In the 1930s, my family and I were living under Hitler’s regime in Munich, Germany. As Jews, my parents realized that it was essential for us to leave, but no country would give us asylum. Then a miracle happened–Italy opened its borders. It was 1939 when we finally left, each of us taking only one suitcase and 10 marks.

We went to Milan. My father, a tailor, and my mother, a seamstress, found jobs. I was 15–old enough to be employed as a maid. My brother, who was 12, was too young to work. Since none of us spoke Italian, we needed a lot of help, even to buy groceries.

We had been in Milan for one year when the Italian government (which had formed a full military and political alliance with Germany) began sending foreign Jews to the internment camp Ferramonti in Calabria. The image we have of concentration camps cannot be applied here. We were treated well, had enough food and could approach the guards freely.

One year later the government began assigning Jewish families to villages throughout Italy. My family was told we were going to Villanova d’Asti. My brother had befriended a boy who had no family in the camp. The boy asked my parents to take him with us, which they did. The townspeople, especially our landlady, made us all feel welcome. My parents found work in their trades; I did the housekeeping.

In the fall of 1943 our landlady, Signora Balbiano, came to inform us that Germans had begun arresting Jews in the south of Italy, and suggested that it might be time for us to go into hiding in Zimone, a tiny mountain village in the north. She introduced us to the village priest, who found a barn for us to stay in. The townspeople knew we were living among them, so we were free to come and go and my father was able to continue working as a tailor.

One Sunday the priest told us not to leave the barn because a government search party looking for partisans was on the way. The boy we had brought along did not heed the warning; he sneaked out to the village square to check the time on the church clock tower. When he saw the soldiers, he began to run. The men spotted him and followed him back to our barn. We were all arrested and sent to an Italian prison that was under German command. After two months we were deported in cattle cars to Auschwitz. It took five days to get there. My mother and I survived together, but that was the last time I saw my father and brother. I do not know what happened to the boy.

Now back to Italy 1999. On March 13, Lea’s birthday, we set out to find Zimone. It was noon when we entered the sleepy village. It looked deserted, maybe because it was lunchtime. We found a bar and stopped. I asked the young woman at the counter if she knew anybody who had lived there 55 years ago. All of a sudden an elderly man, who had been sitting at a nearby table, stood up and shouted “Thea!” I thought I had not heard right, but he shouted again, “Questa e Thea, bellissima Thea!” It was Mario, one of my brother’s good friends. We hugged with tears in our eyes. Mario reminisced about the good times we’d had together, like when he, his brother Enrico and Emanuel would take me to the local dances. I had forgotten so much; it was great to listen to those precious memories.

Mario took us to the barn where we had lived for six months, and then to visit Enrico. As I looked at Mario and Enrico I thought: “If my brother had been permitted to grow into a man he could have been here too.” We did a good deed by bringing the boy into our family, and yet his mistake cost my father and brother their lives.

Bianca, Enrico’s wife, invited us to their house for coffee. We met some of the children and grandchildren of the people who had been so generous to us at a time when such generosity placed them in great danger. Mario told me that after the soldiers took us away, the young people of the village went into hiding, afraid they’d be arrested for helping my family. Thank God they never were.

I end my story with one more inexplicable happening that makes the reunion even more magical. Mario wrote after my return home, “Maybe it was destiny that we met again, because at that hour of the day I never leave my home.”