Yehudith Kleinman was a young Italian Jewish girl born in Venice in 1939 and raised in Milan in the northern part of the Italian Peninsula. She recalls enjoying a carefree childhood, vividly describing a special bond with her mother and fond memories of her grandmother. However, the rise of Benito Mussolini’s government and its alliance with Nazi Germany changed the trajectory of Yehudith’s childhood forever. As World War II unfolded, life for Yehudith, her loved ones, and other Jewish people living in Italy grew more perilous by the day.
One fateful day shortly after the war began, Yehudith’s mother and grandmother were summoned to a nearby building by the Nazis. Unknown to Yehudith at the time, this would be her final glimpses of her mother and her grandmother—the only family she had ever really known. Yehudith had been presented with a choice to remain with her family or go with a Christian neighbor who had also been present at the building. Though she did not fully understand the implications of her decision even in the moment, something in her intuitively guided her to leave with the Christian neighbor. She may not have realized it at the time, but this decision in hindsight likely saved her life.
The Christian neighbor meant well but quickly revealed to Yehudith that her own financial struggles with raising five daughters of her own during wartime conditions rendered her unable to care for Yehudith. However, the neighbor did make good faith arrangements for Yehudith to be cared for by a Catholic convent. The nun running the convent accepted Yehudith but made it clear that her Jewish heritage was to be kept secret from the other girls in the convent.
Yehudith lived out the remainder of the war in the convent and was presented with an opportunity to immigrate to Israel after the war had ended. Though initially hesitant, Yehudith accepted the opportunity. She came to see this as a chance to be among other Jewish people, an opportunity that might eventually reconnect her with her mother and her grandmother.
After her arrival in Israel, Yehudith learned from an aunt that her mother and grandmother had perished in the concentration camps. She mourned deeply for the family she had lost, yet forged ahead through her adolescent and adult years, making the best of the opportunities that were available to her. Yehudith would go on to make her life a blessing serving in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), becoming a teacher, and raising two children of her own while living out the remainder of her life, ultimately finding peace and purpose, in a new faraway land she had eventually come to call home.
