It could have been the only one disease capable of saving thousands of lives, but it never really existed. In a period in which the entire planet is fighting against Covid-19, an invisible but real enemy and, on the occasion of the Remembrance Day, Sunday 24 January at 9.25pm on NOVE – and available in streaming on discovery + – the special “K Syndrome – The virus that saved the Jews” airs the incredible – and incredibly little known – story of three brave doctors at the hospital Fatebenefratelli of Rome who, during the Second World War invented the existence of a virus, called “Syndrome K”, to save some Italians of the Jewish religion from the Nazi-Fascist horror.
In 1943 after the armistice that Italy signed with the Allies, the Nazi regime occupied the city of Rome, deporting over a thousand Jews from the Jewish ghetto to Auschwitz. Between fear and a sense of survival, many Jews sought refuge in the nearby Fatebenefratelli hospital, where three medical heroes, Giovanni Borromeo, Adriano Ossicini and Vittorio Emanuele Sacerdoti, invented the “K Syndrome” – from the initials of the Nazi officer Kesselring in charge of maintaining control of the ‘Italy occupied – to prevent the dozens of Roman Jews from becoming victims of deportation to German extermination camps.
Ossicini, who in the special tells the genesis and development of the operation in a lucid and touching way, compiled, together with his colleagues, false medical records for the fugitives, diagnosing the very contagious Syndrome K disease and thus discouraging the Nazis from checking the names of “affected” patients.
Borromeo, Ossicini and Priests fought their “war in the war”. Theirs is a story of courage, love and altruism at the same time: that courage to face an enemy armed and ready for anything and that love for their job but above all for people.
Last updated: Sunday 24 January 2021, 13:01
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