In our family, the war was never just a story in history books. It crept into our home one night, with tired and frightened faces, and it has never left our memory.

My family, along with others in the community, was part of a silent network that made Operation Servigliano possible in May 1944. Partisans and former British PoWs from Servigliano camp, upon learning that the Germans planned to deport Jews to extermination camps, attacked it in coordination with an Allied bombardment and freed the Jews.

The episode is almost forgotten in western historiography but deeply engraved in Jewish memory, because it represents a concrete example of what could have been done to save human lives, and which too often was not done.

The initial result was extraordinary: for a moment, fate seemed to change course. Jews destined for the extermination camps were freed. Our house opened its doors to some of them: the Volterra family. There were children who could no longer speak, elderly people who could barely walk, mothers who clutched all that remained of their lives in a small suitcase.

But freedom was short-lived. In the following days, many of the liberated were recaptured; some, exhausted, showed up spontaneously. Living in hiding was not possible for everyone. Those families were not made for a clandestine existence: there was no food, no security, no strength.

At the entrance to the former Servigliano camp today stands a plaque. It commemorates the fact that out of approximately ninety people liberated, only twenty actually managed to escape deportation and martyrdom. That number weighs like a millstone, because behind each number was a name, a face, a story my family had encountered, even if only for a few days.

Our assistance was simple: a makeshift bed, a hot meal, the silence needed to survive. But it was also an act of courage, because helping meant risking everything. Yet, in that short space of time, it was demonstrated that another choice was possible. This is why we continue to tell this story: because even when the ending is tragic, what matters is having tried to change the course of events.