A Disease That Saved Jews

As German soldiers began rounding up Jews in Italy and deporting them by the thousands to
concentration camps in Fall 1943, a deadly disease called Syndrome K swept through Rome. As
a result, dozens of patients were admitted to Fatebenefratelli Hospital located in the middle of an
island on the Tiber River. The symptoms of the disease included coughing, paralysis, and death;
it was also highly contagious.
The 16th-century Fatebenefratelli Hospital had quarantined plague patients, and because of its
isolated site, sheltered cholera patients in 1832.
Medical textbooks said nothing about Syndrome K. No medical professionals knew anything
about it except for those at Fatebenefratelli. It sounded similar to Koch Syndrome—or
tuberculosis—a frightening disease at the time. When German soldiers went to raid the hospital,
the doctors told them about the disease; none dared to enter. And that’s how at least 100 Jews
who were taking refuge at the hospital escaped death: Syndrome K was a fake disease.
The hospital’s head physician, Giovanni Borromeo, with the help of other doctors, had created
the disease to save the Jews and antifascists seeking refuge in the hospital. Borromeo began
providing Jews a safe haven in the hospital in 1938, when Italy introduced antisemitic laws. One
of the refugees was Vittorio Sacerdoti, a young Jewish doctor, for whom Borromeo provided
false papers and a position in the hospital. Another doctor, Adriano Ossicini, an antifascist, had
been imprisoned several times before he found work at the hospital. Ossicini, along with other
doctors, ran a semi-clandestine resistance base at Fatebenefratelli.
In October 1943, the Nazis raided a Jewish ghetto in Rome, and many Jews fled to
Fatebenefratelli, where Borromeo admitted them as patients. The refugees were diagnosed with
Syndrome K to distinguish them from the other patients. The letter K was chosen because Albert
Kesselring led the German troops in Rome and because it was also the initial of the last name of
a Nazi officer in Rome, Herbert Kappler.
Syndrome K was purported to be a neurological illness whose symptoms included convulsions,
dementia, paralysis, and, ultimately, death from asphyxiation. When the Nazis came to visit,
patients were instructed to cough a lot whenever soldiers passed by their door.
The ruse worked. “The Nazis thought it was cancer or tuberculosis, and they fled like rabbits,”
said Dr. Vittorio Sacerdoti during an interview with BBC in 2004.
In 2016, the 96-year-old Ossicini spoke to the Italian newspaper La Stampa about the invention
of the disease:

 

 

 

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Syndrome K was put on patient papers to indicate that the sick person wasn’t sick at
all, but Jewish. We created those papers for Jewish people as if they were ordinary
patients, and in the moment when we had to say what disease they suffered? It was
Syndrome K, meaning ‘I am admitting a Jew,’ as if he or she were ill, but they were
all healthy. The idea to call it Syndrome K, like Kesserling or Kappler, was mine.

No one knows exactly how many lives Syndrome K actually saved, but accounts vary from two
dozen to more than 100.
After the war, the Italian government honored Borromeo by awarding him the Order of Merit
and the Silver Medal of Valor. He died in 1961 at his own hospital. He was posthumously
recognized as a “Righteous Among the Nations” by the Israeli government.
The hospital itself was recognized as a “House of Life” by the International Raoul Wallenberg
Foundation, which advocates on behalf of Holocaust saviors.