I want my readers to fall in love with this Jewish hero - The Jewish Chronicle

They called him La primula rossa: the Scarlet Pimpernel. This brave and dashing aviator from a prominent Genoese Jewish family had little organisational experience when he took over the North Italian Delegation for the Assistance of Jewish Emigrants (Delasem) rescue network in November 1943. But he did have intelligence, drive and a certain amount of chutzpah. A self-taught forger, he issued Jews in hiding with false identity cards that were good enough to fool the Gestapo, and he deployed his contacts in the Red Cross and beyond to create a new, safer procedure for smuggling refugees into Switzerland. And he did all this while evading the Nazis and their collaborators at every turn, sometimes in spectacular ways. His capture carried a bounty of one million lire: well over a quarter of a million pounds in today’s currency.

He may sound like something out of a storybook, but Massimo Teglio was entirely real. In writing my novel Daughter of Genoa, my biggest challenge was to do him some kind of justice.

I didn’t know anything about Teglio when I began working on the book in the summer of 2022. At that time, I was living in the walled Tuscan city of Lucca, trying to make my Italian dream work on a precarious freelancer income. My debut novel Escape to Tuscany, a dual timeline story of armed partisan resistance (in 1944) and escaping coercive control (in the present day), was still a year away from publication.

I went to Genoa whenever I could. I spoke to experts across the Jewish and Christian communities. The facts I discovered were more extraordinary than I had ever anticipated

I knew that I had to start on my second novel, and that I wanted it to be about a different aspect of the Italian resistance movement. Beyond that, I had no idea what I was going to do. So when my closest Italian friend offered to show me around his home city of Genoa, I leapt at the chance. Could this be the setting of my next book?

What followed was a love story: a process of discovery that would shape the next years of my life. First of all, I fell in love with Genoa. This historic port city prides itself on being the only one in Italy to liberate itself from Nazi control with no help from the Allies. The archbishop of Genoa, Cardinal Pietro Boetto SJ, even convinced the German command to retreat quietly rather than face further reprisals from the city’s fearsome partisan forces. He had been involved in the resistance, too: Delasem had operated under his protection throughout the occupation.

That “SJ” after Boetto’s name meant that he belonged to the Society of Jesus, and that was my first inkling of the story I wanted to pursue. I had spent a long time studying the Jesuits. I knew that the Society of Jesus was profoundly implicated in the Vatican’s proximity to fascism and its failure to protect Jews. And so I knew that Cardinal Boetto, who was recognised as Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem in 2015, must have been an exceptional case. But he was just my starting point.

As I conducted my research, I went to Genoa whenever I could. I spoke to experts across the Jewish and Christian communities, and I read everything about Delasem that I could find.

The facts I discovered were more extraordinary than I had ever anticipated. Cardinal Boetto had not merely looked the other way as Delasem worked to protect Jews in Italy from deportation and murder. His offices at the Curia were its headquarters – his secretary was its treasurer, and worked closely with Teglio to distribute help and funds. In a time of rampant Christian antisemitism, this was a genuine interfaith effort. As I walked the streets of the city, learning it by heart, my book took shape. Not a big, sweeping epic, but a small, intimate study: the story of a fictional cell within a real-life network. There was my heroine, Anna, a young woman with an Italian Jewish father and a Scottish Protestant mother, who finds herself persecuted as a Jew; first in fascist Italy, then under Nazi occupation. Father Vittorio, decidedly not a hero – a troubled Jesuit priest who works for Cardinal Boetto, and whose crisis of faith puts everyone in mortal danger. Silvia and Bernardo, two members of the Waldensian church who secretly print ration cards and identity cards for Delasem. And finally, two real people from history: Francesco Repetto, Boetto’s secretary; and Teglio, my leading man. What else could he be? Daughter of Genoa is not a documentary. I have worked in the gaps of the historical record, inventing conversations that never took place and relationships that never happened.

As a historian, I know that no novel can ever convey the scale and horror of the Shoah. The greater a story’s narrative appeal, the more it makes sense to our hearts and our brains, the further it must be from the inhumane, senseless reality of what was done to millions of Jews, simply for being Jews. And so I have chosen a different approach.

By setting my story in one small corner of one Italian city, I want to bring my readers deep into the claustrophobic world of occupied Genoa.

I want to give them a taste of the fear my characters live with every day, the determination that drives them, the secrets they have to keep. I hope that those who didn’t already know about Delasem or the Italian Racial Laws will be inspired to go and find out more.

And, above all, I hope that they, too, will fall in love with Teglio: a great Jewish hero whose bravery, commitment, and irrepressible character deserve to be known and loved.

By his own estimate Teglio and his contacts saved around 1,500 refugees. But the impact of Delasem, and of rescue efforts in Italy more broadly, was even greater.

Historians estimate that at least 80 per cent of Jews in occupied Italy survived the war. This includes our hero, who died in his native Genoa in 1990, at the age of 89. That million-lire bounty was never claimed.

Daughter of Genoa is published by Bloomsbury Publishing this week

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