The Medical Student Who Killed 33 SS Officers To Avenge The Jews They Sent To Auschwitz
Benty, according to his own memoirs, read those laws and felt something break.
Not loudly, not dramatically, but irreversibly.
He had Jewish friends.
He had Jewish classmates.
He watched them disappear from university lecture halls overnight.
One day they were there sitting in the same rows, taking the same notes, laughing at the same professors.
The next day, their seats were empty, the desks were still warm, and nobody said a word.
That silence was what made Bentivia an anti-fascist.
Not a speech, not a pamphlet, not a heroic moment of revelation.
The silence, the way an entire society looked at the empty desks and said nothing.
The way the professors continued lecturing as if the missing students had never existed.
The way the remaining students shifted in their chairs and avoided eye contact and pretended that nothing had happened because acknowledging what had happened would mean admitting that they were complicit in it.
Bentegnar could not pretend.
He would spend the rest of his life unable to pretend.
In 1939 at 17 years old, Bentegnner co-founded a Trosky student group called the Grapo Deunificatio Marxista, the Gum with two friends named Curado Nuran and Nino Baldini.
The group was small.
It was clandestine.
It existed in the margins of a university campus where the fascist secret police, the OVRA, had informers in every lecture hall.
But it existed and for a teenager in Mussolini’s Italy, its existence was an act of defiance that could have cost him everything.
On the 23rd of June 1941, Bentegna made his first public stand.
Some 3 to 4,000 university students gathered in Rome to protest a new government measure that would have repealed the legislation protecting students in good academic standing from being drafted into the military.
It was not a protest against fascism per se.
It was a protest by young men who did not want to be sent to die in Mussolini’s wars.
But in fascist Italy, any public gathering not authorized by the regime was a political act and the secret police were watching.
They arrested Bentegnar.
They filed a report.
They put his name on a list.
He was released in 1943 with a formal warning only because a friend of his happened to be the son of Guidoto, the head of the OVR itself.
That same year, 1943, Bentegna formally joined the Italian Communist Party, the PCI.
It was the logical destination for a young man who had started as a troskist and arrived through the machinery of war and occupation at the conclusion that only organized resistance could answer what was being done to his country.
But the party leadership did not fully trust him.
His troskiest background made him suspect.
His connection to the son of the head of the secret police made him more suspect.
He was accepted.
But he was watched.
He was useful, but he was not one of them.
This was a distinction that would follow him through the war and beyond.
In September 1943, everything changed.
Italy’s fascist government collapsed.
Mussolini was deposed and arrested.
The new Italian government under Marshall Badolio signed an armistice with the allies and the Germans who had been waiting for exactly this invaded from the north.
Within days, the Vermacht controlled Rome.
The Gustapo set up headquarters at Vietaso, a residential street near the Basilica of St.
John Lateran.
The basement cells of Vietaso would become the most feared address in Rome.
Prisoners were tortured there.
Many never came out and then the roundup.
On the 16th of October 1943 at 5:30 in the morning, 300 German soldiers fanned out through the ghetto of Rome, the Jewish quarter world, one of the oldest Jewish communities in the world.
predating Christianity itself.
The soldiers had lists.
They had addresses.
They had the registry of Roman Jews which had been seized from the main synagogue weeks earlier despite a grotesque bargain in which the Jewish community had been forced to deliver 50 kg of gold to SS Colonel Herbert Kappler as a ransom for their safety.
The gold was delivered.
The promise was a lie.
By 2:00 that afternoon, 1,022 Jews had been rounded up.
Men, women, children.
200 of them were children.
They were held for 2 days at the Collagio Military on Viaela Langara across the Tyber.
On the 18th of October, they were loaded onto trucks, driven to the Tibetina railway station, and packed into sealed freight cars.
The train left Rome that morning.
Its destination was Ashvitz Burkanau.
Of the 1,022 Jews deported from Rome that day, 16 survived, 15 men.
One woman, Cetime Spiscino.
The other 1,06 were murdered in the gas chambers within hours of arrival.
In the months that followed, additional roundups across Rome led to the deportation of another 7 to 800 Jews.
In total, more than 2,000 Roman Jews were sent to the camps.
102 survived.
The rest, roughly 1,900 men, women, and children were gassed at Awitz.
Rosario Bentegnar knew what was happening.
The partisans knew.
The entire city knew, even if much of it chose not to speak, the gold ransom, the empty apartments in the ghetto, the sealed trains at Tibetina, the silence of the Vatican, whose walls were close enough to the ghetto that Pope Pius I 12th could have heard the screams if he had opened his window.
Benty Vegna, the boy who had watched his Jewish classmates disappear from university lecture halls in 1938, now watched their parents and grandparents and younger siblings disappear from Rome itself.
The empty desks had become empty homes.
The silence had become mass murder.
In October 1943, Bentegnner and a young woman named Carla Capony joined a communistled resistance organization called the groupy Diazioni Patriotica.
the GAP patriotic action groups.
Bentegnar took the code name Paulo.
Capony took the code name Elena after Helen of Troy.
They had met when Bentegnner delivered clandestine documents to Capone’s apartment for a resistance meeting.
They became partners.
They became lovers.
They became in the lexicon of urban guerrilla warfare a cell.
Carla Capony was 25 years old.
She had grown up under Mussolini’s dictatorship just as Bentegnar had.
She was the daughter of a middle-class Roman family.
She was beautiful, poised, and capable of extreme violence when the cause demanded it.
Weeks before Via Rasella, Capone had single-handedly blown up a truck carrying 2,500 gallons of German gasoline at a Nazi fuel depot.
She had stolen a Beretta 9mm pistol from the holster of a fascist soldier on a tram.
She had used that pistol to shoot a German officer on Via Vento, Rome’s most fashionable boulevard in broad daylight.
She was not a symbol.
She was a weapon.
The GAP was not a large organization.
Its Rome cell numbered perhaps 40 to 50 active members.
Most of them were young.
Most of them were students or intellectuals.
The leaders were often university professors.
The members were middle-class idealists who had broken with fascism and embraced Marxism as the only framework radical enough to justify what they were about to do.
They had pledged to carry out urban guerrilla warfare inside occupied Rome, to assassinate German and fascist officials, to attack military headquarters, to destroy radio stations, railway hubs, and war material, to make the occupation as expensive as possible for the Germans.
Seven attacks in rapid succession between November and December 1943.
Pipe bombs thrown into a German frequented tratoria.
Trucks blown up in front of the opera house.
Soldiers killed as they exited a screening of a German language film at the cinema barbarini.
Guards attacked at Rome’s central prison.
Each action was small.
Each action was a statement.
We are here.
We are watching.
We are not afraid.
But the GAP leadership wanted something bigger, something that would echo beyond Rome, something that would prove to the Allied forces advancing up the Italian peninsula from the Anzio beach head that the resistance was not a rumor.
It was a fighting force.
The date they chose was the 23rd of March, 1944.
It was not random.
March 23 was the 25th anniversary of the founding of the first fascist combat group by Bonito Mussolini in Milan in 1919.
The Fasy Italani decombatimento, the original black shirts, the seed from which the entire dictatorship had grown.
To strike on that date was not just military.
It was symbolic.
It was a message to Mussolini, to Hitler, and to every Italian who still believed in the regime.
25 years of fascism.
This is what you have earned.
The target was chosen with precision.
The 11th company of the third battalion of Pol regiment Bzan marched through central Rome every afternoon along the same route.
At the same time, singing the same song.
They were predictable.
They were complacent.
They were for a guerilla unit operating inside a hostile city.
The perfect target.
Now let the second stream run.
The PISA regiment Bzan was not what most people imagine when they hear the letters SS.
It was not a waffen SS combat division.
It was not an Einat’s group and killing unit.
It was not composed of fanatical Nazi volunteers.
It was a police regiment, an ordino police unit, Ordnung’s Polyai, and its members were in the main reluctant soldiers from a disputed borderland south to roll.
The Alto Adjpine territory in the far northeast of Italy, wedged between the Austrian border and the Dolommites.
For centuries, it had been part of the Hapsburg Empire.
Its population was overwhelmingly Germanspeaking.
After the first world war, the Treaty of Sanja in 1919, transferred it to Italy.
The South Tyians became Italians overnight against their will.
Mussolini’s regime spent the next two decades trying to Italianize them.
Place names were changed.
German language schools were closed.
The German language was banned from public life.
The South Tyrians resisted quietly and stubbornly in the way that mountain people resist.
They kept speaking German at home.
They kept their customs.
They kept their identity.
In 1943, when the Germans occupied northern Italy, the Nazis reversed everything.
The Alto DJ was effectively annexed to the Reich under the operational zone of the Alpine Foothills, the Ozav.
Germanspeaking South Tyians were told they were German again, and being German again meant being eligible for conscription.
The Polyai Regiment Boszan was raised in the autumn of 1943 from South Tyrion men, most of them in their 30s, many of them fathers, some of them men who had already served in the Italian Royal Army before the armistice.
They were not volunteers.
They were drafties.
Their officers and non-commissioned officers were ethnic Germans from the Reich.
The native Germans routinely insulted the South Tyranian rank and file during training, calling them Tyola Holtzka, Tyrion blockheads.
The regiment’s third battalion was designated a reserve unit and stationed in Rome.
Its companies rotated through guard duties and patrol routes across the city.
The men of the third battalion were not given leave.
They were forbidden from interacting with Roman civilians.
They were forbidden from attending church.
Some of them were laddens, speakers of a Roman language from the Doomite valleys, who barely spoke German at all.
They were told to march.
They were told to sing.
They were told to carry their rifles and their grenades and to show the population of Rome what German order looked like.
Every afternoon, the 11th company assembled and marched through the center of the city.
Three a breast, rifles on shoulders, singing hoof, mine madel at the top of their lungs.
Major Hans Dobeck, the battalion commander, enforced the singing with harsh punishments.
The song was not for morale.
It was for intimidation.
156 voices echoing through the streets of an occupied capital, reminding every Roman who heard them, that the Germans were in charge.
The route was always the same.
Down through the old center, past the commercial district, into the narrow streets of the Trevy Rioni.
The column would pass through Via Deltraoro and then turn into Via Rella, a one-way cobblestone street that connected Via Deltraoro with Via deluquatro Fontana.
Via Rella was quiet, lined with small shops, barbers, tailor, artists.
There was a Palazzo at number 156, the Palazzo Tatoni, the former residence of the late Senator Tatoni, whose widow still lived inside.
There was a barracks of the PI, the Plesia del Africa Oriental Italana at the corner of Vadelbacio.
The street was narrow, poorly paved and steep.
It was selected by the GAP precisely because of its tranquility and its lack of pedestrian traffic during the afternoon siesta hours.
The partisans had scouted the route for weeks.
They knew how many steps it took from one designated point to another.
They knew how many seconds it took, walking at a normal pace to reach each of the planned escape routes.
They knew the rhythm of the column, the speed, the spacing, the singing.
Now the two streams begin to move.
1,400 hours.
The 23rd of March, 1944.
Thursday, the weather was mild.
Spring was arriving in Rome.
The trees along the boulevards were beginning to leaf.
The sky was clear.
The sun was warm.
The 11th company of the third battalion assembled in formation.
156 men.
Three files.
Sub Lieutenant Walter Wgast at the head.
Rifles slung, grenades on belts.
They had spent the morning at the shooting range as they did most mornings.
Now they were returning to their barracks.
They would march through the city singing as they always did.
Woolgast gave the order.
The column stepped off 3,400 m from Via Rasella.
Rosario Bentegnar pushed the rubbish cart out of the basement at Via Marco Aurelio and into the afternoon light.
The cart weighed over 30 kg empty with 18 kg of explosive and the iron shrapnel packed around it.
It weighed closer to 60.
The wheels were small.
The handles were rough.
The uniform he wore was ill-fitting.
He had taken off his glasses.
The world was slightly blurred.
He turned the cart toward the center of Rome and began walking.
The plan was straightforward.
Bentevegna would push the cart to Via Rasella and park it at a designated point outside Palazzo Tony.
He would wait for the column when the head of the column had passed and the main body was directly alongside the cart.
He would light the fuse using a pipe filled with tobacco crumbs and paper.
The fuse would burn for approximately 50 seconds.
Benty Vegna would walk away.
At the corner of Via Rasella and Via Delicquatra Fontane, Carla Capony would be waiting with a man’s raincoat.
She would drape it over his sanitation workers uniform.
They would walk away together arm in-armm like the lovers they were.
Meanwhile, four other GAP members would be positioned at the lower end of Via Racella on Vadelacio, armed with pipe bombs and grenades.
When the main charge detonated, they would throw their weapons into the rear of the column, catching the survivors in a crossfire.
The remaining members of the 13 person team would be stationed at various points along the escape routes, acting as lookouts and covering the retreat.
13 people, one cart, 18 kilog of TNT against 156 armed soldiers of the German order police.
14 10 hours.
The column was marching, singing.
The sound carried through the streets.
Romans heard it and stepped aside.
Shopkeepers pulled down their shutters.
Mothers pulled their children indoors.
The singing was a warning.
A column was coming through.
Stay off the street.
3,200 m from Viraella.
1412 hours.
Bentegnar was passing the coliseum.
The rubbish cart rattled over the cobblestones.
He was straining against the weight, leaning back on the downhill stretches to keep the cart from rolling ahead of him.
There were no breaks.
If the cart got away from him, if it tipped, if a wheel caught on a stone and the lid jolted open and someone saw the steel pipe inside, it was over.
He kept his eyes forward.
He kept his pace steady.
He was a street sweeper.
He was invisible.
14, 20 hours.
The column turned onto Via Natsionali, heading south through the commercial district.
The singing echoed off the tall buildings.
Some of the men were tired from the morning’s shooting exercises.
Some of them were thinking about dinner.
Some of them were thinking about home, about the Doommites, about the valleys and the farms they had been taken from 6 months ago.
They were soldiers because someone had told them they were German again after 20 years of being told they were Italian.
They had not asked for either identity.
They marched because the penalty for not marching was worse than marching.
2,800 m from Vella.
Day 1425 hours.
Bentegna turned onto Via defori Imperiali, the grand boulevard that Mussolini had carved through the ancient ruins to create a ceremonial avenue leading to the coliseum.
The irony was not lost on him.
He was pushing a bomb down the Ducy’s parade route, dressed as a rubbish collector.
He passed a German checkpoint.
The soldier on duty glanced at him, glanced at the cart, looked away.
Bentegna kept walking.
1430 hours.
The column was approaching the junction of Via Nationali and Via XX40 Magio.
The singing had settled into a rhythm.
Hoof mine madel.
The same words over and over.
Some of the men had been singing this song every afternoon for 6 weeks.
It had lost all meaning.
It was just sound, just vibration in the throat, just the motion of the jaw.
The words were empty.
The melody was muscle memory.
2,300 m from Vieiraella, 1435 hours, Benty Vegmer turned right off Via defori Imperiali and began the climb toward the Kyanali.
The cart was harder to push uphill.
His arms achd.
Sweat ran down his back, soaking the blue fabric of the sanitation uniform.
He passed the Palazzo deliral.
Armed centuries stood at the gates.
They did not look at him.
He was a street sweeper.
He was part of the scenery.
He thought about the plan.
He thought about the fuse.
He thought about the 50 seconds.
He thought about Carla waiting at the top of Vieiraella with the raincoat over her arm.
He thought about the children he had seen playing near the designated parking spot the day before during the final reconnaissance.
He would have to make sure the street was clear.
He would have to warn anyone nearby.
There were workmen.
There was a Red Cross station in a building nearby.
There were civilians who lived on Via Rasella and who had no idea what was about to happen on their doorstep.
1440 hours the column reached Patza del Kirinalei.
Major Dbeck who often followed his men’s movements was deciding on the route.
The column would normally have continued down Via del Trioni a wider and more comfortable street but Via Deltri was busy with afternoon traffic, civilians, carts, automobiles.
Dobeck ordered the column to take the parallel route instead down via deltraforo then left into via rasella.
It was steeper, poorly paved, narrow, but it was quieter.
The column would reach Via Deloquatra Fontaine faster without fighting through the traffic.
This was the decision on which everything turned.
If Dbeck had chosen Via Delt, the column would not have entered Via a cellar.
The bomb would have sat in its cart waiting for a target that never arrived.
The fuse would never have been lit.
33 men who were about to die would have lived.
335 civilians who were about to be murdered in a cave the next day would have lived.
But Dobeck chose Via Rasella because he did not like traffic because it was a Thursday.
Because the sun was warm and the quieter route was shorter, the geometry of this particular catastrophe was built on small decisions made by men who did not know they were deciding anything at all.
1,500 m from Via Rascella.
1445 hours Bentegna reached Via del Quirinav and turned onto Via deluquatro Fontaine.
He was now heading south downhill toward Via Racella.
The cart pulled against him on the slope.
He gripped the handles and leaned back.
The metal wheels scraped against the cobblestones.
The sound was thin and sharp in the quiet street.
The column was moving through Via Deltraoro.
The singing bounced off the walls of the narrow street.
The men were marching in step, boots striking stone.
156 men moving as one body.
The rhythm was mechanical.
Left, right, left, right.
The song was mechanical.
Hoof mine Medel.
The distance was closing.
1,200 m.
1450 hours.
Bentegnar turned left off via Delequatro Fontane and entered via Rella from the top.
He was going downhill now.
The cart wanted to run.
He braced his legs and controlled the descent, his arms shaking with the effort.
The street was quiet.
A few pedestrians, a Red Cross worker coming in and out of a building nearby, a group of workmen on a truck parked near Palazzo Tatoni doing renovation work on a building.
He reached the designated spot outside Palazzo Tatoni number 156.
He parked the cart against the wall of the building.
He adjusted the lid.
He checked that the fuse was accessible.
Then he stood by the cart, leaning against it as if resting.
A street sweeper taking a break.
Nothing unusual.
Nothing to see.
It was a few minutes before 2:00 in the afternoon.
The column was not due for nearly 2 hours.
Now the waiting began.
Waiting is the hardest part of any operation.
The body cools down.
The adrenaline that carried you through the preparation and the approach dissipates and fear moves in to fill the space.
Bentegnar stood by the cart in the March sunshine, watching the shadows shift on the cobblestones and waited for 156 men to walk to their deaths.
He could not smoke yet.
The lit pipe was the signal.
When he lit the pipe, it meant the column was in sight.
When he lit the pipe, Carla Capony, watching from a window of an apartment 80 m up the street, would walk down to the door and take her position at the corner with the raincoat.
When he lit the pipe, the four men on Vadel Bukacio would grip their pipe bombs and grenades and get ready.
So he waited.
And while he waited, the world continued around him as if it were an ordinary Thursday.
A woman hung laundry from a window.
A cat sat on a doorstep and cleaned its paw.
A boy kicked a ball against a wall.
The sound of the ball hitting stone was the loudest sound on Via Rascella.
The column was still marching, still singing, still closing the distance.
900 m, 1,500 hours, 3:00.
The waiting had lasted more than an hour.
Bentegnar had spoken to no one.
He had moved only to shift his weight from one foot to the other.
The workmen on the truck nearby had glanced at him a few times, but paid no attention.
The Red Cross worker had gone inside.
The street was emptying as the afternoon siesta settled over the neighborhood.
Shutters were closing.
Doors were locking.
800 m.
15 hours.
A column entered the area around Patza Dispia.
The singing was louder now.
Closer.
Bentegna could not hear it yet.
Via Rella was too far.
But he knew from 6 weeks of reconnaissance approximately where the column would be at this hour.
He had walked the route himself, timing it step by step.
He knew the pace.
He knew the rhythm.
He knew how long it took for 156 men marching three a breast to cover each block.
600 m.
15 20 hours.
Bentegnar noticed children.
A group of boys were playing near the cart, kicking a football between them on the cobblestones.
His throat tightened.
The blast radius of 18 kg of TNT in an enclosed street was not something that discriminated between soldiers and children.
He said nothing.
He could not say anything yet.
If he spoke, if he acted strangely, someone might notice.
Someone might call a policeman.
Someone might look inside the cart.
A GAP member named Pasquali Balsamo was stationed nearby as part of the lookout team.
Balsamo saw the children.
He walked over.
He kicked the football hard, sending it bouncing away down the street.
The boys chased it.
They did not come back.
400 m, 1530 hours.
The sound of singing, faint, distant, but unmistakable.
The melody of hoof, mine.
Maddle carried on the warm march air through the side streets and alleyways of the Trevy Rioni, and reached Via Rella as a thin ghostly echo.
Benty heard it.
His hands were steady.
His breathing was controlled.
Later, he would describe this moment to the American journalist Peggy Poke.
First a great fear, he said, then a great calm, an enormous lucidity, a sense of letting go.
300 m, the singing was louder now.
The sound of boots on stone was beginning to emerge beneath the melody.
Left, right, left, right.
156 pairs of boots hitting the cobblestones in unison.
The rhythm of a marching column is not something you hear with your ears alone.
You feel it in your chest in the ground beneath your feet.
It is a vibration that enters the body and stays there.
200 m.
The column entered via deltraforo.
The front rags were now visible to the lookout stationed at the top of Via Rella.
The signal was relayed.
The column was coming.
Bentegnar reached into his pocket.
He pulled out his pipe.
He filled it with tobacco crumbs and scraps of paper.
He struck a match.
He lit the pipe.
The smoke curled into the air.
The signal 80 m up the street.
Carla Capony saw the smoke.
She picked up the raincoat from the chair beside her.
She walked to the door.
She opened it.
She stepped into the sunlight.
She was 25 years old.
She had a pistol in her handbag.
She was calm.
100 m.
The column turned left from Via Deltraoro into Vierella.
Sublutieant Walghast was at the head.
The tallest men were in the front row.
The singing was now enormous in the narrow street, amplified by the stone walls on either side.
Hoof, mine, maddo.
156 voices filling via a cellar like water fills a pipe.
The sound was everywhere.
It drowned out the scrape of the cartwheels, the footsteps of the lookouts, the heartbeat of the man standing beside the rubbish cart in the blue sanitation uniform.
50 m.
Bentive waited.
The plan was specific.
The head of the column had to pass the cart.
The main body had to be directly alongside it.
The blast needed to catch the densest part of the formation.
If he detonated too early, he would only hit the front ranks.
If he waited too long, the column would be passed and the explosion would catch empty street.
He had to time it by ear.
By the sound of the boots, by the rhythm of the song, by the feeling in his chest.
25 m.
The head of the column reached the cart.
Wolgast marched past.
The front ranks marched past.
The main body began to draw alongside.
0 m.
Benty touched the pipe to the fuse.
The fuse caught.
It hissed.
The sound was tiny, inaudible beneath the clamor of the singing and the boots.
Benty turned.
He walked away from the cart.
Not too quickly because running would attract attention.
Not too slowly because he had approximately 50 seconds before 18 kg of TNT detonated in the street behind him.
He walked toward the corner of Via Rasella and Via Delequatro Fontaine.
The garden wall of Palazzo Barbarini was ahead of him.
Carla was at the corner.
He reached her.
She put the raincoat over his shoulders, covering the blue uniform.
They turned and walked away, arm in arm.
Two lovers on a Roman afternoon.
Behind them, the fuse burned.
Bentegnar had warned people.
In the final seconds before the column arrived, he had spoken to a Red Cross worker standing near the cart.
He had told him to leave, that something terrible was about to happen.
The man had understood.
He had left.
Bentegnar had shouted to the workmen on the truck to get away.
They had run.
He had done what he could, but there were still people on Via Rella who did not know.
Residents in the apartments above, shopkeepers in the basement below, a 13-year-old boy named Pierro Zukareti, who was somewhere on the street for reasons that would never be entirely clear.
The fuse burned for approximately 50 seconds.
The column was still marching, still singing.
156 men compressed into the narrow canyon of Via Rasella.
Their bodies packed together three a breast, their rifles useless on their shoulders, their grenades clipped to their belts, their voices raised in a song about a girl who jumps.
The world ended at 1547 hours.
The explosion was enormous.
18 kg of TNT and cast iron shrapnel detonated in an enclosed cobblestone street roughly 4 m wide.
The blast wave had nowhere to go but up and sideways.
It hit the main body of the column at waist height.
The concussion shattered windows for 100 m in every direction.
The shrapnel tore through flesh and bone and fieldg gray fabric at 300 m/s.
28 men of the 11th company of the third battalion of SS Pelier regiment Bzen died instantly.
Their bodies were scattered across viaella.
Blood and debris and severed limbs covered the cobblestones.
The survivors, dazed and bleeding, stumbled through the smoke and dust.
Some ran towards Vadelbacio, toward the rear of the column, away from the blast.
The four GAP members on Vadelbacio were waiting for them.
They threw pipe bombs and hand grenades into the panicking rear ranks.
More explosions, more screaming.
The surviving soldiers began firing wildly into the buildings on either side, spraying bullets into windows and doorways, shooting at shadows, shooting at nothing.
The pock marks from their bullets are still visible on the walls of Via Rella today.
They have never been filled in.
Benty and Capone heard the explosion behind them.
They did not turn around.
They kept walking arm in arm down via Delequatro Fontane toward Patza Barbarini around the corner into the crowd.
They vanished.
Not one member of the 13 person gap team was captured.
Not one was injured.
They melted into Rome’s streets and disappeared.
Behind them, Via was a charal house.
Author Robert Katz, who wrote the definitive account of the attack in its aftermath, described the scene as blood, bodies, and severed limbs covering the entire length of the street.
German soldiers were screaming.
Wounded men were dragging themselves across the cobblestones.
The smell of cordite and blood hung in the narrow street like a fog.
Windows above were shattered.
Plaster and stone had been blown from the building facads.
The rubbish cart was gone, vaporized by its own cargo.
Only twisted fragments of metal remained.
28 men dead on the spot.
Over a hundred wounded.
More than 60 of those wounds were serious.
Five more men died in the hours that followed, bringing the immediate death toll to 33.
In the days and weeks after, additional wounded died of their injuries.
The ultimate death toll among the Polair Regiment Bzan soldiers would reach 42.
Two Italian civilians were killed in the blast.
One of them was Pierro Zukareti.
He was 13 years old.
Within minutes of the explosion, the machinery of German occupation responded.
General Curt Malza, the German military commandant of Rome, arrived on the scene.
He was drunk.
He was always drunk.
The Romans called him the king of Rome, and they did not mean it as a compliment.
Malza was enraged.
He began screaming orders.
He wanted to dynamite every building on Vierella.
He wanted to round up every resident of the neighborhood and shoot them.
He wanted the city to burn.
SS Colonel Herbert Kepler, the head of the German security police and SD in Rome, arrived shortly after.
Kappler was a different kind of man.
He was not drunk.
He was not hysterical.
He was methodical.
He was the same Herbert Kappler who had demanded 50 kilos of gold from the Jewish community of Rome 5 months earlier and then deported them to Ashvitz.
Anyway, he was the same Herbert Kappler who ran the torture cells at Vietaso.
He looked at the bodies on Via Rascella and he began to calculate.
Colonel Eugene Dolman, the senior SS liaison officer in Rome, arrived.
Consul Ebahad von Mackinson, the German ambassador, was informed.
The news reached Berlin.
Adolf Hitler was told.
Hitler’s initial reaction, according to multiple accounts, was fury.
He demanded that between 10 and 50 Italians be executed for every German killed.
Some accounts say he wanted the entire Trevy quarter of Rome dynamited.
Some say he wanted 300 civilians shot on the spot.
The numbers fluctuated as the message passed through the chain of command.
But the principle was fixed.
There would be a reprisal.
It would be massive.
It would be immediate.
Field Marshal Albert Kessler, the German commander in chief south, authorized the final ratio, 10 Italians for every German soldier killed.
With 33 dead, the number was 330.
Kaplau was given the task of assembling the victims.
He began that night.
He ordered his subordinates to compile lists.
prisoners from Vietaso, prisoners from Regina Coali, Rome’s central prison, men who had already been condemned to death for partisan activity.
But there were only three men under death sentences.
That was not nearly enough.
Kepler expanded the lists.
Men serving prison sentences, men under investigation, men suspected of resistance sympathies, men whose only crime was having been arrested at a German checkpoint without proper papers, and Jews.
75 Jews who were being held under racial laws, men whose crime was their ancestry.
The lists were still too short.
Kepler needed 330 bodies.
He sent his men out into the streets around Via Rascella to round up random civilians.
Men pulled from cafes, men pulled from apartments, men pulled from cues at bread shops, anyone, everyone.
By the morning of March 24, Kappler had assembled 335 prisoners, five more than the 330 required.
The extra five were a mistake, an administrative error.
Someone had miscounted.
When Kappa’s subordinates discovered the error, they decided it did not matter.
Releasing the five extra men might compromise the secrecy of the operation, so they would die, too.
Five men would be murdered because someone could not count.
On the afternoon of March 24, 1944, the 335 prisoners were loaded into trucks.
They were driven to the Via Ardentina, a road on the outskirts of Rome near the ancient catacombs.
There in a series of man-made caves that had once been used as a puzzle quarry, the operation was carried out.
SS Captain Eric Priky and SS Captain Carl Hass were in charge of the killing.
Prib had a list.
He stood at the entrance to the caves with a clipboard and crossed off each name as the prisoners were brought in.
They were killed in groups of five.
Each group was led into the cave, forced to kneel on the bodies of the group before them and shot in the back of the head.
The executioners were SS officers and enlisted men.
Some of them had never killed a man before.
Some of them vomited.
Some of them had to be given cognac to continue.
The killing took approximately 4 and 1/2 hours.
335 men killed one by one, kneeling on the corpses of the men who had gone before them.
75 of them were Jews.
At least one of them was a boy of 14.
Some of them had been partisans.
Some of them had been political prisoners.
Some of them had been ordinary Roman citizens who had been in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Some of them had no idea why they were dying.
They were never told.
When the shooting was finished, German engineers sealed the mouth of the cave with explosives.
The blast was intended to collapse the entrance and bury the dead.
It did not work completely.
The cave was only partially sealed.
The bodies lay inside, stacked on top of each other, decomposing in the darkness.
They would not be found by the Allies until after the liberation of Rome on the 4th of June 1944.
The next day, the 25th of March, posters appeared across Rome in German and Italian.
They announced that the partisan attack on Vieiraella had been an act of criminal sabotage.
They announced that as a reprisal, 10 Italians had been executed for every German killed.
They stated that the order had already been carried out.
The posters did not mention the caves.
They did not give the names of the dead.
They presented the massacre as a simple equation.
You killed our men.
We killed 10 of yours for every one of ours.
This is the mathematics of occupation.
This is the price of resistance.
Rosario Bentegnar read those posters.
Carla Capony read them.
Every member of the GAP cell that had carried out the Via Rasella attack read them and they understood with a clarity that would never leave them what their bomb had cost.
Not in German lives in Italian ones.
The GAP had anticipated reprisals.
They knew the German doctrine of collective punishment.
They had studied the precedents.
Lead in Czechoslovakia raised to the ground in 1942 after the assassination of Reinhard Hydrich.
Mass executions in Greece, in Yugoslavia, in the Soviet Union.
The pattern was established.
Strike the Germans and civilians die.
The Partisans knew this.
When they built the bomb, they knew it.
When Bentegnar pushed the cart through the streets of Rome, they knew it.
When Capone stood at the corner with the raincoat, they had made their calculation.
The occupation could not be accepted.
Resistance was a moral imperative.
The cost of resistance was paid in lives that were not theirs to spend.
But the cost of not resisting was paid in something worse, in complicity, in silence, in the slow, grinding extermination of everything that made life worth living.
This is the weight that Rosario Bentegnner carried for the next 68 years of his life.
He did not hide from it.
He did not apologize for it.
For the rest of his life, through decades of public controversy, political attacks, court trials, and revisionist campaigns, Bentegna maintained that the Via Rasella attack was a legitimate act of war by a legitimate resistance movement against an illegal military occupation.
He was right in every legal and moral framework that existed before and after the war.
The Italian courts agreed.
The European Court of Human Rights agreed.
The act was legal.
The reprisal was a war crime.
The responsibility for the Ardine massacre lay with the men who ordered it and the men who carried it out, not with the partisans who provoked it.
But the law is one thing.
Memory is another.
And memory does not file things in neat legal categories.
Memory stores the dead.
All of them.
The 33 soldiers of Poly Regiment Bzan, who was singing a song about a girl when the world exploded.
The two Italian civilians, including a boy of 13 who should have been doing his homework, and the 335 men in the Arditine caves, kneeling on the bodies of the dead, waiting for the bullet in the back of the head.
Bentegna carried all of them, every name, every number, every face he imagined but never saw.
He married Carla Capony after the war.
They had a daughter whom they named Elena, Carla’s partisan code name, after Helen of Troy.
He finished his medical studies and became a doctor.
He practiced medicine for decades.
He saved lives.
He set bones and stitched wounds and delivered babies and wrote prescriptions and did all the ordinary quotidian work of a man who heals the living.
And he did it in the same city where he had once pushed a rubbish cart full of explosives through the afternoon traffic and killed 33 men.
He and Capone divorced in 1974.
The war had bound them together, but the peace could not hold them.
Capony remained in public life.
She became a journalist.
She served in the Italian Parliament as a representative of the Communist Party.
She was awarded a gold medal for military valor by the Italian government.
She suffered from poor health for the rest of her life, the result of her years in the resistance.
She died on the 24th of November 2000 at the age of 82.
Bentegnar lived on.
He defended the Via Rasceller attack in every forum that would hear him.
He wrote books.
Akum Banditin published in 1983.
Operation Via Rascella in 1996.
He gave interviews.
He testified in trials.
He fought back against every attempt by Italian neofascists and right-wing politicians to rewrite the history of the resistance, to cast the partisans as criminals and the German occupiers as victims.
In 1974, 30 years after the attack, Bentygner sat down with Peggy Poke, an American journalist with United Press International, and reconstructed the events of that March afternoon.
He described the fear, the calm that followed the fear, the enormous lucidity, the sense of letting go.
He did not describe regret.
He described a man who had done what he believed was necessary and who was prepared to live with the consequences.
All of them.
Eric Pripke, the SS officer who had stood at the entrance to the Arotine caves with his clipboard, crossing off names as men were led to their deaths, escaped to Argentina after the war.
He lived there for nearly 50 years, undisturbed under his own name.
In 1994, an American television crew from ABC News tracked him down in the Patagonian town of San Carlos de Bariloce.
They knocked on his door.
They asked him about the Arditine caves.
Pripk, then 80 years old, confirmed his role.
He said he had been following orders.
He said the caves were something small that was lost among everything else.
The bombings, Dresdon, Hiroshima, his dead, the lost war beginning again from nothing.
He said he was a soldier.
He said he never thought it was a crime.
The broadcast triggered an international outcry.
Pripke was extradited to Italy.
He was tried.
He was convicted.
He was sentenced to life imprisonment, later commuted to house arrest due to his age.
He died on the 11th of October 2013 at the age of 100 in an apartment in Rome.
He was buried in secret in an unnamed prison cemetery to prevent his grave from becoming a neofascist shrine.
Herbert Kappler, the man who had ordered the massacre, was tried by a British military tribunal in 1948 and sentenced to life imprisonment.
In 1977, severely ill with cancer, he escaped from a Roman military hospital.
His wife smuggled him out in a suitcase, or so the story went.
He fled to West Germany, which refused to extradite him.
He died at his home in Salttow in February 1978.
Carl Hass, the other SS officer who had overseen the killings, lived quietly in Italy under an assumed name for decades.
He was eventually identified, tried alongside Pribka in 1997, and convicted.
He was sentenced to life imprisonment, later reduced on appeal.
He died in 2004.
Petro Caruso, the Italian fascist police chief of Rome, who had collaborated with Catler to compile lists of hostages, was tried by an Italian court in September 1944, just 3 months after the liberation.
He was convicted and executed by firing squad on the 22nd of September 1944.
Donato Careta, the vice governor of Regina Coelli prison, who had provided prisoners for the caves, was seized by a mob during his trial on the 18th of September, 1944, and lynched before a formal sentence could be handed down.
Justice, such as it was, came late and unevenly.
Some of the killers were punished, some escaped, some lived to old age in comfortable exile.
The dead stayed dead, and Bentegnar stayed in Rome, the city he had been born in.
the city he had pushed a rubbish cart through on a Thursday afternoon in March.
The city where he had killed and where others had been killed because of what he did.
He walked the same streets.
He passed via Rasella.
He passed the Ardetine caves which had been declared a national memorial and cemetery open to visitors, a place where school children were brought on field trips to learn about the price of occupation and the cost of resistance.
The debates never stopped.
Every anniversary of the attack, every anniversary of the massacre, the same arguments erupted in Italian newspapers and on Italian television.
Were the partisans heroes or criminals? Was the attack justified? Did Bentegnar and his comrades know that the reprisal would happen? Should they have surrendered to prevent it? Should they have warned the population? Could they have chosen a target whose destruction would not have provoked a massacre of civilians? The German command had posted notices threatening reprisals, but the notices did not specify the ratio.
The partisans expected punishment.
They did not expect the Arditine caves.
Antivgna himself said that he had anticipated arrests, perhaps executions of prisoners already condemned, but not 335, not 75 Jews pulled from their cells, not boys of 14, not a production line of death in an underground quarry, men kneeling on the corpses of the dead, shot in the back of the head, one after another for 4 and 1/2 hours.
The scale was beyond anything the partisans had imagined, and the responsibility for that scale lay with the men who conceived it, ordered it, and carried it out.
The Italian courts settled the question definitively.
In multiple trials spanning decades, the courts ruled that the Via Rasella attack was a legitimate act of resistance.
The Adiotine massacre was a war crime.
The Partisans bore no legal responsibility for the reprisal.
The moral question was harder.
Moral questions always are.
Bentevegna lived with the moral question every day.
He did not resolve it.
He held it.
He carried it the way a doctor carries the knowledge that some patients die despite everything you do.
The way a soldier carries the knowledge that his bullets do not distinguish between combatants and the people standing behind them.
The way anyone who has ever made a decision with consequences beyond their control carries the weight of those consequences.
He did not put it down.
He could not put it down.
It was not his to put down.
He grew old.
His hair went white.
His face lined.
He became a grandfather.
He continued to practice medicine.
He continued to speak publicly about the resistance.
He continued to defend the Vicella attack with a conviction that never wavered.
Even as his body weakened and his voice thinned and the war receded further and further into history.
In 2004 on the 60th anniversary of the attack, there was a ceremony at Vierella.
Dignitaries spoke, wreaths were laid.
Benty was there.
He was 81 years old.
He stood on the cobblestones where he had once pushed a cart loaded with explosives and listened to speeches about heroism and sacrifice and the price of freedom.
He said little.
He did not need to say much.
His presence was the statement.
I was here.
I did this.
I live with this.
He died on the 2nd of April 2012 in Rome.
He was 89 years old.
68 years had passed since the afternoon he lit the fuse on Via Rella.
68 years of carrying the 33 and the 335 and the two and the 13year-old boy and the 75 Jews and the,022 who had been deported from the ghetto and the 1900 who died at Avitz and the silence that had started it all.
The silence of the empty desks in a university lecture hall in 1938.
68 years is a long time to carry anything.
Bentner carried it all.
The cobblestones of Vieiraella are still there.
The street is still narrow, still quiet, still steep.
The bullet holes in the walls have never been repaired.
If you walk down the street on a spring afternoon, when the light is soft and the shadows are long, and the sound of traffic from Via Delroni drifts up through the side streets like a distant hum, you can still see them.
Small dark circles in the stone.
Each one the diameter of a finger.
Each one the mark of a bullet fired by a dying man’s comrade in the smoke and chaos of a march afternoon 82 years ago.
They are not labeled.
There is no plaque beside them.
They are just there.
Part of the wall, part of the stone, part of Rome.
The fay arotine are still there.
The caves on the outskirts of the city sealed and reopened and excavated and transformed into a memorial.
335 coffins lie in rows beneath a massive concrete slab, each one bearing a name and a photograph.
School children visit.
Tour groups visit.
The prime minister of Italy visits every March 24th.
Wreaths are laid.
Speeches are made.
The dead are honored.
75 of the coffins belong to Jewish men.
Men who were pulled from their cells in Viaaso and Regina Coelli.
men who had committed no crime except being born Jewish in a city whose occupiers had decided that being Jewish was a death sentence.
Their names are inscribed alongside the names of partisans and political prisoners and ordinary citizens and boys too young to understand why they were dying.
In death, the categories collapsed.
They were all Romans.
They were all victims of the same machine.
The machine is gone now.
The regime that built it is gone.
The men who operated it are dead, but the memory of what it did remains, embedded in stone and bone, and the quiet persistence of Roman streets that remember everything, because stone has no choice but to remember.
Rosario Bentegnar was a medical student.
He was 21 years old.
He became an anti-fascist because of what was done to the Jews of his country.
He pushed a cart through the streets of Rome.
He lit a fuse.
He walked away.
He spent the rest of his life being a doctor and being the man who lit the fuse.
And he never pretended that those two things did not coexist inside the same body, the same hands, the same mind.
He healed.
He killed.
He carried it.
The distance between the cart and the column was 3,400 m at 1400 hours.
It was zero at 1547 hours.
Everything that happened afterward, the explosion, the massacre, the trials, the debates, the memorials, the 68 years of memory, all of it originated in the moment those two streams met.
The man with the cart and the men with the song, the medical student and the soldiers, the fuse and the marching boots, 0 m.
That is the distance at which history happens.
Not in the grand spaces of strategy rooms and chancellaries and parliaments.
In the narrow space between a rubbish cart and a column of singing men on a cobblestone street in Rome.
In the half second between the spark and the blast.
In the 50 heartbeats between lighting the fuse and the end of the world.
The streets of Rome were quiet that evening.
The singing had stopped.
It would never start again on Via Rella.
The 11th company of the third battalion of SS Pelisair regiment Bzen had ceased to exist as a fighting unit.
Its survivors were evacuated.
Its dead were buried.
Its name passed into history as a footnote to a massacre that overshadowed the attack that provoked it.
And the city went on.
Rome always goes on.
It has been sacked and burned and occupied and liberated and rebuilt more times than any city on earth.
It absorbs its catastrophes the way the Tyber absorbs the rain.
The water rises, the water falls, the river keeps flowing, the streets dry, the shops reopen, the laundry goes back on the lines, and the bullet holes stay in the walls because Romans know that filling them would be a kind of forgetting, and Romans do not forget.
The memorial at the Arotine caves is open every day.
Admission is free.
You walk through a gate and along a path lined with cypress trees and you enter the tomb, a long hall lit by natural light, filtering through gaps in the concrete ceiling.
The coffins are arranged in rows side by side, each one slightly raised on a stone pedestal.
The names are engraved in bronze.
Some of the photographs are clear.
young men, old men, men with mustaches, men with glasses, men who look like they were interrupted in the middle of something and never got to finish it.
Among them are names you might recognize if you knew the history of the Jewish community of Rome.
Men whose families had lived in the ghetto for 500 years.
Men whose ancestors had been there since before the emperors.
Men who had survived the gold ransom of September 1943 and the deportation of October 1943 only to be pulled from their cells 6 months later and shot in the back of the head in a cave because a partisan had lit a fuse on via recella.
The connection between the two events, the deportation and the massacre, was Herbert Kappler.
He was the thread.
He had demanded the gold.
He had ordered the deportation.
He had organized the massacre.
One man, three crimes, the same city, the same year.
The Jewish community of Rome was his target in October.
The entire civilian population of Rome was his target in March.
The difference was one of scale, not of kind.
Both actions were expressions of the same principle.
The conquered exist at the pleasure of the conqueror.
Their lives are currency.
Their deaths are arithmetic.
Bentegnar understood this.
He had watched it unfold since 1938.
The racial laws, the disappearing classmates, the gold ransom, the deportation trains, the sealed freight cars at Tibetina station, the 122 who went east, and the 16 who came back.
He had watched his city become a machine for processing human beings into categories, the useful and the expendable, the compliant and the condemned.
And he had decided at some point between the empty desks and the empty apartments and the empty streets of the ghetto that he would not be compliant, that he would be instead the man with the cart.
Was it worth it? The question has been asked 10,000 times in 10,000 newspaper columns and television debates and university seminars and dinner table arguments across Italy for 82 years.
Was the Via Rosella attack worth 335 lives in the Aratim caves? Benty never answered that question directly because the question itself was a trap.
It assumed that the partisans had the power to prevent the massacre.
They did not.
The Germans could have chosen not to retaliate.
They chose to retaliate.
The Germans could have chosen a smaller number of victims.
They chose 10 to one.
The Germans could have chosen to execute only condemned prisoners.
They chose to include Jews and random civilians and boys of 14.
Every escalation was a German decision.
Every additional death was a German crime.
The partisans controlled one thing and one thing only.
The fuse.
Everything after the fuse was the occupier’s choice.
But the question persists because grief does not respect logic.
The families of the 335 dead do not care about legal frameworks and moral philosophy.
They care that their fathers and brothers and sons went into the caves and did not come out.
And some of them blamed Bentegnar.
Some of them blamed him until the day they died.
Some of their children blame him still.
Because blame needs a living body to attach itself to.
And the Germans who ordered the massacre were either dead or exiled or hidden behind the machinery of postwar amnesia.
And Bentegnar was right there in Rome, walking the same streets, breathing the same air, living the life that their dead could not live.
He bore it.
He bore it the way he bore the cart with both hands, leaning into the weight, moving forward because forward was the only direction available.
He did not ask for sympathy.
He did not ask for forgiveness.
He asked only that the record reflect the truth, that the attack was legitimate, that the reprisal was a crime, that the dead of the Ardine caves were murdered by the Germans, not by the partisans, and that the cause for which he fought, the liberation of Italy from fascism and occupation, was a cause worth fighting for, even at the cost, especially at the cost.
On the morning of the 2nd of April 2012, Rosario Bentegnner died in his apartment in Rome.
He was 89.
It was a Sunday.
The spring had come early that year.
The trees were in leaf.
The sky was clear.
The tyber was running high.
The streets of the Trevy Rioni were quiet.
Via Rella was quiet.
The bullet holes were still in the walls.
He had been a medical student and then a partisan and then a doctor and then an old man who remembered.
He had pushed a cart through the center of an occupied city and changed the history of that city in 50 seconds.
He had loved a woman named Carla who had thrown pipe bombs and stolen pistols and walked away from explosions arm in-armm with him in the Roman sunshine.
He had raised a daughter named Elena after the code name of a partisan after Helen of Troy after the face that launched a thousand ships or in this case a thousand arguments about what resistance means and what it costs and who has the right to decide.
He had lived with the weight of Vierella for 68 years.
He had carried the 33 and the 335 and the two and the boy of 13.
He had carried the 75 Jews in the caves and the 122 on the train to Awitz and the empty desks in the university and the silence that had made him into the person he became.
He had carried all of it in the same hands that healed patients and held his daughter and turned the pages of his own books and gripped the railing of his balcony on spring mornings when Rome was beautiful and the past was very far away and very close at the same time.
He put it down on the 2nd of April, 2012.
He was the last person alive who could.
The weight did not disappear.
It transferred to the city, to the stones, to the bullet holes in the walls that have never been filled, to the coffins in the caves, to the names on the plaques, to the question that will never be answered.
Because it is not a question that has an answer.
It is a question that has a weight.
3,400 m at,400 hours.
Zero at 1547 hours.
A man with a cart and a column of singing men.
A fuse and a match.
50 seconds.
The distance closed.
The streams converged.
and everything that followed.
The explosion, the massacre, the liberation, the trials, the memorials, the arguments, the grief, the defiance, the 68 years of memory.
All of it began in that convergence on a cobblestone street in Rome in the Trevy Rioni where a medical student in an ill-fitting uniform pushed a rubbish cart into the path of history and walked away with his lover’s raincoat on his shoulders and the sound of singing still ringing in his ears.
The singing stopped.
The silence lasted 68 years.
Then he died and the silence became permanent.
But the stones of Veracella remember they always will because stone does not forget and Rome does not forget.
And the living, the ones who carry the weight, they do not forget either.
They just put it down eventually when their arms give out and their hearts stop and the distance between the beginning and the end of a life reaches zero.
The way all distances reach zero in the end.
0 m.
The place where everything meets.
The man and the column.
the fuse and the song, the doctor and the partisan, the healer and the killer, the one who lit the match, and the 335 who paid for it, and the 68 years of Roman sunlight in between.
He carried it, all of it, until he could not carry it anymore.
Then he set it down in Rome where he had picked it up on a Thursday afternoon in March in the middle of a
