Fall 1943. Germany had just taken over Italy. No mercy was shown for Italian Jews. German soldiers began rounding up Italian Jews like sheep and deported about 10,000 people to concentration camps throughout the 2-year Nazi occupation. Most never returned. But in Rome, a group of doctors saved at least 20 Jews from a similar fate by diagnosing them with Syndrome K, a deadly, disfiguring, and contagiosissima disease. On a tiny island in the middle of Rome's Tiber River, just across from the Jewish Ghetto, was the 450- year-old Fatebenefratelli Hospital. Nazis raided the area on 16 October 1943 and a handful of Jews had no choice but to flee to the Catholic hospital. There, they were quickly given case files reading "Syndrome K". It was a completely newfound disease. It did not exist in any medical textbook or physician's chart. In fact, it didn't exist at all. Syndrome K, the mysterious unknown disease Syndrome K was a codename invented by doctor and anti-fascist, Adriano Ossicini, to help distinguish between real patients and healthy hideaways. The fake illness was meticulously orchestrated: Rooms holding "Syndrome K" sufferers were designated as dangerously infectious and Jewish children were instructed to cough to imitate tuberculosis patients, when soldiers passed through the hospital. "The Nazis thought it was cancer or tuberculosis, and they fled like rabbits," said Vittorio Sacerdoti, a then 28-year-old Jewish doctor who worked at the hospital under a false name. On 21 June, Fatebenefratelli was honored as a "House of Life" by the Raoul Wallenberg Foundation, a US organisation dedicated to honoring heroic acts during the Holocaust. In conjunction with the occasion, 96-year-old Ossicini granted an interview about the invention of the disease: "Syndrome K was put on patient papers to indicate that the sick person wasn't sick at all, but Jewish. We created those papers for Jewish people as if they were ordinary patients, and in the moment when we had to say what disease they suffered, it was Syndrome K, meaning 'I am admitting a Jew,' as if he or she were ill, but they were all healthy. The idea to call it Syndrome K, like Kesserling or Kappler, was mine." The names were derived from Albert Kesserling was the German commander overseeing Rome's Nazi occupation and SS chief Herbert Kappler who had been installed as city police chief, and later masterminded the Ardeatine massacre, a mass killing of Italian Jews and political prisoners in 1944. "The lesson of my experience was that we have to act not for the sake of self-interest, but for principles," said Ossicini. "Anything else is a shame." More were saved by Syndrome K Survivor testimonies gathered by Yad Vashem confirm that at least a few more lives were saved after 16 October 1943. Several families with small children sheltered there through the winter, until German forces swept through the hospital again in May 1944. Accounts of how many Italian Jews were saved by Fatebenefratelli Hospital vary from dozens to hundreds. Another doctor acting out the life-saving lie was surgeon Giovani Borromeo, later recognised by the Israeli Holocaust remembrance organisation Yad Vashem as "righteous among nations." Vittorio's cousin, Luciana Sacerdotti (now Tedesco), was also safely hidden in the hospital as a small child during the last raid. Another doctor acting out the life-saving lie was surgeon Giovani Borromeo, later recognised by the Israeli Holocaust remembrance organisation Yad Vashem as "righteous among nations." Italy's Jewish community is one of the oldest in Europe and Syndrome K is one of many WWII-era anecdotes of ordinary Italians taking extraordinary action to save the lives of fellow citizen, made even more striking against the historical backdrop of Italy's own anti-Semitic laws. Nearly 9,000 Roman Jews of a community of 10,000, ultimately managed to evade arrest, a feat sadly trampled over by the Third Reich's genocidal mania in the last years of the war. Source
