Sergio DeBenedetti memoirs

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum 

Sergio DeBenedetti was born in Florence, Italy and obtained his PhD in physics at the University of Florence in 1933. During the Fascist era, he worked on cosmic ray physics and received a three-year fellowship to the Curie Laboratory in Paris. He was forced to cut his stay in France short when Italy invaded Abyssinia, but returned to France when, as a Jew, the Italian Race Laws exempted him from military service. He remained in Paris until the day before the Nazis entered the city in 1940, reaching the United States by way of Lisbon. 

Sergio DeBenedetti memoirs 

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Consists of one unedited memoir, in Italian, entitled"Note Antifasciste" by Sergio DeBenedetti (approximately 520 pages) 1941, and the edited version of"Note Antifasciste" retitled"Between Fascism and Freedom: The Education of Sergio DeBenedetti" edited by Vera DeBenedetti Bonnet, in English, (approximately 100 pages), 2003. In this memoir, Sergio DeBenedetti recounts his experiences as a Jewish physicist in Mussolini's Italy and his experiences working in Paris in the months immediately preceeding the Nazi invasion in 1940.