Model of survival: The story of Holocaust survivor and octogenarian Yona Amit

Yona Amit, 87: From Italy to Jerusalem, 1950

Octogenarian Yona Amit has a story to tell, and she tells it – often. One of a fast-dwindling number of Holocaust survivors, she is among those who have taken it upon themselves to share their story of tragedy, providence, survival, and renewal for the next generations, to inspire and give us hope.

She often tells her story at Yad Vashem, as well as at schools and community centers, and for other groups who want to hear her impassioned account of how her family survived – and others didn't.

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Yona's story

Amit was born in 1938 in Fiume, Northern Italy (today Rijeka, Croatia), to a Modern Orthodox Jewish family. Following the German conquest, the family left the busy seaport and arriving to the town of Bagnacavallo, where they went into hiding with the Tambini family.

When suspicion arose that their hiding place had been revealed, the Tambinis moved the family members into hiding with a different family: the Dalla Valles. Amit, her brother, sister, and cousin, were later moved to a convent in the city of Lugo, under assumed identities. 

After a year in the convent, the family reunited and embarked on an arduous and dangerous journey through the Alps, eventually reaching neutral Switzerland. The Galandauers returned to Italy after the war and immigrated to Israel in 1950.

The first thing Amit remembers as a five-year-old girl growing up in the northeast side of “the Boot” country is her shoe-sharing story, which opens the Yad Vashem video On a Dark and Rainy Night – The Story of Yona Amit (Galandauer), one of many nicely produced testimonials from survivors to make their stories interesting and accessible.

“My first memory is when one Saturday… they let us children leave our hiding place and go play outside,” she said, not knowing why they had been allowed to do so. She was very happy because she met some of her cousins. While they played, she traded shoes with her seven-year-old cousin, Ernesto Berger. 

“But there must have been an informant, and the people who were hiding us came and literally grabbed us and put us back” into hiding, she said – before she could get her valuable shoes back, which angered her usually calm father. That was the last time she saw Ernesto, who was taken to Auschwitz, along with her shoes. They are probably among the pile of shoes still there, collected and then abandoned by the fleeing Nazis, and now preserved in a glass case as a memorial at the death camp.

Everyone heard rumors about the Germans’ deadly plan for the Jews, but it was hard to believe. Amit’s father, Yohanan, decided to take the extended family to what he hoped was a safer place. 

“We were nine: three children, my mother, my father, my mother’s mother and widowed sister (my grandmother and aunt) and her two children – my cousins,” Amit said. They “miraculously” got through a border check without falsified papers and made it to Treiste.

“We found out later that Ezekiel Macakaro, a friend of Vicento Tambini, was the one who warned him about the impending clean-up of the Jews – instead of turning them in to the Gestapo himself,” she said.

Describing the political atmosphere in Italy before the German invasion, she told the Magazine that the Italians had a good relationship with their fellow Jews, and even when Fascist leader Mussolini enacted the racial laws, “they were really more against the communists than the Jews, who were not persecuted and killed like in Germany and Poland.”

There was really no antisemitism, she said. The Italians were "pretty peaceful, and life in Italy for the Jews and in Italy generally was good.” They put Mussolini in prison, and signed a separate peace agreement with the allies in mid-1943. But Hitler took over their county in September, and things got bad for the Jews.

Yitzhak Einhorn, a traveling wine merchant, introduced them to the Tambinis, who hid them at great personal risk until they all had to flee – Jews and compassionate gentiles alike – after the “shoe story.” Einhorn and one of his daughters were eventually sent to Auschwitz. Two other daughters survived; the granddaughter of one, like Amit, lives in Jerusalem. 

“I always stress, especially when I speak to young people, about the Righteous Among the Nations,” Amit told the Magazine. “We came to the Tambinis, nine people asking for asylum, and they risked their lives for us, even though we were complete strangers. The war in Italy was terrible. There were only small portions of rations, but not for the Jews – so they had to divide their food with us.” Thirty families went to Bagnacavallo to seek refuge.

Another Righteous Among the Nations was Antonio Dalla Valle. “When we came to Antonio for refuge, his elderly mother, Maria, opened her arms, hugged us, kissed us, and said, ‘You’re welcome into my house. Wherever I will sleep, you will sleep; whatever I will eat, you will eat.’ And there was no food – everybody was hungry,” Amit said.

“Giorgio, Antonio’s grandson, was my age,” the survivor said. “His father dug a tunnel and hid 28 Jews. Antonio also helped save Jews but when he was praised for his life-saving kindness, he said, ‘What did I do? Nothing. I did nothing special!’ This is what I emphasize when I speak to the kids.” The Dalla Valles had to flee with the Jews; their home was blown up – and they would have been blown up in it with them.

One example of Amit’s sharing with children is a video of her talking about her story to her very cute grandson, Boaz. She tells him about her happy childhood. He asks if it was dangerous; she answers that it was, but they were helped “thanks to good people,” which is the title of the 10-minute video. She talks about their dark, cold, wet, and muddy trek through the Alps and how they were brought by smugglers to Switzerland, where her mother gave birth to her youngest brother Yitzhak.

Amit told the Magazine that the smugglers took a lot of money, and sometimes they killed their charges on the way, “but some of the smugglers – like ours, fortunately – were good. My grandmother had a broken hip, and fell on the trek and broke her leg. They wanted to leave her, and she agreed, but my father said he wouldn’t hear of it.” They did leave – to bring the rest of us, but were persuaded to go back for her. They carried her in their back baskets – that were usually used for coffee and other contraband – by cutting two holes for her legs.

Another righteous gentile helped them make the mountainous journey. Lidia Cattaneo was a wealthy Italian who had four children, let them all stay in her house in Lugo. She helped arrange and pay for the smuggling operation, which necessitated that they not go all together. 

At one point, Amit’s mother, Helena, sat on a log and started to cry – which upset her little daughter, who thought she should be happy. Only later did Amit understand the stress her mother was suffering, worrying that at any moment they could all perish or be sent to the death camps, along with the baby boy she was carrying in her womb, unbeknownst to his big sister.

They all made it to Switzerland, where Yitzhak was born. The family eventually made it to Israel, where Yitzhak would serve in the IDF and tragically fall in 1970 in the War of Attrition. For their father, who had suffered and survived the Holocaust, this was too much; he died suddenly, grief-stricken, two years later. 

“I think of my father, a 34-year-old young man with three little children among a family of nine, and how he navigated that family in a world where every step could lead you to death,” said Amit, whose older sister Zippora lives in Bnei Brak. 

Surviving and making aliyah

“I don’t know why I was saved – why me from all the others," the survivor said. "But I know that my task was to be one little part of bringing up our nation from the ashes to become a nation again, to come to Israel, and to build this country. I’ve got four children, 21 grandchildren with their spouses, and 11 great-grandchildren – and they all live in Israel. For me, this is of the utmost importance because I think all Jews should live in Israel.”

She was proud to add that they all contribute to the nation, to the country, and to the people. “During this war, nine of my grandchildren were in Gaza and in the North – at the beginning of the war, all of them were there at once.”

“We are living in a difficult time,” said the survivor-turned-educational activist, who urges all Jews to visit the Auschwitz memorial. “But just like we came out of the Holocaust stronger, so we will also come out of this situation stronger.”

May Yona Amit and other inspirational models of resilience and hope  hasten this future for Israel.

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