Street in 2014. She now runs the prestigious cafe franchise at the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA) in the Royal Hospital Kilmainham.
Since 2018 she has become involved in Holocaust Education Ireland, travelling around schools telling them about her family’s experience – making it real for a generation of children who only know about it through the textbooks.
“It is typical of families like mine to have so few relatives. There is surviving the Holocaust and there is living after the Holocaust. My parents grew up with very few aunts, uncles or grandparents. I have only three cousins,” she says.
Camerino was raised in a big Jewish community in Montreal which included songwriter-poet Leonard Cohen, an acquaintance of her father. Enzo Camerino concealed his Jewishness when he first moved to Canada, but gradually became an advocate for Holocaust awareness. He returned to Auschwitz in 2004 and on the 70th anniversary of the round-up of Roman Jews in 2013, he met with Pope Francis in Rome. This was much to the surprise of Camerino, who found out about it on Facebook and their extended family. They assumed he was in a nursing home in Canada and on dialysis.
Enzo Camerino died on his birthday in December 2014.
“He really believed that the only way to protect people from going through in the future was to make sure people really learn about it and not just read it in a book,” his granddaughter says.
“They need to study what happened and I would say to remember to pay attention as to how it gradually became the Holocaust and started with intolerance and dehumanising people. That danger still exists today.
“You are still the same people with the same potential to do good or bad. When they see or hear something intolerant, whether it be anti-Semitic, racist or homophobic, speak up.”
It is a message she too brings to schools around the country. The lesson of the Holocaust is that the capacity for evil lurks in all of us, she believes. The philosopher Hannah Arendt famously used the phrase “the banality of evil” to describe Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi who was hanged in Israel in 1962 for his Holocaust crimes.
“I don’t think anti-Semitic or Jewish people are any kind of a different human being. Everybody has the potential to do terrible things, but also good things like the family who hid my grandmother and her family,” she says.
The October 7th Hamas attack on Israel, killing 1,200 people, and Israel’s retaliatory attacks against Gaza since then, killing more than 25,000 people, have brought a new wave of anti-Semitism around the world. Recently the first question she was asked about at a school in Bunclody, Co Wexford, was about the conflict in Gaza. Jewish people, she told them, have differing opinions on what is going on.
“It gives me the opportunity to show there is a difference between being Jewish and being Zionist, being Jewish and being Israeli or between Israelis and the Israeli government. I think that there are not very many Jewish people here in Ireland so it easy to misunderstand,” says Camerino, who didn’t wish to share her own opinions on the conflict in Gaza.
She admits to a “low-level nervousness” being Jewish in Ireland where the community is so small.
“I still don’t write my religion on my census form. It’s kind of tokenistic because I’m in Ireland and I’m talking about being Jewish. If people wanted to find me, they could find me, but I’m especially concerned for my son who is Jewish and is born here.”
National Holocaust Memorial Day will be marked on Sunday, January 28th, from 4pm to 6pm in the Dublin Royal Convention Centre on 1 Ship Street Great behind Dublin Castle
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