Follow an Italian Hero and Learn about Budapest!

2013 is a year of many noble causes, among others the year of the “Hungarian-Italian Cultural Season” dedicated to the friendship between the two countries first of all in cultural terms. Such seasons and years claimed as “special” - involving special financial involvement of governmental institutions - lead us to ask “Well, and what about culture/friendship among nations/whatever is the noble cause, in all the other years?”. At the same time they really make sponsors more willing to finance projects and remind public opinion of important issues from time to time. 

Photo of Giorgio Perlasca: www.deliberatelyconsidered.com

One very important result of the “Hungarian-Italian Cultural Season” 2013 is the launching of a new educational projects titled “Budapest, Itinerary of Memory-On the Tracks of Giorgio Perlasca” (“Budapest, Itinerario della Memoria - sulle orme di Giorgio Perlasca") aiming to familiarize Italian students both with a hero, a Righteous among the Nations of Italian origin and the history of the Holocaust. Budapest is a popular destination of school excursions among Italian high schools, so the idea at the core of the project is that numerous Italian teenagers could learn about an important Italian hero, if these excursions to Budapest would be utilized in an educational way. As it is known, in the case of children and youth informal education – one of its methods is visiting places, where history actually happened – is usually much more efficient than teaching from only textbooks. In the framework of this new project a memorial excursion including all the places of Budapest connected to the Italian diplomat Giorgio Perlasca will be part of the students’ program. The project was launched in Venice this September and also presented in Budapest in late October in the presence of Perlasca’s son.

Why is the person of Giorgio Perlasca so important for Italians, Hungarians, and for universal history? First of all he saved the lives of 5200 Hungarian Jews in Budapest during the Nazi and Arrow-Cross terror of 1944 and 1945 by forging thousands of fake safe-conducts (“Schutzpass”), by moving entire Jewish families to so called “protected houses” and by continuously preventing roundups in such buildings.

Sculpture of Giorgio Perlasca in Budapest.

Image: artes-liberales.hu

However, his story is a bit more complex, which makes it more instructive. He was originally a Fascist, who fought in the Spanish Civil War on Franco’s side. That made it possible for him to find connections to Spanish Embassies whenever and wherever he wanted. So, when being in Budapest in the autumn of 1944 –opposing Mussolini’s North Italian Republic of Salò allied with Nazi Germany  - he utilized his merits earned on the Fascist side of the Spanish Civil War to get connected to the Spanish Ambassador in Budapest who could issue safe-conducts for Jews as a representative of a neutral country. However, with the Soviet army approaching Budapest from the East and the Nazi-allied Arrow-Cross government fleeing Budapest westwards, the Spanish ambassador left Budapest and Perlasca made himself independent from anybody, pretended to be a substitute of the Spanish Ambassador which he was not, and used the stamps of the embassy left behind. 

So, he was a man of Fascist political conviction, who once facing what the allies of Mussolini’s Italy were doing against humanity, did everything he could do to save lives. He became a righteous man just as simply as many people became perpetrators or bystanders. He broke all the laws imposed on him to serve universal ethics. As he claimed in an interview much later: it was simply what every sane people should have done, nothing special. His righteousness was just as banal, as Eichmann’s evilness according to Hannah Arendt’s theory on the banality of evil. Indeed, one of the biographies on Perlasca is titled “the Banality of Goodness”.

Ágnes Kelemen,

Nationalism Studies,

Hungary

This article was originally published in the 39th issue of The CEU Weekly.