Dan Vittorio Segre

Dan Vittorio Segre was born into a Jewish family of the Piedmonte region of northern Italy. Having been born in 1922, as Mussolini marched through Rome, Segre knew of no other life than that of fascism throughout his childhood. He assimilated to the fascist system through school, where he joined the Balilla and Avanguardisti youth organizations. In 1938, when he was sixteen years old—the advent of the racial laws in Italy—he and his family moved to Torino so that Segre, who had been banned from attending public school, could continue his education at a Jewish institution. It was in Torino that Segre first gravitated toward the political situation and the Jewish question. He quickly decided to immigrate to Palestine, with the full support of his father. [1]

Segre spent the following years of his life away from Italy. He became an Israeli diplomat, a press attache in Paris, and for a number of years he was the head of the overseas service of the Israeli broadcasting station Kol Israel. He is now head of the Institute of Mediterranean Studies in the Italian Swiss University of Lugano, and has published several books. [2]

Below is an excerpt from “My Jewish-Fascist Childhood” from Segre’s memoir,Memoirs of a Fortunate Jew: An Italian Story.

My Jewish-Fascist Childhood

I was born at the end of 1922, a month after the March on Rome, and I lived for sixteen years in Fascist Italy. Those years of Italian life were for me an existence so regular, normal, and carefree, so devoid of events, that I would find it very difficult to say what was special about Fascism…

I never entered the Mussolini regime— I was born into it. As a totally assimilated Jew and as an Italian raised under a political regime of which my family and all my friends approve without any reservation, I, too, saw Fascism as the only natural form of existence….

This childhood experience of total adaptation to the environment allows me today to understand better situations that appear to be inconceivable to others: the ability, for instance, of the Israelis to lead a normal life, day after day, in the midst of an unending state of war; the ability of the citizen-solider to bear and often enjoy military service provided that it lasts long enough to assume a regular rhythm…

The Fascist youth organizations to which I belonged from my earliest years—the Balilla and the Avanguardisti—were part and parcel of the school system. I respected them in the same way I respected my teachers at the Royal Gymnasium, but they did not interfere with life…

I do not remember, either in school or outside, one single occasion when I felt uneasy because I was a Jew. I was convinced that being Jewish was a treat no different from Cirio brand marmalade, the more so because I was the constant object of jealousy among my school friends for being allowed “for religious reasons” to be absent from the boring lessons of the Gymnasium priest…

Since I had no contact with the world outside Italy; since I read only school textbooks, adventure stories, and, from time to time, the local newspapers to look up the titles of films or the sports programs; since I lived first in the gilded cage of my mother’s estate in Piedmont and then in the cotton-wool climate of a Venetian provincial town in which my family occupied a certain position; since I had no political or social reasons to become interested in events or ideas beyond those of my daily routine, so full of small duties, of cycling and riding competitions, of social satisfactions, I lived in the belly of the monster, totally unaware of its existence.

The first sixteen years of my life were divided into periods of equal length—from 1922 to 1930 on my mother’s estate near Turin, and from 1931 to 1938 at Udine, a small provincial town in the Friuli region… After the publication of the laws against the Jews in July 1938, we returned to the Piedmont region and I went to live in my grandmother’s house in Turin, one of the few cities in Italy where the Jewish community was able to organize secondary schools for students who had been thrown out of public schools. Here I discovered for the first time a world different from mine; here took place the first brutal meeting with the particularism of my Jewish condition, my first contacts with a literature, a history containing ideals totally different from those with which I had grown up…

I felt, indeed, like a fish out of water… Feeling deeply offended by the behavior of the Fascist party and the king toward me and my family, I broke my ties with the Italian nation in a series of secret, nighttime ceremonies, during the course of which I buried, under the great cedar of Lebanon in my mother’s garden, my black Fascist dagger, a wooden toma-hawk, and my collection of tin soldiers— the symbol of my now-shattered hopes of joining the Royal Military College.

To the psychological shock caused by these sudden changes… I attribute in part the tenacity with which the uniformity of my life under Fascism—the only normal existence I ever knew—has stuck in my memory. It is as if my subconscious has refused to abandon the illusion of quiet, happy years of my youth and blocked all attempts to look more deeply at those early periods of my life that must, in some way, have recorded the events that shook my family and the country of my birth during this time. [3]

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