Drawings mark wartime refuge

HIDING FROM NAZIS

ROME • The church of San Gioacchino in Rome is full of frescoes, mosaics, and intricate stained glass windows, but perhaps its real masterpieces are charcoal wall drawings hidden away in its attic.

The drawings were done by one of 35 men — including Jews, anti-fascist Christians, and military defectors — who were hidden in the attic during the Nazi occupation of Rome in the Second World War, some for as long as six months.

Father Ezio Marcelli discovered the drawings in 1984, 40 years after allied soldiers liberated Rome from Nazi occupiers in June, 1944. He remembered hearing from an older priest that people were hidden in the church during the war and began looking in the parish archives for clues.

“I managed to find this hiding place. We made this extraordinary discovery,” he said. “I was very emotional.”

“The meaning of what happened here, of people being persecuted, hunted down to be sentenced to death, still has a real significance today,” Marcelli said.

Despite his 90 years, Marcelli fearlessly climbs the external spiral staircase leading to the attic.

“We must always be vigilant and careful so that no one can ever again do such evil actions,” he said, taking visitors through a secret passage that was once bricked up to conceal the people inside from possible Nazi raids.

The three larger-than-life drawings on the walls, done in charcoal pencil, show Jesus with a crown of thorns, a Madonna and child, and a modern-day man sitting on a simple chair with his head in his hands. This is likely a portrait of one of the fugitives.

While they are not signed, Marcelli said they were almost certainly done by Luigi de Simone because the archives also contained sketches on sheets of paper that were signed by him.