Testimony of Luciana Wallisch Albahri, born in Trieste, Italy in 1926, regarding her family’s experiences in Trieste, Sarajevo, and in hiding in Venice

Testimony of Luciana Wallisch Albahri, born in Trieste, Italy in 1926, regarding her family’s experiences in Trieste, Sarajevo, and in hiding in Venice Childhood in Trieste in a non-religious family; deep roots of mother’s Italian ancestry; father, from Sarajevo, worked as a haute couture tailor for men; attending an Italian public school; cultural life and welfare until 1938; forbidden to attend school; antisemitic incidents in Italy; father’s livelihood compromised; family’s escape to Sarajevo in 1939; opening a haute couture tailoring shop for men in Sarajevo; life in isolation due to not knowing the language; outbreak of the war and the German occupation in 1941; father’s arrest and disappearance; soldiers break into the home in order to carry out searches; contact with the Italian embassy; eviction from the family’s home in Sarajevo; escape to Mostar and rescue from deportation thanks to connections with the Italian minister of foreign affairs and minister of defense; sailing on an Italian warship from Mostar to Trieste; family life in Trieste until September 1943; German occupation of Italy; family’s escape to Venice; hiding with other relatives in the apartment of a non-Jewish physician; receiving the apartment from the physician after his move to southern Italy; obtaining food from a family acquaintance; life in hiding until the liberation on April 25, 1945; continued life in Venice; sister’s wedding to a soldier from the Jewish Brigade and her aliya to Eretz Israel; aliya to Israel with his mother in 1951; absorption.