Trieste, January 27 - Italy joined nations around the world on Friday in ceremonies commemorating the millions of victims and some heroes of the Holocaust.
International Holocaust Day, which was approved at the United Nations in 2005, is being marked by numerous events in Italy.
President Giorgio Napolitano told Italians to keep watch for any "resurgence of Holocaust denial and anti-Semitism" and Premier Mario Monti warned not to allow "xenophobia and intolerance to affect our core values". A memorial ceremony was held in Trieste for Giovanni Palatucci, an Italian policeman who saved thousands of Jews in the Second World War before dying in a Nazi concentration camp.
Palatucci, who came from a small town near Avellino, was police chief in the northeastern city of Fiume (now Rijeka in Croatia) when he was arrested by the Gestapo in late 1944 and died in Dachau in January 1945 at the age of 36.
The Vatican started procedures to beatify him in 2002 - the first stage towards sainthood.
Vatican officials hinted at a personal interest on the part of Pope John Paul II.
Palatucci's heroic efforts to save Jews remained unknown for many years and were only slowly pieced together by historians. He came to the attention of the public thanks to a series of posthumous honours he was awarded during the 1990s.
Palatucci, who was in charge of the immigration office at Fiume, used several ploys to save the area's Jews from the death camps.
First he employed semi-legal ways of diverting them towards safe internment camps in Italy or other countries, helped by his uncle, a bishop posted at the southern city of Salerno.
But then he began to take ever bigger risks to get Jews past the Nazis, forging documents and even compromising his own safety.
He had a fairly good idea that the Nazis were closing in on him, research shows, and in 1944 went to Switzerland for a holiday with his fiancee'. But he opted to return to Fiume to continue his work in the knowledge that he would almost certainly be arrested.
Palatucci, who started off as a Fascist policeman in Genoa, was a devout Catholic whose rebellion against the Fascist regime was apparently sparked by two love affairs, one with a high-ranking Fascist woman official and one with a rich Jewish girl.
In 1990 Palatucci joined the other 'Just Among the Nations' at Yad Vashem, the Jewish Holocaust Memorial. In 1995 the Italian state honoured him with a gold medal for civilian valour.
Italy's state broadcaster RAI celebrated Palatucci's deeds with a two-part TV biography shown in September 2001.
Palatucci was one of two Italian Schindler-type heroes.
The other was Giorgio Perlasca, who posed as a Spanish diplomat in Budapest after the real consul fled the city near the end of the war.
He used his bogus position to save thousands of Jews from Nazi German death camps.
Perlasca, too, was the subject of a TV biopic that drew record audiences in 2002.
(photo: attendants at ceremony for Giovanni Palatucci)
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