Villa Venier: the first concentration camp in Italy

The first Concentration Camp opens at Villa Venier, in Vo’ Vecchio, a small village near Padua

Following the enforcement of Police Ordinance No. 5 (November 30^th1943), several concentration camps were opened on the Italian territory. The first one was opened on December 3^rd, 1943, just a few kilometres from the centre of Padua, in the Vo’ Vecchio area. The chosen location was Villa Contarini Venier, a privately owned property built in the17^thcentury. A group of Elizabethan nuns had rented the villa to take refuge from the bombings in the Padua centre.

 From the beginning of December 1943, the Jews arrested in Padua and the surrounding province began to be interned there. The diary of the parish priest of Vo’ Vecchio, Don Emanuele Rasi, reports what happened in the following months, during which around seventy people passed through this place. The forty-seven Jews from Padua were eventually deported to Auschwitz in July 1944: only three women survived.

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