Remembrance day, that parish that saved 15 Jewish girls

Vatican Radio - Vatican News celebrates the Holocaust Memorial Day with a video story unearthed from the days of Nazi terror in Rome, when in October 1943 a group of Jewish girls found escape between a convent and a parish connected by a secret passage.

And celebrates it with images of Papa Francesco that mute and with his head bowed he wanders among the avenues of Auschwitz extermination camp in 2016.

The unearthed story is about this group of Jewish girls who drew all the time they were forced to take refuge in a narrow, dark tunnel under the bell tower of Santa Maria ai Monti to distract yourself from the clatter of soldiers' boots on the cobblestones, during the horrible October 1943.

Above all they drew faces: those of mothers and fathers so as not to let terror or time cloud their memory, those of dolls lost in the flight, the face of Queen Esther holding a kalla in her hand, the bread of the offering.

They wrote their names and surnames, Matilde, Clelia, Carla, Anna, Aida. They were fifteen, the youngest was 4 years old. They saved themselves by hiding in a space six meters long and two meters wide at the highest point of this sixteenth-century church in the heart of ancient Suburra, a few steps from the Colosseum. There were distressing hours that sometimes turned into days. Between walls and arches they moved like shadows to escape soldiers and informers.

Helped by the "cappellone" nuns and the then parish priest, Don Guido Ciuffa, escaped roundups and certain death in the abyss of the concentration camps that swallowed up the lives of their families. The same ones who had the heart to entrust them to the Daughters of Charity in the then Convent of the Neophytes. Mixed with students and novices, at the first sign of danger, they were led to the parish through a communicating door.

That door today is a concrete wall in the catechism hall. "I always explain to the children what happened here and above all what must never happen again," he told Vatican News Don Francesco Pesce, parish priest of Santa Maria ai Monti for twelve years. Ninety-five steps up a dark spiral staircase. The girls walked up and down the tower, alone, in turn, to retrieve food and clothes and take it to their companions, who were waiting on the concrete dome that covers the apse.

The same used as an attraction in the rare moments of play, when the chants of the Mass drowned out the noises. “Here we have touched the height of pain but also the height of love”, says the parish priest.

“An entire ward has been busy and not only Catholic Christians, but also the brothers of other religions who kept silent and continued in the work of charity. In this I see a preview of the Brothers all ”. They were all saved. From adults, to mothers, wives, grandmothers, they continued to visit the parish. One until a few years ago, climbing up to the shelter as long as her legs allowed. She was elderly and she stopped in front of the sacristy door on her knees and wept. Just like 80 years ago.