Fatal Silence - Brief Article - Book Review

Contemporary Review, March, 2004

Fatal Silence. Robert Katz. Weidenfeld & Nicolson. [pounds sterling]20.00. xxiii 418 pages. ISBN 0-297-84661-2. This is the author's second book on the plight of Rome's Jews during the Second World War. It was first published in the US as The Battle for Rome. Now the title has been altered, perhaps to take advantage of the recent assertions that the Vatican was 'silent', i.e., did not really try to save the Jews in the War.

The author's aim is actually to tell the story of Rome after the Germans occupied the city and before they fled as the Americans arrived from the south. This occupation followed the deposition of Mussolini and the surrender and the flight of the royal government. He bases his history largely on newly released archives in the U.S. and is concerned with the invading Americans, the Germans, the Vatican and the Italians, whether resistance fighters or disarranged government officials. Central to his story is the resistance attack on Germans in March 1944, in which thirty-five German soldiers were killed, and the horrific reprisals ordered by Hitler in which 335 men were murdered. This gives his book a dramatic intensity and focus. Central also is the author's hostility to Pius XII whose 'passivity ... was sometimes indistinguishable from complicity before the acts of perpetrators of crimes against humanity'.