ENZO SERENI PIONEER AND PARACHUTIST

The representatives of Italy’s Jewish communities gathered at a Jewish school in Rome a few months ago to pay tribute to a hero whose name is still very well remembered in the Italian capital: Enzo Sereni. Outside his own country, however, the extraordinary story of his life and death is little known. The Serenis were an old Italian family; their name can be found in the Jewish catacombs of the Via Appia. Throughout the centuries, they had belonged to Rome’s patrician society; Enzo’s father, a Professor of Medicine at the University, was court physician to King Victor Emmanuel III. Since the Risorgimento, the Serenis had become rapidly assimilated, treating their Jewish extraction as no more than a nominal private matter. Enzo, born in 1905, was attracted by Zionism as a teenager: the rise of Fascism—which a good many Italian Jews regarded with sympathy—perturbed him profoundly. “I feel myself a Jew when Jews are attacked and insulted”, he wrote in his diary. “I feel myself a Jew not only at home or in the temple, but always, at every hour of the day”. Mission to Germany 1933 After graduating as a doctor of medicine and serving in the Italian Army, where he was given a commission, he exchanged the luxury of his family’s aristocratic villa in Rome for the primitive life of a pioneer settlement, the kibbutz Givat Brenner, in Palestine. He was sent on missions to Europe to try and convince the Jews that their future lay only in the creation of a Jewish homestead; his last tour was to Germany in 1933, where he helped to organise the emigration of young Jews from Hitler’s Third Reich to Palestine. In an English-language biography published some years ago (Enzo Sereni by Clara Urquhart and Peter Ludwig Brent, Robert Hale, 1967), he appears with all the characteristics of an early saint; others who knew him well describe him as a twentieth-century condottiere, dynamic and passionate, but with the mind of a classical scholar. When the War broke out he persuaded his parents to follow his example and emigrate to Palestine: he was well aware of the danger that Mussolini would soon be emulating Hitler’s example and persecute the Italian Jews. Enzo Sereni was already 39, married and with a family, when he volunteered for the Parachute unit which the British were setting up in the Middle East. Altogether, 240 Parachutists from Palestine were trained in ‘Egypt, among them some whose names, like Sereni’s, are now household words in Israel: Hanna Senesch and Haviva Reich, Reuben Dafni and Joel Nussbacher. They were all required to assume noms de guerre for their secret work; most of them chose English names, but Sereni called himself Shmuel Barda—he wanted to be recognisable as a Jew. During his training period he broadcast from Cairo for the Allied cause to the Italian people, blaming the King for having sold out his subjects to Mussolini. After one particularly sharp radio talk the Egyptians arrested him; none of his friends knew where he was. He went on hunger strike; after ten days he was taken to hospital, nearer to death than to life, and eventuallv released. Captured by Germans After completing his training he was appointed instructor and moved with a small group—including Hanna Senesch, Reuben Dafni and Joel Nussbacher—to Bari in Italy’s liberated south. The group, five in all, was flown to Yugoslavia in March, 1944, to make contact with the partisans and to cross into Nazi-occupied Hungary. Most of them paid with their lives: Hanna Senesch as well as Haviva Reich, who jumped on a later mission. On May 15, 1944, it was Enzo Sereni’s own turn. He took off with an Italian radio operator and was dropped in the Ferrara district; the plan was that he should reach the 40,000 Jewish and anti-Fascist refugees in that area and organise their escape to the south. But the pilot lost his way, and instead of coming down near Ferrara Enzo and the radio operator found themselves in the hills north of Florence, which were swarming with German troops. The two parachutists lost each other. Within a matter of hours, the Germans captured them. With a group of Italian partisans he was taken to Dachau. The S.S. Commandant lined them up and asked provocatively, “Who’s the Jew responsible for the air-raids on Germany?” and without a moment’s hesitation, Enzo Sereni stepped forward: “I am the man”. It turned out that the Nazis knew quite a lot about his work with the parachutists. He was charged with having organised a whole network of Allied agents whose secret radio messages guided the British and American bombers—it was no doubt an exaggeration, but he proudly accepted the responsibility. We do not know how he died. But the Dachau file index—kept with that meticulous efficiency which was so typical of the Nazis—carries this entry: “Prisoner No. 113160, Block 23. Bora June 22, 1905. Resident at Tel Aviv. V3 (the code word for members of the British Forces) Barda, Shmuel. Arrived October 9, 1944. Taken to Special Punishment Cell for interrogation. November 17, 1944. Died November 18, 1944.”