At the request of Pope Francis, the virtual reproduction of a collection preserving the requests for help addressed to Pope Pius XII by Jews from all over Europe after the beginning of Nazi-Fascist persecution is now accessible to all. It consists of a total of 170 volumes, or nearly 40,000 files. Only 70% of the total material will be initially available, but will later be supplemented with the final volumes currently being prepared.

“If I am writing to You today, it is to ask you to help me from afar”. Thousands of archived files that give voice to desperate calls for help. Like this one, from a 23-year old German university student “with Israelite origins”, who was baptized in 1938, and who, on 17 January 1942, made a last effort to free himself from detention in a concentration camp in Miranda de Ebro, Spain. He finally had the opportunity to join his mother who had fled to America in 1939, “to prepare a new life for me”, he wrote. Everything was ready for departure from Lisbon. The only thing missing was the intervention “of someone from outside” so that the authorities would consent to his liberation. “There is little hope for those who have no outside help”, he explains with few, but eloquent words. He then writes to an old Italian friend, asking her to ask Pope Pius XII to have the Apostolic Nuncio in Madrid intervene in his favour, knowing that: “with this intervention from Rome, others had been able to leave the concentration camp”.
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