EUROPE/ITALY- “A just man among the nations” award in memory of medical doctor Borromeo top clinician at St John of God Brother Hospital on the River Tiber during World War II who saved the lives of many Roman Jews ‘infected with K disease’

Rome (Fides Service) -The “Giusto fra le Nazioni” medal will be awarded in memory of medical doctor Giovanni Borromeo top clinician at St John of God Brother Hospital on the River Tiber who saved the lives of many Jews in Rome during the Nazi persecution in the 1940s. The award will be presented tomorrow to Dr Borromeo’s children by the Israeli Ambassador Ehud Gol during a ceremony organised at the Hospital in collaboration with the Israeli Embassy in Rome.
With this important award the name of Giovanni Borromeo will be engraved among the Just at the Yad Vashem Mausoleum memorial of the martyrs and heroes of the Holocaust, instituted to commemorate the six million Jews murdered by the Nazis. The award, an act of recognition for those who risked their own life to save the lives of persecuted Jews, intends also to keep alive the memory of the Holocaust.
Present for the ceremony the families of the rescuers and the rescued. In those difficult years 1943-1944. Borromeo managed to save many Jews by declaring they had developed ‘K disease’ and had been put in isolation at the hospital.
Whenever there was a military control at the hospital the letter K written on the medical record of Jewish patients was said to stand for Koch disease or tuberculosis which the Germans feared particularly. Koch was a German bacteriologist who established the bacterial origin of anthrax, typhoid, cholera and also tuberculosis. However, Ii actual fact K stood for Kesserling, a German military commander in Rome at that time. Through this strategy of Dr Borromeo and thanks also to the complicity of Prior Brother Maurizio many lives were saved. (AP) (1/3/2005 Agenzia Fides; Righe:24; Parole:256)