Last update - 00:00 12/03/2007
Reconstructing a massacre
By Saviona Mane
The rage that followed the publication of Ariel Toaff's "Pasqua Di Sangue" ("Bloody Passovers") is still fresh in the minds of Italian Jews, but their tempers have been provoked once again. This time, the controversy surrounds veteran director Carlo Lizzani's movie, "Hotel Meina," filmed on the banks of Lake Maggiere in Northern Italy.
The film producers have tried to reconstruct the story of 16 Italian Jews who took refuge from the Nazis in a hotel, owned by Jews, in the Italian town of Meina. The Jews were executed in September, 1943, and their bodies thrown into the lake. The script is based on a book by Marco Nozza, which documented the first German massacre of Italian Jews, in which 54 people were killed.
Becky Behar Ottolenghi, daughter of the owners of the hotel, was 13 years old at the time of the massacre. She says the film deviates from the truth and from Nozza's book, and that it presents the Nazis in a positive light. She is determined to fight the film's creators and screenwriter Pasquale Squitieri. "I am willing to go all the way to court," she said in an interview with Haaretz. "The producers bought the rights from Nozza's widow, and we are examining the legal steps at our disposal."
The affair was brought to light in the Italian newspaper La Stampa, which also published excerpts of correspondence between Behar and Lizzani, including her plea to the director, "to honor the truth and the dead" or to make it clear that the film's plot is entirely fictitious.
"Since I read the script, I haven't been able to sleep and my stomach turns," she says. "I have been traveling throughout Italy for 12 years to tell schoolchildren the story of the Meina massacre. What kind of credibility will I have now, after a film like that, which implies that Jews were free to move around the area, which portrays a Nazi woman as a hero who wanted to save everybody, which fails to mention Fascists or partisans - and presents me as an 18-year-old girl in the midst of a love affair that never took place?" protests Behar, who immortalized the events at Meina in her book, "The Forgotten Massacre."
Imprisoned, then executed
"The reality was utterly different. The local Fascists informed the Germans of the presence of Jews in the hotel, and they imprisoned us all in one room on the top floor. Of the 22 people who were there, 16 were executed. My family was saved because of the intervention of the Turkish consul who was coincidentally a guest at the hotel. He told the Germans that we were citizens of Turkey, which was still neutral, and warned against causing us any harm."
Lizzani, however, believes this film is his personal contribution to the battle against anti-Semitism. "The story of 'Hotel Meina' must be viewed in a metaphorical light, above and beyond the actual unfolding of events, even if the cost is a certain betrayal of a few aspects," the 85-year-old director wrote Behar. "It is possible that there was no presence of a 'positive,' German character at Meina, but that does not interest me. Aside from the boredom of depicting another screaming SS officer, I feel an obligation to myself to derive a broader, more universal meaning from the affair," says Lizzani, who with this film returns to directing after an 11-year break.
This is not Behar's first battle against the creators of "Hotel Meina." She recently conducted a successful campaign against screenwriter Squitieri, a former, right-wing member of parliament from the National Alliance party. Squitieri, who was originally tapped to direct the film, was replaced by Lizzani, but Behar considers this victory a Pyrrhic one. "The producers did replace the director, but they did not introduce any changes into the script," she attests, vowing to continue the battle.