In the sultry summer of 1943, when love still flourished before being broken, the young Goffredo Paggi, an Italian Jew, was living the happiest days of his life. But cruel fate had other plans. In a dramatic turn of events, the police knocked on his door, and his idyllic world came crashing down. This is the story of a summer that turned into an endless winter.
Who was the architect of its ruin? In 1945, at the end of a war that had devastated Italy, a man was tried for that terrible crime: the betrayal. It was a work colleague who accused him, but in the end he was acquitted. But why?
In the dark folds of Italian history, in an era marked by fascism and Nazi occupation, the journalist Vera Paggi set out on the trail of a historical truth, since the judicial one seemed unattainable. Through thousands of documents in the archives, you discovered the traces of the traitor who had condemned the Jewish accountant Goffredo Paggi, arrested by the police of the Santa Croce police station in Florence, and destined for a journey of no return to Auschwitz.
Almost 80 years after those tragic events, Vera Paggi investigated the culprits through the trial documents and finally identified them. She not only revealed the identity of the informer, released despite suspicions, but also revealed the name of the director of the Santa Croce police station, the man who had given the order to arrest the young Jew. This man, with powerful protections, escaped justice and passed through the post-war period unscathed, receiving honors and career promotions.
The short summer (Panozzo Editore) is a compelling story that unfolds like a thriller in the life of a thirty-year-old Jew, an accountant born in Pitigliano. In this mix of old and new friendships, the young Anna Caterina it represents the love of that summer, a short but intense love, which for Goffredo will last a season, but for her it will remain alive for her whole life, because she will never be able to forget it.
Vera Paggi is an Italian journalist and author with a long career in Rai. You started as a reporter for l’Unità in the 1980s and collaborated with Guglielmo Zucconi in the first television investigations. Subsequently she became a reporter for La Repubblica and then for Rai, working for almost twenty years at Rainews24, where she told stories of Jews, anti-fascists and ordinary people who contributed to the history of the 20th century through documentaries and investigations. Since 2021, she has dedicated herself to making podcasts for the project of History / in History. Furthermore, she has published several books, including Claudio, a rediscovered story (2003), Alley of unleavened bread, from the Pitigliano ghetto to the economic miracle (2013), Smart life (2016) e Milena dude (2021).