EDITORS' NOTE: Mr. Jasha M. Levi, a Yugoslav Jewish antifascist in the 1930s and a fighter against dictatorships and genocides for all his life, fled the Nazis and his native Sarajevo for Italy. Here he—as a foreigner whose whereabouts remained unknown "to the Nazis and their Italian collaborators"—was spared "the cruel fate suffered by Italian Jews deported in cattle cars from Milan or burned in a crematorium in Trieste." Mr. Levi, who recounted his personal experience in a political memoir, "Requiem For A Country," asked i-Italy to publish the following short essay. In complying with his request, we believe that his balanced personal account not only, as he concludes, "does not diminish the memory of the eight thousand murdered Italian Jews," but may actually contribute to a better understanding of their tragedy—of which Italians, as a government and as a people, bear a collective historical responsibility, despite the good that some of them may have done in helping hundreds like Mr. Levi to survive.
