The Mystery of the Missing Jewish Books of Rome
Tracing the fate of 25,000 volumes lost to the Holocaust
By Michael Frank
…In all this relentless looting, packing, transporting, organizing, categorizing, sequestering, and (after the war) returning of the calligraphed and printed word, the story of the library of Rome is one of the least explored—and most haunting. The actual plundering appears to have been described in just one contemporaneous account, Giacomo Debenedetti’s taut October 16, 1943. It did not draw serious attention from the Italian government until 2002, when the Tedeschi Commission was established. Made up of historians, archivists, and government officials, the commission spent nine years probing the library’s fate, in the end producing a 43-page report that concluded by more or less throwing up its hands at the complexity of the problem….
