“The SS wandered around the courtyard pointing their guns and shouting orders in German, those who didn’t understand were immediately hit with rifle butts.
I couldn’t bear that gratuitous violence anymore, so I turned to the person I guessed was the commander of that operation. He was a very young captain; he was called Theo Dannecker. […] I spoke to him in German and told him I would gladly be his interpreter…”

“They placed us in groups in the Military College’s various lecture halls. In the late afternoon, an order arrived stating that there would be a specific selection to free Catholics who had ended up there by mistake, as well as children of mixed marriages.
Dannecker called me over, he made me climb on top of a table next to him, I had to translate his words: ‘Who is not a Jew, stand in line here; if I find a Jew who has the courage to claim not to be one, the minute I discover the lie, the liar will be eliminated. And we Germans are not in the habit of playing around.”

“There were also two women who told me they and their family had just escaped from Ferrara: Bianca Ravenna Levi and her daughter Piera. They had gone to stay with relatives in Rome, certain that this city was safer, as were many people in the North: everyone thought the Allies would soon arrive to protect them. They were clearly running a great risk due to their identity cards, […]
Bianca’s sister Alba, was also with them, arrested with her husband and son. When Alba heard of the selection of half-Jews, she pushed her sister and niece forward, so they could exploit the fact that they were not on the registers of Roman Jews. Her gesture managed to save them, while she and the rest of her family did not return.”

“A total of 252 people were freed. Whereas I remember the courage of a non-Jewish Italian woman, the nurse of a young Jewish man with epilepsy, who didn’t want to be separated from him and so suffered our same fate. She did not return.”