Tuesday, June 17, 2025
Producer and former educator Vince Marmorale was surprised to discover Livia Delessio, who survived the Holocaust in the care of a convent in Italy, at his recent showing of “My Italian Secret,” a film about Jewish Holocaust survival in Italy, which was screened at the Town of Hempstead’s Merrick Golf Course Clubhouse on April 30.
“My Italian Secret” covers the story of the Catholic refugee network and the Jews that it saved. Delessio, an attendee of the screening, shared her story with the audience.
In World War II, the Nazis arrived at Delessio’s door and asked her mother for their papers. Her mother provided their old papers, without religious designation. When the Nazis asked where her husband was, she said he was working for the Nazis in Germany and she saluted Hitler — and they left her alone with her two daughters.
“It was a miracle,” Delessio said. “God, somehow he must have inspired my mother on what to answer the German Nazi that came to the door.”
Delessio was saved by her town’s convent, which allowed her and her sister to spend their days there. The caveat was that they required that the girls be baptized. Their mother agreed because she cared more about saving their lives.
“So, I was also baptized, but my heart is still Jewish,” Delessio said. “No matter what they do, it’s like a root to a tree, you can’t change.”
That wasn’t an issue for most Jews, saved by the network of 26 monasteries and convents in Italy, which provided false identities and shelter for those fleeing Nazis.
The film features the stories of many heroes, including Dr. Giovanni Borromeo. He ran a hospital across the river from the Jewish quarter in his city in Italy. Borromeo came up with a disease that he called “K” which he described horrifically to the Nazis, and it stopped them from entering the hospital where the Jews were hidden.
Marmorale told attendees that he first learned about the Holocaust when he was a young boy growing up in East New York, an area of Brooklyn that housed many Southern Italians and Eastern Europeans. One day, he was invited to lunch to meet the new tailor’s son. The woman who served them had a concentration camp tattoo on her arm.
“Back then, this was a long time ago, they were bright, they were clear as a bell, like they’d just been tattooed yesterday,” Marmorale said.
In 1982, Marmorale attended a Holocaust remembrance seminar. It inspired him to develop a program to share the story of three survivors who lived in Sachem, and an area of Suffolk County to which he had moved. Eventually, he was invited all over Long Island to show other educators how to teach about the Holocaust.
“When I was a boy, it was never discussed, because the story was so terrible,” Marmorale said. “After a time, nobody knew the story. That’s when many of the survivors started speaking out. Because if they weren’t going to talk about it, it was going to disappear.”
Years later, he said, a man named Walter Wolf called him and told him the story of how he survived the Holocaust in Italy, including that knew six other people who had similar stories.
To Marmorale, it’s because of a lack of respect for authority that Italians were motivated to defy the Nazis. “What happened in Italy couldn’t have happened unless they had this kind of mindset,” Marmorale stated.
He also believes Italy had far less antisemitism than other places. “Some of the most prominent leaders were Jews,” Marmorale said. “It’s as though we were to kill the descendents of Thomas Jefferson and George Washington.”
Marmorale explained to attendees of the screening why Delessio’s story is so important.
“You become a witness when you listen to a survivor,” Marmorale said. “Which is why this story is so important. Only because there was goodness in the worst of times. Unfortunately, in most places that wasn’t true. I think it’s a remarkable story.”
