Welcome to Noble Blood, a production of I Heart Radio and Grim and Mild from Aaron Manky,

listener discretion advised.

Hi, this is Danish Ward's host of the podcast. Just a little bit of housekeeping.

If you want to support the show, you can do that on our Patreon. There's a link in the episode

description. We also have merch and that link is in the episode description.

Oh, and I wrote, uh, I have two books, Anatomy, a Love Story and its Equal Immortality, a Love

Story. And if you like history or the characters that I've covered in this podcast,

not characters, historical figures, then I think you would really like those books. Check them out.

And that's about it. Thank you so much for listening. Oh, one more quick note before we begin.

This episode centers around the Holocaust and so it contains some very dark and disturbing themes

in details.

October 16th, 1943, was a cold, damp morning in Rome. It was a Saturday, the Sabbath, the

holiest day of the Jewish week. But the 12,000 Jewish families in the city hadn't gone to Rome's

great synagogue, the Tempium Majore, in a long time. They had been living under Nazi occupation

since September of that year. They had been subject to Italy's own racial laws for five years prior.

Many Jews were living in the Jewish ghetto. Perhaps a few brave souls had lit Sabbath candles

at sundown the previous night, furtively, hiding the small flicker of the flames from any passers-by.

Perhaps the wax of those candles still hung dried from the candlesticks. Suddenly there was a

loud banging on the door, the curled hard fists of the Nazi occupiers. Some Jewish mothers

hushed their babies, collected themselves, and opened their doors, some coward or hid, and saw

their doors forced down. A number of Jewish men had already gone into hiding,

suspecting that they might be targeted, so it was mostly women and children who the Nazis

...