“A Light in the Night of Rome,” by writer and priest Jesús Sánchez Adalid, is based on the true story of two Italian doctors who, during World War II, saved hundreds of Jews from the Holocaust through to an invented virus, “as unreal as it is dangerous”.

In Italy, during the Second World Warthere was something called the “K-syndrome“, a false disease so contagious that it scared away German soldiers and, thus, saved hundreds of jews at the Tiber Island Hospital in Rome. It is in this particular setting that the latest novel by the Spanish writer and priest takes place. Jesus Sanchez Adalid, A light in the night of Rome.

“Everything had so many doses of romanticism, heroism and generosity that I found it new and interesting for a plot”, says the author in the heart of the Jewish quarter of the Italian capital during an interview with EFE shortly before presenting his book, published by HarperCollins. . .

Renowned author of historical novels, winner of prizes such as the Alfonso X for citadelSánchez Adalid (Don Benito, 1962) received the first piece of history in 2019, after the Vatican declassify new documents referring to the papacy of Pius XII.

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These documents described the sophisticated plot the doctors had hatched Adrian Ossicini there John Borromeoof the Fatebenefratelli hospital, with the complicity of the Holy See, while Rome plunged into horror with the arrival of the troops of Hitler.

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(“A Light in the Night of Rome” can be purchased in digital format from Bajalibros by clicking here)

In the fall of 1943, a few weeks after the Italian capitulation, the strange medical building anchored on the Tiber, which tourists photograph daily in the direction of the popular district of Trastevere, welcomed dozens of Jews infected with a virus, as unreal as it is dangerouswhich prevented the German soldiers from identifying the patients.

“The hospital is a point of reference in the city, all Romans have known it for centuries. Here the remedy pandemicsmoments of war… It’s more than a thousand years old, it’s very old, ”confides the writer.

Some of the luckiest of the supposed patients even managed to regain their freedom after being pronounced dead and received documents with new identities.

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“There is still a survivor. It is over 100 years old. I spoke to him on the phone because he had met the protagonists of my plot,” he recalls.

The inventors of fake "K-syndrome" They were two doctors from the Tiber Island Hospital in Rome, where Jews persecuted by Hitler's troops successfully took refuge.
The inventors of the fake “K-syndrome” were two doctors from the Tiber Island Hospital in Rome, where Jews persecuted by Hitler’s troops successfully took refuge.

With the Vatican archives, hitherto hidden “by the inertia of the Church” concerning the secrets of the past, and the documents of the foundation Steven Spieleberg and the Italian government, Sánchez Adalid was able to recreate the lives of some of the inhabitants who avoided the raid of October 16, 1943, when the troops of the Gestapo They entered the Jewish ghetto in Rome.

This is how he discovered the romance between Gina and Betto, whose passionate love affair in one of the darkest scenes of the “Città Eterna” ended up shaping the plot of A light in the night of Rome.

“At the beginning, I was rather seduced by the history of the hospital – recognizes the author, accustomed to investigating the Middle Ages and the Golden Age -. But then the protagonists beat me”.

Betto was one of the few Jews to avoid deportation. His Sephardic origin and his mastery of Ladino, the Judeo-Spanish language, enabled him to obtain false papers to pass himself off as Spanish.

Sanchez Adalid: "The families who had contributed in one way or another to the enthronement of Mussolini later realized that through him all the horrors had reached the city.
Sánchez Adalid: “Families who had contributed in one way or another to Mussolini’s enthronement later realized that all the horrors had reached the city through him.”

After losing his family in a raid, who would later die in Auschwitzwanders around Rome until he finds refuge in the hospital on the island of the Tiber.

“Meanwhile, Gina represents the other side of Rome, noble and bourgeois. Families who had contributed in one way or another to the induction of Mussolini and later they realized that through him all the horrors had reached the city,” explains Sánchez Adalid.

“He was part of a band of partisans and she also belonged to the Travertino gang, an absolutely illegal association when Mussolini was still in power,” he points out.

In the midst of the tragedy, an intense and forbidden love story is born between them that the novel reconstructs from the testimonies, dates and anecdotes collected by their descendants.

“I experienced this as a miracle. I keep wondering how it is possible that he had access to the lives of these two characters”, concludes Sánchez Adalid, ready to continue exploring contemporary history in his next books.

Source: EFE

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