Pappagallo Pietro

Pappagallo, Don Pietro In June 1944, not long after Rome was liberated from the German occupation, the Italian resistance published a newspaper article in memory of Pietro Pappagallo. In describing his activities, they wrote that he helped the underground and the persecuted, including Allied soldiers in hiding, as well as Jews. A similar account, by Oscar Cageggi, an inmate who had been imprisoned along with Pappagallo, was published in Il Quotidiano in June 1944. An underground activist, Ada Alessandrini, published an article in Mercury Magazine in December 1944. She related that she had been given the task of aiding a young German Jewish girl, so she had looked for a way to provide the girl with fake identity papers. Alessandrini first approached a fellow activist for help, but he refused her. Wandering the streets of Rome with nowhere to turn, she decided to ask Don Pietro Pappagallo for help. He gave them a warm welcome and agreed to help the girl. According to him, all that was needed was a picture and a seal of a city in liberated Italy—in this case, Naples. Don Pietro had family members who owned a printing press in Rome. He had approached them earlier in the occupation and asked them to obtain a seal of the city of Naples, which would enable him to create forged documents for Jews and others. They had such a seal engraved, and that is how he was able to aid the Jewish girl. Don Pietro’s nephew Antonio later recalled, “My uncle was a real priest . . . he lived his vocation; all kinds of people knocked on his door.” Don Pietro was arrested in January 1944, at the age of 56, after being betrayed by Gino Crescentini, a notorious Italian who betrayed many Jews who were in hiding or had fake papers. The German SS murdered Don Pietro Pappagallo on March 24, 1944, along with 335 other Italians (among them, 77 Jews) in the quarries of the Fosse Ardeatine. On July 13, 1998, the president of Italy posthumously awarded Pietro Pappagallo the Medaglia d’Oro al Merito Civile (Gold Medal for Civil Merit). On May 22, 2018, Yad Vashem recognized Don Pietro Pappagallo as Righteous Among the Nations.