Daniel Israel (b. 1910), and Anna-Chana Bisson got married in 1933 in Trieste, Italy. Daniel was a professional upholsterer, and together with Anna's father, he managed a large upholstery business in the city center. Daniel and Anna had two boys, Dario (b. 1934) and Vittorio (b. 1935), and they lived with Anna's parents, Zadok-Vittorio and Stella Bisson, and Anna's unmarried sister, Julia. The family lived in a Christian area of the city and maintained a traditional Jewish lifestyle. Daniel wanted them to immigrate to Eretz Israel (Mandatory Palestine) in 1938, but Anna refused to leave her parents, so they stayed in Trieste. Dario and Vittorio went to the local Jewish grade school.
On 8 September 1943, with the Italian government's surrender to the Allies, the Germans took control of most of Italian territory, from Naples northward, including the cities where all the largest and oldest Jewish communities were located: Rome, Livorno, Florence, Milan, Venice and Trieste. Until liberation, the Germans carried out relentless and brutal manhunts everywhere in order to seize Jews. Everyone who was caught and identified as Jewish, was arrested, with no regard as to whether they were Italian citizens or refugees. The arrested Jews were gathered together, transferred to transit camps in northern Italy, and from there, were deported to camps in the East, most of them to Auschwitz. In the last months of the war, the deported Jews were sent to camps in Germany. During this terrifying period, in which the life of every Jew was hanging in the balance, the Italian and foreign Jews needed assistance, and for the most part, they received it from all strata of Italian society.
Following the Germans' entry into Trieste, the Jewish school was closed, and a short time later, the Germans started arresting the Jews, gathering them together and deporting them, mostly to Auschwitz. In light of the German occupation, Daniel decided to get his wife Anna and his sons Dario and Vittorio out of the city. He found refuge for them in the village of Gradisca di Sedegliano, next to Udine, with the Christian Venier family. Anna and the children reached the village in late September 1943, and posed as refugees from the Pola district of Italy. Daniel did not fear for his own safety, and continued working with his father-in-law. They rented a warehouse, and made a living selling the furniture remaining in their business.
The arrest of Jews in Trieste began on 9 October 1943, and on 7 December 1943, the first deportation train left Trieste for Auschwitz. By the end of January 1944, the city had been emptied of Jews. The few Jews remaining were either under arrest, or were living underground under perpetual threat of arrest and deportation. Within less than four months, the Jewish community in Trieste, one of the largest in Italy, had been liquidated. According to historian Liliana Picciotto Fargion, between 7 December 1943 and 25 February 1945, 1,177 Jews were deported from Trieste. 1,080 of them were murdered. Just 97 survived. (Liliana Picciotto Fargion, "Italien", in Dimension des Völkermords, ed. Benz Wolfgang, 1991, p. 224).
Daniel and his father-in-law were arrested at their furniture warehouse on 20 December 1943 and sent to prison in Trieste. The Germans went to their home too, arrested Anna's mother, Stella, and sealed off the apartment. Julia wasn't home that day, and so avoided arrest. She traveled to the village where Anna and the boys were hiding, and notified Anna about the arrest of her parents and husband. "As a result, in the first days of January 1944," relates Anna, "We returned to Trieste, in the hope of receiving news of our loved ones' fate." Anna and the boys found refuge with the Christian Camati family in Trieste, where they stayed for some three months. For the sake of her sons' safety, Anna decided to part with them. They were sent to the Christian families of friends, and Anna stayed with the Camatis. "In order to cope with our severe financial difficulties, " relates Anna, "I stayed on as a housekeeper at the Camatis until the end of June 1944. All this time, I was in contact with my husband, thanks to the help of friends. The separation from my boys was heartbreaking. I lived in perpetual fear that they would be taken."
Daniel was incarcerated in Coroneo prison for some eight months, and from time to time, was required to make mattresses and do upholstery work for the Germans. During his period of imprisonment, he wrote approximately 270 letters and notes to his wife and sons, some of them on pieces of paper that he cut from the margins of newspapers that came his way. He would hide the letters in the collar and cuffs of his shirts, which he would unravel and then resew before they were sent to the laundry. The Christian seamstress in the upholstery workshop would visit him in jail, and take his clothes to be cleaned. Vittorio relates:
No one had the slightest inkling where the people had been deported. In his letters, Father wrote: "Why are they holding me here for so long? They've already sent this one and that one away, only I am still here. Every two weeks, an SS officer comes and interrogates me, asking, 'Where are your wife and children? How is it that you are not in contact with them?'", and Father kept denying all knowledge.
On one occasion, Anna, Vittorio and Dario saw Daniel in the prison courtyard from afar. They came to the building, from the attic windows of which one could look down on the courtyard, and they stood there until they saw Daniel walking there. Anna left the Camati family a few months later, and found refuge with the Matton family. "Mr. Giovanni Matton, who had once worked with my husband, was aware of our terrible plight, and wanted to host us in his home," relates Anna. "The children and I stayed with this family until early November 1944. The situation in Trieste was dire, and Jews were being arrested on a daily basis. In order to avoid a situation in which our host would be deported, in November 1944 we moved to the carpentry workshop owned by one of Mr. Matton's sons on Via Donadoni. In a small room full of tables, they made us a cupboard with a sink, and three children's beds. We were closed in that place most of the time. There, I spent the last winter as one of the hunted, together with my boys, in the direst of psychological and financial circumstances."
From time to time, Anna and the boys went to the nearby church, and were given a little food there. Vittorio recalls:
We would cross ourselves when arriving at the church… My father was an observant man. In his letters to us, he wrote, "Pray. I also pray to God that He should help us, that you shouldn't be caught, and that I should be able to return home safely." In order to protect us, Father addressed us in the letters by nicknames, and didn't use our real names, for fear that we would be exposed if the letters being smuggled from prison were intercepted.
On 2 September 1944, a deportation train left Trieste carrying 48 Jews from Italy – 21 women and 27 men. The youngest was 19, and the oldest 84. Other deportees on the train were Jews from Zagreb and non-Jewish political prisoners (Picciotto Fargion, p. 224). Prior to their deportation, they were held in prison in Trieste, and in the Risiera di San Sabba concentration camp, which was established in an abandoned factory near Trieste. On the train were Jews arrested in Venice, Odina and Fioma, including Adolfo Ottolenghi, the Venice community's Rabbi. The train reached Auschwitz-Birkenau on 7 September. Historian Danuta Czech notes that 69 Jewish men on this transport came from Trieste. 13 of the men were imprisoned in the camp and received the numbers B9739-B9751. The rest of the deportees, including all the women, were murdered in the gas chambers (Czech, Auschwitz Chronicle 1939-1945, 1990, p. 704).
33-year-old Daniel Israel was one of the 13 men who passed the selection. His parents-in-law, Stella and Zadok Bisson, were murdered.
Trieste was liberated on 2 May 1945. Anna and the boys returned to find their home ransacked. Dario and Vittorio went back to the reopened Jewish school, and Anna found work at the Jewish home for the elderly in the city. Dario celebrated his Bar Mitzvah in the Great Synagogue – the first Bar Mitzvah marked in Trieste after the war's end. They stayed in Trieste and awaited Daniel's return. They heard from survivors coming back from the camps that Daniel was seen before the evacuation of Auschwitz-Birkenau in mid-January 1945, but then vanished without a trace.
Of the 48 Italian Jews deported on 2 September 1944 from Trieste to Auschwitz, only one man survived - Gino Abuaf (b. 1925) from Venice. Gino's father Achille Abuaf, who was deported with his son, was murdered on arrival.
Anna, Dario and Vittorio immigrated to Israel in April 1949. In 2016, Vittorio Israel submitted a Page of Testimony to Yad Vashem in memory of his father, Daniel Israel. The same year, Dario and Vittorio donated the original letters and notes that their father wrote in prison in Trieste before his deportation to Auschwitz, as well as documents and family photographs to Yad Vashem for posterity, as part of the "Gathering the Fragments" national project.
