Further to my recent Report, "Ferramonti di Tarsia."- Italian "Kibbutz" during WWII",
I was reminded that one chapter of the most recent book "Under the Southern Sun" by Paul Paolicelli focuses on Ferramonti.

That Chapter was featured in Italian American, Spring '03, published by OSIA.
The nation's most widely read magazine for people of Italian heritage. Vol. VIII no. 2 .

A few excerpts from that Sons of Italy magazine follows.   I was most amused by the "gelato" incident, and most impressed with the "cholera" incident, and amazed by the "survival" rate (except for a "mistake" Allied bombing raid), there appears to have been NO mortalities.

An excellent point is made regarding Ferramonti. Either our Jewish community (as a 'Righteous Gentile' tribute),  the Italian Government, or Calabria Region should rebuild this Monument to Man's Moments of Humanity to Man.
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"UNDER THE SOUTHERN SUN"-
Stories of the Real Italy and the Americans it Created.
By Paul Paolicelli
Ferramonti's Concentration Camp...
A Story of the Southern Italian Character

In his new book, Under the Southern Sun, Paul Paolicelli journeys to Southern Italy to learn about the values of Italian immigrants brought to America more than a century ago. He finds some answers among the ruins of a World War II concentration camp in Calabria. But this was a camp unlike any other.

     I was surprised to hear rumors of a World War II Fascist concentration camp in northern Calabria. My innkeeper's brother had mentioned it in passing. "It was at Ferramonti near Tarsia, just north of Cosenza," he said. "You can still see what's left of it from the highway."

     My research turned up one article, a mention on the Simon Wiesenthal Center's Web site and three books, all by Francesco Folino, but only in Italian and all out of print.

     One day I decided to drive there on my own. Two old and rusted yellow arrows, half hidden with overgrowth pointed out the way.

IL DUCE'S RACIAL LAWS

     ...Earlier in the war, Il Duce had scoffed at Hitler's racism, but by 1938, Mussolini had gone from Hitler's mentor to Hitler's petitioner. He needed help and sacrificed the Jews and other political "undesirables" in Italy to get it.

     The Italian authorities rounded up non-Italian Jews and political enemies whom they sent under guard to a camp in a remote region of the country. But there any similarity to the German camps ends.

     Ultimately, Ferramonti became a place of survival. In fact, almost all of the nearly 4,000 prisoners sent there survived the war. The four who didn't were killed during an Allied bombing raid.

LIFE IN THE CAMP

Once the prisoners settled in, an active barter system sprang up. The townspeople traded their meager far produce for money or the supplies the prisoners received from their Red Cross packets, which the Italian guards never tampered with.

     Most prisoners were physicians, dentists, university professors, rabbis and other highly skilled professionals who had fled to Italy to escape the Nazis. When the town learned about its talented neighbors, locals began sneaking into the camp at night to see the prison's healers whom they preferred to the ones in town.

      At least three stills were set up with the commandant's permission to help the prisoners "keep warm" in inclement weather.

     Several synagogues and other places of worship were established as well as schools for the children. Prisoners often ran errands into Cosenza without guards accompanying them.

     One summer evening, probably in 1943, Gaetano Marrari, the Commandant, and his wife backed a truck into the camp and gathered up dozens of the children.

    By now, the inmates knew of the mass murder of Jews in Poland and Eastern Europe. Rumors ran through the camp that the youngsters were being shipped north. Desperate parents were in tears. A few hours later, however, the children returned safe and sound. The commandant and his wife had taken them to town for a gelato.

[Photo] All that is left of the Fascist camp of Ferramonti di Tarsia which once housed nearly 4000 prisoners.

A CLOSE CALL

    By the fall of 1943, as the Nazis began their retreat from Italy, a German general stopped by the camp to see what was being done to evacuate the prisoners. For the first time in their captivity, the prisoners were in serious danger.

     The lives were saved by a local priest who learned of the impending visit and scurried over to the camp's main gates. There he hurriedly conferred with some of the inmates who quickly took down the Italian flag flying atop the camp's headquarters and ran up a hastily made quarantine pennant in its place.

     When the German officer and his entourage arrived, the priest met them at the front gate and humbly explained  that the General was, of course, more than welcome to enter the camp, but a severe outbreak of cholera there could imperil the officer's health. The German performed a quick about-face and continued on his way north without looking back.  A few days later, the Allies liberated Ferramonti, which then became a displaced persons camp for several years.

A QUESTION OF CHARACTER

     Near Munich, the town of Dachau has become a Mecca for tourists. Its concentration camp's huge brick buildings house artifacts and detailed descriptions of the horror that took place there more than 60 years ago.

      At Ferramonti, a solitary plaque commemorates the camp's 50th anniversary, but no maps highlight the spot and the road signs are so poor that few Calabrians and even fewer outsiders know about it. And yet, Ferramonti stands as a stoic, poignant and ironic monument to the humanity of southern Italy and the madness of war.

     It is a symbol of the innate compassion that shapes the Italian character, forged by a long history of foreign invasion, suffering and domination. In the end, the story of Ferramonti is a story of ice cream on a summer's eve and the southern Italian celebration of life.

Ferramonti
http://www.paulpaolicelli.com/Ferramonti.html
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"Under the Southern Sun" is an OSIA Book Club Selection,
and I would ordinarily "hyperlink" their Site, but since OSIA also has a "Tonelli" selection included, I am "hyperlinking" the Barnes & Noble Site.

Barnes & Noble.com - Under the Southern Sun: Stories of the Real Italy and the Americans It Created

From Publishers Weekly
Like many Americans who identify with cultural hyphenation, Italian-American Paolicelli (Dances with Luigi) has a strong desire to explore his heritage through numerous visits to his grandparents' native southern Italy. What he discovers is much more than traces of his own family tree; it's an obliterated history, hidden by prejudice and bias.

According to Paolicelli, northerners have looked down on the southerners as illiterate, unskilled laborers and considered their dialects to be inferior to the "proper" Italian spoken in the north. The region, however, contains some of Europe's oldest cities (e.g., Matera, in Basilicata, dates back more than 7,000 years) and has produced many successful Italian-Americans, including Jimmy Durante and Mario Cuomo.

Paolicelli also writes about...Ferramonti, a Calabrian (Settlement) camp where... Jews were (confined)...

"Unlike their German counterparts, the Italians... had no anti-Semitic beliefs, no taste or liking for the situation and, in fact, took steps to make the camp as tolerable as possible for all involved." Paolicelli's history is a patchwork of conversations, legends and research. His zeal for the stories he hears is evident in his enthusiastic and easy-to-read prose. The larger narrative, however, is a bit choppy. His numerous visits and lack of chronology make the book more of an account of his personal journey than a serious journalistic pursuit. Reed Business Information Inc.

From Booklist
In an effort to learn more about himself, his family, and the last generation of Italian Americans to have "direct memory and ties with the great diaspora from Italy during the end of the nineteenth and early part of the twentieth centuries," Paolicelli, author of Dances with Luigi (2000), undertakes an illuminating journey of self-discovery.

Traveling through southern Italy in search of the "unique southern sensibility" that informed his grandparents and their offspring, he peels back the layers of a region and a society largely ignored or misunderstood by both historians and modern tourists. In the Mezzogiornio, he travels off the beaten path, investigating the tradition-rich social customs that provided an entire generation of immigrants with the motivation and the drive to succeed in America. Smashing conventional stereotypes of southern Italians, he opens a window onto an essentially unexplored cultural and geographical landscape. Margaret Flanagan, American Library Association.

Book Description
Recently there has been a seemingly endless stream of books praising the glories of ancient and modern Rome, fretting over Venice’s rising tides and moldering galleries, celebrating the Tuscan countryside, wines and cuisine. But there have been curiously few writings that deal directly with Italy as the country of origin for the grand and great-grandparents of nearly twenty-six million Americans.

The greatest majority—more than eight out of ten—of those American descendants of immigrant Italians aren’t the progeny of Venetian doges or Tuscan wealth, but are the diaspora of Southern Italians, people from a place very different than Renaissance Florence or the modern political entity of Rome. Southern Italians, mostly from villages and towns sprinkled about the dramatic and remote countryside of Italian provinces even now tourists find only with determination and rental cars.

In Under the Southern Sun, Stories of the Real Italy and the Americans it Created, journalist Paul Paolicelli takes us on a grand tour of the Southern Italy of most Italian-American immigrants, including Calabria, Basilicata, Puglia, Sicily, Abruzzo, and Molise, and explores the many fascinating elements of Southern Italian society, history, culture.

Along the way, he explores the concept of heritage and of going back to one’s roots, the theory of a cultural subconscious, and most importantly, the idea of a Southern Italian “sensibility” – where it comes from, how it has been cultivated, and how it has been passed on from generation to generation. Amidst the delightful blend of travelogue and journalism are wonderful stories about famous Southern Italian-Americans, most notably Frank Capra and Rudolph Valentino, who were forced to leave their homeland and to adjust, adapt, and survive in America.

He tells the story of the only large (settlement) camp (in Italy)  during World War II and of the humanity of the Southerners who ran the place.

He visits ancient seaside communities once dominated by castles and watchtowers and now bathed in tanning oil and tourists, muses over Matera—what is probably Europe’s oldest and most unknown city – and culminates in a fascinating exploration of how one’s familial memory can influence his or her internal value system.

This book is a celebration of Southern Italy, its people, and what it has given to its American descendents.