As Italian police did not participate in these round-ups and most Italians objected to them, a number of Jews were able to go into hiding and found shelter in mountain villages where they wouldn’t be revealed. Some managed to flee to Switzerland.
While Pope Pius II failed to publicly condemn German policies and actions, other Catholic institutions in Rome did offer shelter. One such place was the San Leone Maggio Fratelli Marisi boarding school, where Hiam’s father had brought him and where he assumed the identity of a Catholic child. Children such as Haim who survived became known as ‘The Treasures of Italy”. He believed that blame and responsibility for the Holocaust was not just the collaboration between the Germans and the Fascists, but also the general population of Italians who remained indifferent.
He remained at the school for a year after the war ended, hoping his parents would return. Thinking that perhaps they had gone back to their old home and were waiting for him there, he snuck out of the boarding school one night and made his way back to his house. His knock was answered by a stranger. When he asked about his parents, the person angrily responded he had not heard of them, that he should never come back and chased him off with a stick. In many other instances it didn’t stop at that, with several returnees beaten with thrown rocks. Stories were also told of guns and bayonets being used and pregnant women beaten to death with clubs. It was more than enough to dissuade Haim from pursuing it any further. He learned later that his house was only one of many vacant Jewish family homes all over Rome that had been claimed by neighbours.
With no family and now homeless, Haim became part of a group of other displaced youths who roamed the streets and depended on their wits and the generosity of Roman citizenry to survive. One of their distinguishing features was they had apparently never met a bar of soap! While this had no consequences for them, it did for those with whom they came into contact and may have been the reason he said with a smile and more than a small sense of pride, that others kept their distance.
Their nights were spent in the hallways of apartment buildings which tenants were kind enough to make available. They would gather whatever scraps of food they could find, searching in garbage cans and collecting spoiled vegetables from street vendors. They used whatever remained in discarded cans, with bottles of wine particularly being sought after as alcohol helped to ease the pain of their situation. Nothing was deemed inedible. Meals were cooked over open fires using a patelnye, mixing together whatever they had found They gave it a name – ‘mes colonza’, meaning ‘a mixed mess’. Haim was in charge of guarding the patelnye and keeping it safe from the other groups of roving youths which made him feel closer to his mother.
