An excerpt from Judith Monachina’s Days of Memory

By Albert Stern / BJV Editor

Judith Monachina of Stockbridge was a community journalist in the Berkshires when she began to interview people about the Italian Holocaust in 2000. In covering community news for the now-defunct publication The Advocate, she would occasionally write about Holocaust memoirs published during those years – many, she remembers, were being written as survivors aged and wanted to ensure that their stories were not lost.

She recalls attending a lecture in Pittsfield by Daniel Goldhagen, author of the landmark expose Hitler’s Willing Executioners, who talked about the Holocaust history of Italy. Monachina, whose father’s family is of Italian descent, knew nothing about those events and was spurred to find out more. In order to understand the primary documents, she studied Italian and met a woman in her class who conducted an exchange program between high schoolers in Lenox and Rome.

Her earliest interview with a survivor, Maria Perla Ajo, took place in Gubbio, Italy, on one of the students’ trips to Italy. This led to more interviews in the US and Italy, where she conducted research on a Fulbright Fellowship in 2007 and researched the lives and memories of individuals from the Jewish community in fascist Milan. She studied at the primary Holocaust archive in Italy: The Center for the Documentation of Contemporary Jewish History (CDEC).

Monachina collected her experiences in the just-published Days of Memory: Listening to Jewish Italians Who Lived Through Fascism and the Holocaust. The book took close to two decades to come together, and was nurtured by the late Marc Jaffe, the accomplished editor who retired to Williamstown and supported many Berkshire writers. Days of Memory was one of the last projects he worked on before he passed in 2024 at age 102.

In Italy, Monachina worked with Liliana Picciotto, the foremost historian of the Italian Holocaust, who co-wrote the essential volume on that period, The Book of Memory. In this excerpt from Monachina’s Days of Memory, she describes Picciotto’s method of interviewing survivors and how these necessary stories have come to be told, recorded, and archived for the historical record. Picciotto understands she is in a race against time as the events of World War II are soon to fade from living memory, and so is aggressive in her efforts to record the truth.

It was difficult, in the post-Oct. 7 reality, reading about Picciotto’s life’s work chronicling the experiences of survivors – one once had the sense that, with the success and security the State of Israel had experienced in recent decades, the Jewish people would no longer need this kind of forensic historian. One of the most disheartening realizations for me post-Oct. 7 was that, 20 or 30 or 40 years hence, there will be historians like Liliana Picciotto working with survivors to document the stories and legacy of the Hamas pogrom and the war in Gaza. In her book, Monachina provides a sharp portrait of Picciotto and, in telling her story, also suggests how future historians are likely to draw on techniques developed by Holocaust researchers when talking about trauma.

And that adds an additional layer of heartbreak to the story Judith Monachina tells so well.

From Days of Memory, by Judith Monachina

In the early 1990s, Liliana finished Il Libro della Memoria (The Book of Memory). She had found and processed thousands of hand-written correspondence and government records, come up with a list, names of Jews who were deported from Italy, the circumstances of their deportation, and their fates. A list of people, most of them killed.

“In the early 1990s most of the people did not want to speak at all. In the ’70s and ’80s nobody spoke, nobody,” Liliana said. “They came little by little to speak. Now they speak and write books and go into schools. It was their age that compelled them.” They realized they might die without having told their story. When they came around, they did it all at once. Liliana also began to videotape interviews with a hundred people who had been deported, the project that resulted in the film Memoria.

“At the same time, a cultural shift occurred in Italy. The story of the individual became interesting to people. Perhaps it was television,” she said, that made the individual story as interesting as the epochal story of a group, a political party, or a big idea. “The story of an individual – his suffering and his experience – this era of testimony coincided with the aging of the survivors and their need to get the story told.” She interviewed people at their homes; then at their childhood homes in Florence, Rome, and Milan; and then she went to Auschwitz with them. All of this took time, and it was emotionally draining for both parties.

Liliana remembered deciding that the interviews would be regimented, not meandering conversations but specific data gathering experiences, each three or four hours long. When she spoke about it, her voice went staccato.

“If you know the history exactly, you can make the questions that specific, and he cannot avoid, he cannot choose. He must respond to that which you have asked him. Then if you ask him, ‘Which morning? How many of you were in the house? At what hour? Who came? What was the weather? What things did they put into the suitcase?’... such precise questions, he cannot glide over.

“Therefore, each and every question is so made: ‘How did you got off the train? To the left or to the right? What did you see? What was the weather doing? What did they yell at you when you arrived?’ All questions are very, very, very precise, and at the end of the interview, very, very long, the person is drained.”

“How does the person function after that kind of interview?” I asked.

“They are very disturbed,” she answered. “It is very, very disturbing; it takes some days to recuperate. But it is the only way. We do not want to know only their impressions of today, we do this for the time they are no longer here. Do you understand? Because of the distance in time between when it happened and now, the interviewee tends to introduce things that are not part of their own story: films they have seen, books they have read.”

“Si, è vero,” I said – yes, it’s true. Sometimes I leave an interview having learned more about the interviewee’s thoughts than about their personal history. Because of Liliana’s work and that of other historians, the testimonies are for the most part recorded. I can do similar interviews, perhaps, but I am free to ask people about the things that might be considered avoidance or skirting by Liliana. She says at times it was necessary to practically put the person under pressure to make the interviews productive. For Liliana, it was the only way to be sure to get the basic factual information. “It was a very difficult choice,” she told me, “but in the end, a correct one.”

If, when these people are gone, we do not have their exact memories, we have nothing. Their memories may have been precise when they were buried inside them, and when they are forced to go find them, they experience their pain again. Someone like Liliana, with her dedication, could do it.

The interviewee must trust Liliana and trust that his memories will be well kept with her. It must be worth reliving the pain, the agony, of seeing a family member murdered, or even just uncovering the first sensation of shame, anger, or sadness the teenagers felt when they were kicked out of school. Talking about the interviews, Liliana seemed suddenly tired, as if remembering them revived the original exhaustion.

“When you interview people in this way,” I asked, “do you explain to people that is what you are doing?”

“No no no no,” she said.

“You just do it?” I asked.

“Yes, just do it.”

“And they just follow?”

“Si si si si, si si si.”

Then, she said more quietly:“They were very strong testifiers.” She did not know if they could do it any longer, because they had become older, weaker. They had wanted to be available and have the strength to do it in this way.

After finishing the film Memoria, she wrote a book for children, one that was used in schools. “A very light, very simple book.” She looked for it on a shelf for a moment, then sat.

“I told you that I had four children? This is the baby,” she smiled, picking up a picture of Jonathan.

Days of Memory: Listening to Jewish Italians Who Lived Through Fascism and the Holocaust by Judith Monachina is available at The Bookstore in Lenox and through Amazon. Monachina is the director of The Housatonic Heritage Oral History Center at Berkshire Community College in Pittsfield. For more, visit judithmonachina.com.