Word: ghettos
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Around the Piazza Giudea, in the heart of Rome's ancient ghetto, where loyalties are fierce and memories are long, people still remember when Celeste di Porto was a quiet, intent little girl. Like other children in the ghetto, she grew up in garbage-strewn alleys, amid the antique squalor that sometimes breeds keen wits. She did well in school and read much. Said her aunt last week: "My God, once they start reading, it's all over...
...life." In the fall of 1943, she began to go about with one Vincenzo Antonelli, a notorious young Fascist street brawler, who roamed the Jewish quarter with a gang of toughs, plundering shops and beating up stray Jews. Then the Nazi SS (which ruled Rome) started raiding the ghetto. Whole families were sent to concentration camps...
...Celeste's aging father walked to the police station and let himself be arrested-to atone for his daughter's deeds and save his family's honor. His wife and his two other daughters took their cart and walked off into the countryside. In the ghetto, the arrests continued. Among the Jews seized was Lazzaro Anticoli, one of the Black Panther's childhood friends. In prison, so goes the story, he cut himself, and with his finger dipped in his own blood wrote on the wall of his cell: "My name is Lazzaro Anticoli, arrested...
...Then a Jewish veteran of the Italian army recognized her in a Naples brothel. After two years in jail, she was tried and, although she denied everything, sentenced to twelve years. Last spring a general amnesty freed her. She became a Roman Catholic. But she kept thinking of the ghetto she had left. She decided she wanted to see it again. Last month, she went home...
Last week, 55 years later, provincial authorities at the same frontier faced a similar problem. For the third time in as many weeks, small groups of Indians had stepped across the border in deliberate violation of colonial "ghetto" laws. Sixty people were arrested; but police pointedly failed to arrest the leader. South African authorities had no desire to martyrize anybody with his name...