Donato Di Veroli: The last of Rome’s Jews to survive the Holocaust dies

The 98-year-old survived Auschwitz and Dachau

On 16 October 1943, a raid of Rome’s Jewish households saw 1,023 members of the community arrested and deported to Auschwitz – just 16 of them survived (EPA)

The last Roman Jew to survive the Holocaust has died at the age of 98, the capital’s Jewish community announced this week.

Born in Rome in 1924, Donato Di Veroli was one of eight siblings raised in the central Piazza Campitelli, a stone’s throw away from the city’s Jewish quarter.

He was 14 when, in September 1938, fascist dictator Benito Mussolini announced the implementation of racial laws aimed at discriminating against Italy’s Jewry.

Soon after, the country descended into unapologetic episodes of antisemitism that saw thousands of Jews leave Italy. Di Veroli stayed in Rome despite the increasing anti-Jewish sentiment spreading across the country.

On 16 October 1943, a raid of Rome’s Jewish households saw 1,023 members of the community arrested and deported to Auschwitz – just 16 of them survived.

That day Di Veroli and his brother hid and avoided being sent to Poland, continuing to live in Rome, albeit in fear, until two plain clothes fascist soldiers arrested him in April 1944.

At just 20 years old Di Veroli was deported to Auschwitz where he was forced to work on a fish farm.

“The prisoners there were forced to work in the nude all day, exposed to unsustainable temperatures, in horrific conditions,” said prominent Holocaust historian Marcello Pezzetti in an interview with Shalom, the Jewish community’s official newspaper.

“But his starkest memory was that of the internal selections,” Pezzetti, who interviewed Di Veroli in 1995, recalled. “At night the prisoners returned exhausted, and the Nazis would pick who to send to die in the gas chamber. Donato told me that the hardest test for him was to show he was still able to work.”

Di Veroli was eventually transferred to Dachau in Germany where he was freed by the allied forces along with an estimated 30,000 prisoners.

He was one of 837 Italian Jews out of the more than 7,000 who were deported to make it back home alive. He was known for being reserved and rarely spoke about his experience in Auschwitz. On Monday the community and Italy mourned him.

“Goodbye to Donato Di Veroli, the last Roman Jew to have survived the Shoah. After the liberation, he never spoke of the horrors of Auschwitz but with great courage, he gave life to a family with a strong Jewish identity,” the head of Rome’s Jewish community Ruth Dureghello said.

“Rome mourns the death of Donato Di Veroli, the last Roman Jew to have survived the Shoah. We will not forget the tragedy he lived through, and we commit to teaching his story to future generations,” Rome’s mayor Roberto Gualtieri tweeted.