Editor’s note: The following is a portion of an interview we did with author Eva Etzioni-Halevy that somehow didn’t belong into the final published piece.
When people ask me how I survived the Holocaust, my reply is that I owe my life to two persons: To my mother and to Mussolini.
I was born in Vienna, and in 1938, when I was 4 years old, Austria joined hands with Nazi Germany.
On the Krystallnacht my father was taken to Dachau. At that time the Nazis still wanted to get rid of the Jews by making them leave. But hardly anyone was willing to accept them. After some three months, my mother was able to procure a fake visa to Monaco for us. On the strength of this document, my father was released. We left at the beginning of 1939, but since the visa was not genuine, we could not enter Monaco, and we were stuck in Italy for the duration of the war.
Hitler demanded that Mussolini deliver all the Jews to the death camps, but he refused. Instead, we were sent to an Italian concentration camp, which, comparatively speaking was bearable.
In 1943, Mussolini was toppled, and Italy capitulated. The Germans conquered the northern part of the country and we hid in villages in the mountains, in daily terror of discovery by the Germans, who were scouring the mountains for Jews.
There were several near-discoveries. When the Nazis actually entered the house in which we put up, but miraculously did not identify us as Jews (merely leaving us trembling in fear) will evidently remain branded in my memory.
We subsisted on meager savings and charity from the Catholic Church, until the Allies liberated us in 1944. We reached what was then Palestine in 1945.
Naturally this harrowing experience shaped my character as a lonely child, who spent much time in solitary contemplation and liked writing more than talking to others.
Later, people have often suggested that my writing be devoted to my experiences during the Holocaust, because soon there would be no one left to tell the tale. But I did not have a book on this topic in me. Instead, I decided to dig for my roots and identity farther back in the past, and time-travel all the way back to biblical times. This is how my biblical novels were born.
Eva Etzioni-Halevy, is Professor Emeritus of Sociology at Israel’s Bar-Ilan University and the author of three biblical fiction novels. Read her Not About Religion interview here.
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