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Eyewitness: Pope Pius XII Saved Jews In Lisbon From Nazi Threat; (400 Jews ship to Hispanola)

Aide to papal nuncio, now 94, recounts dramatic appeal to Dominican strongman for visas; expert sees ?more complicated picture? of Holocaust-era pope.

Walter Ruby - Special To The Jewish Week

Will fresh evidence change Jewish attitudes toward Pius XII?

Monsignor Giovanni Ferrofino remembers the event vividly, though it occurred in Port- au-Prince, Haiti, nearly 65 years ago. As secretary to Archbishop Maurillio Silvani, the papal nuncio, Ferrofino was on duty in February 1942 when a secret message arrived from the second most powerful man in the Vatican.

Writing in code, Luigi Cardinal Maglione, the Vatican secretary of state, explained that he was acting on the instructions of Pope Pius XII. He then instructed Silvani to immediately contact Gen. Rafael Leonidas Trujillo, dictator of the neighboring Dominican Republic, and appeal to him to grant visas to 400 Jewish refugees stranded in Lisbon, Portugal, and desperate to get out. They feared the Germans might soon invade and occupy that country, a concern that proved false.

It was Ferrofino who expertly translated the coded message into Italian and, with considerable excitement, brought it to the nuncio.

The Jews in question had earlier tried to get visas to the United States but had been rebuffed by U.S. officials. Now the pope apparently hoped that Trujillo, a megalomaniacal strongman whose country bordered Haiti, could be convinced to help the refugees.

Silvani, who was also accredited to the Dominican Republic, contacted the Dominican ambassador in Port-au-Prince and explained the pope?s request. ?Trujillo will never say ?No? to the pope,? the ambassador replied, according to Ferrofino. ?But it is well known that the only way one can ask for such a favor is in person.?

In other words, Silvani and Ferrofino would have to travel to the Dominican capital, Ciudad Trujillo (now Santo Domingo), to appeal to Trujillo in person.

Today, 94 and living in retirement in Maussane-les-Alpilles, France, Ferrofino described what happened next ? a dramatic tale that ended in Trujillo granting the 400 visas for the Jews stranded in Lisbon ? during two recent phone conversations with The Jewish Week.

Ferrofino?s account of Pius? intervention with Trujillo was first reported by Sister Margherita Marchione, a New Jersey-based nun, in a little-read 2002 book called ?Consensus and Controversy: Defending Pope Pius XII? (Paulist Press). In his Jewish Week interviews, the retired prelate fleshed out an episode potentially of great significance to the future of Jewish-Catholic relations.

Pius XII, a highly controversial figure who reigned as pope from 1939-1958, is widely seen in the Jewish community as having stood by passively as Hitler murdered 6 million Jews.

If verified, Ferrofino?s story would appear to indicate that on at least one occasion Pius launched a personal initiative to help save Jews whose lives he believed to be in peril.

The incident may also become part of a public relations blitz by the Vatican leading to a possible early decision by Pope Benedict XVI to beatify his predecessor Pius XII, the first step toward canonization and full sainthood.

Signaling that such an effort may be imminent, Cardinal Walter Kaspar, head of the Vatican Office for Dialogue with Jews, told the Catholic weekly Il Consulente Re in an interview in its July 19 edition that Pius XII ?did what was humanly possible? to protect Jews from Nazi persecution during the years of World War II. Kaspar?s comments were widely construed by observers to be a trial balloon to gauge the likely reaction of world Jewry if the Vatican goes ahead with long-delayed plans to beatify Pius.

Asked about Kaspar?s comments, Rabbi David Rosen and Israel Singer, respectively president and chairman of the International Jewish Committee on Interreligious Consultations (IJCIC), the principal Jewish body empowered to dialogue with the Vatican, indicated in separate interviews that few in the Jewish community would react warmly to a decision by the Vatican to beatify Pius. But, they said, such a step would not cause a serious rupture in what each characterized as the positive and mutually beneficial relationship between the Vatican and world Jewry.

Two other well-known leaders with expertise on the Holocaust differed on how much significance should be given to new pieces of evidence like the Trujillo story?especially given what many Jewish leaders charge has been a recalcitrant response by the Vatican to longstanding Jewish appeals for impartial scholars to be allowed to sift through the wartime pontiff?s overall Holocaust record.

?I don?t think this story is sufficient to change Jewish perception of Pius XII, but it would complicate the picture,? said Michael Berenbaum, former director of the United States Holocaust Museum Research Institute and president of the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation. ?If proven, it would show that Pius took an action that resulted in 400 Jews being alive who might otherwise have been killed. It turns out they were safe in Portugal, but no one knew that at the time.?

Berenbaum added, ?The Jewish perception has long been that, during the Holocaust, the Vatican didn?t mind Jews being killed, and the pope, for his own reasons, had a record of complicity and cooperation [with Hitler]. That?s too simplistic a picture.

?I?m not arguing that Pius should be enshrined as a righteous among the nations, but I?m arguing you have to look at a more complex picture without in any way apologizing for Pius. This story would add to the complexity.?

Abraham Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League, who was himself saved from the Nazis as an infant by a Polish nanny who baptized and raised him as a Catholic during the war years, took a tougher line.

?If the [Pius-Trujillo] story is true, it will be one more piece of evidence in the whole picture ? that we can put on the scale along with everything else in order to make a judgment. However, it?s a little suspicious that the Vatican won?t open the files [on Pius XII in the Vatican Archives], so scholars can go through the evidence, but instead selectively releases documents showing that Pius was a great tzaddik. That creates a skewed picture.?

The Long Road To Cuidad Trujillo

Giovanni Ferrofino, who speaks fluent and articulate English, vividly remembers the two-day, 250-mile trip from Haiti over poor roads under a blazing sun that he made together with Silvani. It was ?torture, especially for the 60-year-old nuncio, who was in ill health,? he said.

?After arriving in the capital, we were taken to see Trujillo at one of his nearby fincas [plantations],? Ferrofino said. ?We found him on his horse, inspecting the sugar cane crop. When the general saw us coming, he waved and was about to dismount, but Silvani gestured to him that he could stay where he was. Trujillo raised his right arm and with a broad smile, said, ?Yes, I will stay on my horse,? which was one of the propaganda slogans then associated with him.

?Trujillo then told us that he knew why we had come and, as he could not refuse an appeal of the pope, would grant the 400 visas immediately.?

Ferrofino said that Trujillo then elucidated a condition that would presumably not be to the liking of the Jewish refugees; namely that they would not be allowed to stay in Ciudad Trujillo, the capital city, but would have to make their homes in remote mountainous country along the Haitian frontier to help guard the border against desperately poor and hungry Haitians then pouring into the Dominican Republic.

Nevertheless, Ferrofino said, ?The visas were issued and within a few weeks, the 400 refugees arrived in the Dominican Republic. Yet all but two of them quickly left the country and headed by ship for Cuba and Mexico where, with the help of the nuncio in Mexico City, they were given assumed names. Many of them then crossed the border into the United States, the land that originally denied their entrance. All of this happened thanks to Pius XII.?

Ferrofino said that the two refugees who chose not to leave the Dominican Republic, an ?attractive blonde? ballerina from Vienna and her husband, soon thereafter came to Port-au-Prince to ask Silvani to help them secure permission to stay in Ciudad Trujillo, where they desired to open a ballet school. According to Ferrofino, Silvani warned the couple that Trujillo, who micromanaged every aspect of life in the country, would have to sign off on such a request, and it was well known that ?Trujillo will only help beautiful women who give him something in return.?

Ferrofino remembers that the woman ?turned pale and looked at the floor? after hearing that, but not long thereafter, she opened a ballet school in the Dominican capital named Flor d?Oro, in honor of Trujillo?s daughter. In 1944, on the 100th anniversary of Dominican Republic?s independence from Haiti, the school?s students, who came from the best families in the capital, gave a glittering performance attended by the entire diplomatic corps, including Ferrofino himself.

Pius? Holocaust Record

The longstanding controversy over Pius XII?s record during the Holocaust, which extends back to the premiere of Rolf Hochhuth?s bitterly anti-Pius play, ?The Deputy,? in 1963, has remained in stasis since 2001. At that time, a committee of Jewish and Catholic scholars appointed by IJCIC and the Vatican to issue a report on Pius and the Jews broke apart after several of the scholars concluded it would be impossible to reach a definitive conclusion until the Vatican opens its archives to independent scholars. The Vatican has promised to open the archives but only after all documents from Pius? papacy have been catalogued, a process expected to take years to complete.

Even Pius? most ardent defenders acknowledge he remained publicly silent about Nazi persecution and genocide against the Jews until late 1944, likely out of fear that an open condemnation of German brutalization of the Jews might have led Hitler to turn against the Vatican itself. Yet there remain deep divisions among scholars as to whether or not the pope took a leadership role in behind-the-scenes Catholic efforts to save Jews.

Susan Zuccotti, author of ?Under His Very Windows; The Vatican and the Holocaust in Italy? (Yale University Press, 2000), a highly critical account of Pius? behavior, says that while tens of thousands of Jews were succored by Catholic institutions across Europe during the Holocaust years, including 4,000 who were hidden in Rome itself during the German occupation of the Eternal City in 1943-44, ?there is absolutely no evidence of a papal order or instructions of any kind. There is no written or oral record of such.?

However, Father David Jeager, an expert on Vatican canonical law and an Israeli-born convert to Catholicism, says of the rescue of Jews by Catholic institutions in Rome: ?Anyone who has any acquaintance with the laws and culture of the Catholic Church at that time would understand those things could not have taken place without specific orders of the pope, and those orders could not have been in written form.?

Why Appeal To Trujillo?

If Pius was indeed inclined to save Jewish refugees in 1942, it is logical he would have appealed to Trujillo for help. After all, the Dominican Republic was the only country in the world that agreed to accept Jewish refugees as permanent residents in the wake of the Evian Conference, an international conclave held in France in 1938 to consider what to do about growing numbers of Jewish refugees fleeing Germany and Austria.

Trujillo, who was apparently intent on refurbishing his tattered image in the U.S. after his army slaughtered thousands of Haitian squatters, offered to grant 50,000 to 100,000 visas to Jewish refugees, although fewer than 1,000 Jews ended up settling in the Dominican Republic.

Sister Marchione, an 85-year-old nun at the Order of the Religious Teachers Fillippini in Morristown, N.J., has written five books in defense of Pius? behavior during the Holocaust. She is hoping publication of Ferrofino?s account in Jewish media may lead Jews who passed through the Dominican Republic in 1942 or their descendants to offer testimony that will help confirm the story. ?I hope some of those people will read this article and step forward to help answer the defamation against a great and good man,? she said.

A search with agencies such as the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS) and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum has so far failed to produce corroborating evidence of Ferrofino?s principal claims. But tantalizing evidence has emerged in recent weeks appearing to confirm his account of the Jewish ballerina who stayed on in Ciudad Trujillo.

Oisiki Ghitis, religious director of the tiny Jewish community in the Dominican Republic, told The Jewish Week that at least two members of the community confirmed to him that an Austrian Jewish ballerina named Herta Brawer indeed ran a ballet school in Ciudad Trujillo during World War II and its immediate aftermath.

Ghitis cited a community member named Picho Brauer (no relation to Herta Brawer), who said that his own sisters attended Brawer?s ballet school. Brauer claims that Brawer sold the ballet school in 1948 to a dancer from Hungary and moved to Puerto Rico.

In addition, The Jewish Week was able to confirm a related claim featured in Sister Marchione?s book that is based on a document published in the official Vatican records of its affairs during World War II ? namely that soon after granting visas to the 400 Jewish refugees in Lisbon, Trujillo offered to transport to the Dominican Republic 3,500 Jewish children who were trapped in southern France.

The document, published in 1974 in Volume 8 of the 12-volume ?Actes et Documents du Saint Siege Relaitif le Deuxieme Guerre Mondiale? (Acts and Documents of the Holy See Relative to the Second World War), is dated Sept. 19, 1942 and is addressed to Vatican Secretary of State Maglione from Msgr. Paolo Bertoli, the new Vatican charge d?affaires in Port-au-Prince (Silvani had in the meantime been appointed Vatican nuncio in Chile).

In the document, Bertoli asserts that the newspapers of Haiti and the Dominican Republic ?have spoken at various times of the protests the Holy See presented ? to the French government of Vichy with regard to recent laws and dispositions adopted in that country against the Jews. In that regard I hasten to inform your eminence that the President of the Dominican Republic has offered hospitality to 3,500 Jewish children between the ages of 3 and 14 belonging to the Jewish population of unoccupied France.?

Yet despite asserting that Trujillo?s offer to the children was ?thanks to Pius XII?s intercession,? Sister Marchione acknowledged to The Jewish Week that she has no hard evidence this was the case.

Asked to check for corroborating evidence of the claim concerning the 3,500 children in the archives of HIAS, an agency that helped thousands of Jews to escape France from 1940-42, Valery Bazarov, director of the HIAS? Family History Service, found a letter dated Oct. 28, 1942, from Dominican Consul-General in Marseilles Marcel Borde to the office of HIAS in that city.

In the letter, Borde confirmed that Trujillo had recently contacted Marshall Henri Petain, head of the government of Vichy France, offering to take 3,500 Jewish children to the Dominican Republic and pay for the cost of their voyage.

Tragically, however, the planned evacuation of Jewish children to the Dominican Republic appears never to have happened. On Nov. 11, 1942, only two weeks after Borde dispatched his letter to HIAS, German troops occupied southern France and quickly rounded up thousands of Jews there for deportation to the death camps. n