h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Dear Peter,

Your personal recollections felt particularly touching to me, since you happened to live astoundingly close to where my father's family was located during the War, in Porto Valtravaglia.

I'm much younger then you are (born in 1959) and carrying my father Polish name, Lawendel. My mother, doughter to an Italian methodist minister, was born and past her youth in Palermo, my maternal grandfather's mission and moved to Milan in 1947. There he met with my father, after he had finished his studies in chemistry in Basel, Switzerland. It all goes back to when my paternal grandaunt, born in a secularized jewish family in Warsaw (the Minc's) married to an Italian banker in the 20s and moved to Mantua and Milan. Thanks to her Italian relations, my grandmother Teofyla (Tosza) managed to escape by train from an occupied Warsaw and reached Northern Italy together with his son Jan (my father) and his nephew Henryk (my father's first cousin). They spent much of their final years of the War in Porto Valtravaglia, in my grandaunt's Isabella Minc Avanzini villa. There, Henryk met with Isabella's elder daughter, Giuliana, and after his studies in Milan married her and moved with to the United States. Henryk and Giuliana are still with us, they live in Palo Alto, California, and I'm regularly in contact and visiting them (both held important positions in the high-tech industry, she was one of the first employees at the Xerox PARC, a mythological originator of computer science and devices). I can provide you with Giuliana's e-mail if you want.

I wonder if you still remember about the "Polish lady" as my Grandaunt was called in Porto. You might not be aware about the Italian Nobel laureate Dario Fo, who spent his youth in Porto and has recently published an autobiography, "Il paese dei mezarat" (http://www.internetbookshop.it/ser/serdsp.asp?shop=1&c=OEOTN3KOTO5GV), which your flawless Italian will certainly allow you to read and perhaps appreciate (it's definitely not one of Fo's best works). "Mezarat", dialect for "half-mice" or "bats" refers to Porto Valtravaglia inhabitants, known for being, according to Fo's, a bunch of joyful night-timers.

I've been following the thread with the history graduate student on your personal message page here. I know she doesn't read Italian but I'd like to point out to her an interesting and dramatic account of what happened in the Germans occupied Meina (on the Lago Maggiore's opposite shore, in Piedmont, southwest from Porto Valtravaglia), to a group of Italian Jews family at Hotel Meina. They were slaughtered and their bodies disposed of both in the lake waters and in the Hotel's basement burner if I'm not mistaken. Their sad story as Italy's first Shoah victims, has been told by Marco Nozza in "Hotel Meina", published a few years ago and now again available in paperback, http://www.internetbookshop.it/ser/serdsp.asp?shop=1&c=RNO0KUZAX1CET. Hour scholarly friend will certainly find many a reference by contacting, here in Milan, the Fondazione Centro di Documentazione Ebraica Contemporanea (CDEC). Their Web site, http://www.cdec.it/, is in Italian only, but I'm sure curators of their archive will be able to assist in English. A very small number of Auscwitz Italian survivors still lives in Milan and I'm personally acquainted with descendants of Meina's victims.

Curiously, I'm much more involved than this with Northern Italy's history from 1943 to 1945 (in two weeks time Milan will celebrate the 60th anniversary of her liberation). In fact, I'm living with the niece of the late Comitato di Liberazione Nazionale per l'Alta Italia chief and "Special Force" decorated Alfredo Pizzoni. On Mr. Pizzoni - who died in 1958, one year before his niece Maria Vittoria Pizzoni was born - you can read a detailed biography, based on his family ample documents collection, by Tommaso Piffer "Il banchiere della resistenza" (The Resistence banker, http://www.internetbookshop.it/ser/serdsp.asp?shop=1&c=RNOTX0S9WLLEQ).

Please forgive for this lengthy contribution

Andrea (Andy) Lawendel
Milan, Italy

Andrea

I read your post with great pleasure and interest. What a small world! I most certainly will try to get the publications you refer to. I only knew a very few of the inhabitants of Portovaltravaglia. It was where the last two classes of elementary school were held (la quarta e quinta) and I had to go to Porto for them. The cinema was also there as was the doctor. After school I often used to play about in the rowing boats moored in the small harbour which the old boat keeper used to let us hire for an absolute pittance. I think it helped keep them in shape, since there was no tourism.

You may be able to help me, there was a Jewish girl of about my age who lived in Portovaltravaglia, who I then had a silly boyish crush on; I was eleven or twelve, far too shy then to tell her and I would get tongue-tied in her presence. She was called Renata and had lost a hand. I am sure your relatives would have known this young girl with only one hand. She was the only Jewish girl I knew in Portovaltravaglia and I think I last saw her at the end of the war.

That massacre at Meina, in the province of Novara, you mention was carried out by the SS 2nd Regiment (SS-Panzer Regiment) of 1. SS-Panzergrenadier Division Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler in September 1943. In fact there were two massacres: 14 Jews on 15 September and then a further 54, rounded up from Baveno, Stresa, Meina, and Arona, on 23 September 1943.
After this 'marvellous feat of arms' on 22 October 1943 they changed their name to 1.SS-Panzer Division Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler. These cold blooded murderers surrendered in May 1945 to Allied and American forces in Austria where, unbelievably, they were treated as ordinary PoWs.

A book I have and would recommend on Nazi atrocities in Italy, which no doubt you know, is "Le stragi nascoste - L'armadio della vergogna: Impunita e rimozione dei crimini di guerra nazifascisti 1943-2001" by Mimmo Franzinelli published by Mondadori, 2002.

Do post more here Andrea, it will certainly help my fading memory of much I saw in those terrible years. It is a story yet only half told.

Peter