As a member of the Jewish Diplomatic Corps, I recently travelled to Rome for the WJC's Governing Board meeting. I had studied at the American University of Rome in 2001 and was excited to take a trip down memory lane. Turns out, not much has changed. On the street outside my old apartment, in a very Jewish area of the city, I spotted these swastikas.
I’ve seen swastikas in Rome before. Back in 2001, I spray painted over few of them, but unfortunately there was plenty of fresh graffiti when I returned at the end of October.
Before the time of blogs, Facebook accounts, and Twitter, when I wanted to communicate with my friends and family I wrote mass emails. Below is an mass email I wrote in April of 2001.
I think the message is very appropriate, and hopefully communicates how the politically correct atmosphere of an American college is confronted by the harsh realities of life beyond campus.
From: Shaun Grossman
Date: 4/27/01
I thought I'd tell you about my experience here in Rome earlier this week.
I had dinner with a friend the other night. She was less talkative than usual, and I asked her what was wrong. She told me that the previous week, a typical sunny 3:00, she was riding the tram down a busy main street. The tram was half full, with the seats all taken and a few people standing in the aisle. A conspicuous man with a shaved head walked on the tram, wearing the usual European tight jeans and a black leather jacket.
My friend, Hallie, was with another one of her friends, Jen, and the two of them watched as the man proceeded to take out a big black marker and start writing on the windows of the tram. His back obscured their vision for the first 15 seconds, but as he moved down the tram it became clear that he was marking large swastikas up and down the windows. Half awakening to what was happening before them, they then watched as he wrote Sieg Heil over and over, turning and marking a large swastika on the upholstery of the seat across the aisle from them.
At this point, Jen began trembling from the realization of her surroundings. Jen's grandparents are all Holocaust, Concentration Camp survivors, and the scene began to affect her greatly. Unsure of what to do, Hallie and Jen began to stare at the man as he walked up and down the tram. Thinking that if the man knew that people were watching him he would stop, they instead watched as a walkway to the unblemished portions of the tram was cleared by the remainder of unaffected, disinterested Roman passengers. With no one stopping him, and the mild assistance of fellow passengers, Hallie said the man virtually covered every interior surface of the tram car.
When the man got off at the next tram stop, now 5 minutes after he had entered their afternoon, Hallie and Jen continued staring at him in disbelief. Their eyes caught the attention of the man, and as the tram pulled away, with his eyes affixed to Jen's through the window, the man precisely drew a big swastika on the glass in front of Jen's face through the window.
After Hallie finished speaking, I was stunned. I could only say, "That's unbelievable. Unbelievable." She said that in the aftermath, her and Jen asked the tram conductor what had happened, and expected the graffiti washed off. I walked away from the conversation wondering what I would have done in the situation, yet still viewing it from an outsider's, fantasy perspective.
After dinner I parted ways with Hallie, and got on the tram to go home. Eating an ice cream cone, I looked down at the floor and slowly gazed up as the tram sped down the track. There, pounding against my senses, I realized that Hail Hitler, Seig Heil, and a countless number of swastikas surrounded me. Not mere graffiti as I had imagined, but it was if I entered a deranged fun house of Nazi propaganda - totally surrounded by these symbols of hate.
I went home and told my roommate what had happened. I commented that Rome was not like the University of Maryland, where when one man from Chicago put a small swastika on a letter sent to the Jewish Student Center, hundreds of students rallied across campus against Hate the next afternoon. "Unbelievable", he said, "Unbelievable".
"No, that's the point", I said. "It is believable."
Shaun Grossman is an entrepreneur residing in Washington, DC.
