I didn’t want to go to Alber­o­bel­lo. It’s a touristy town in Puglia, Italy, known for its odd con­i­cal shaped hous­es and the hordes of vis­i­tors that flock there every year. My hus­band and I tend to avoid such places like the plague. But Cinzia, one of the daugh­ters in the fam­i­ly where we were stay­ing, insisted. 

We had come to Puglia on a house exchange. Over the years we have done near­ly twen­ty of these swaps, a tra­di­tion that began when our daugh­ter was small and became our pre­ferred way to trav­el. By 2016, I decid­ed it was enough. But that spring we got an offer from the Maran­gi fam­i­ly in Puglia. They had a masse­ria (a for­ti­fied farm­house) in an olive grove, sur­round­ed by an orchard of orange and lemon trees. The masse­ria itself dat­ed from the eigh­teenth cen­tu­ry. I couldn’t say no, and so we went. 

We imme­di­ate­ly fell in love with Puglia — the region, the masse­ria, and the com­mu­ni­ty, which includ­ed Maran­gi fam­i­ly mem­bers who lived near­by. Cinzia insist­ed on tak­ing us sight­see­ing and so off we went. As I’d feared, Alber­o­bel­lo was packed with tourists and shops that sold trin­kets and T‑shirts and, after a lit­tle while of try­ing to nav­i­gate the crowd­ed streets, I saw a bench in a church­yard and told Cinzia and the oth­ers that I was going to take a rest. 

It was pleas­ant, sit­ting alone in the shade, watch­ing kids eat ice cream and dogs run around. I wasn’t sit­ting in that church­yard long when I noticed in front of me a rather stunt­ed look­ing olive tree with a plaque around its trunk. Curi­ous, I got up to see what was writ­ten on the plaque and, to my sur­prise, the words were in Ital­ian and Hebrew. I speak Ital­ian and can read a lit­tle Hebrew so I was able to read what was on the plague attached to that scrawny tree. The lit­tle plaque read: ​“This olive tree from the hills of Jerusalem to the peo­ple of Alber­o­bel­lo for the hos­pi­tal­i­ty your cit­i­zens offered dur­ing the racist per­se­cu­tion.” The tree was plant­ed in 2002. 

I was stunned. What could this strange iso­lat­ed town have to do with the per­se­cu­tion of the Jews? I am basi­cal­ly a sec­u­lar Jew but I have a deep inter­est in Jew­ish his­to­ry, espe­cial­ly the Holo­caust. I am drawn to buried his­to­ries. I found I just could not walk away from what­ev­er the sto­ry of this tree and this plaque might be. Ques­tions were swirling in my mind. A lit­tle while lat­er I met up with Cinzia and asked her what she thought. She had no idea. I went to the tourist infor­ma­tion office in Alber­o­bel­lo and they also had no idea. At the time I didn’t pur­sue it any fur­ther. But I filed it away in my mind.

In 2019 we were return­ing to Puglia to see the Marangis who had by now become our friends. An hour before head­ing to the air­port, I ran into my neigh­bor as we were both walk­ing our dogs. We exchanged pleas­antries and then I men­tioned that we were head­ing to Italy in an hour. And he began speak­ing to me in Ital­ian and I, in turn, spoke to him in Ital­ian. We were both a lit­tle sur­prised as we had known one anoth­er for almost thir­ty years. ​“I didn’t know you were Ital­ian,” I told him. 

Then he told me that he was a Roman Jew and his fam­i­ly had sur­vived the Holo­caust, then came to Amer­i­ca. And I told him that I had lived in Rome many years ago. One thing led to anoth­er and I men­tioned the tree in Alber­o­bel­lo. He knew noth­ing about the tree or any role that Alber­o­bel­lo had dur­ing the Nazi era, but he had recent­ly tak­en a class in Ital­ian Jew­ish his­to­ry and he had some arti­cles about the Jew­ish his­to­ry of Puglia. Just before our plane took off, I down­loaded the arti­cles he passed along. 

On the flight to Rome I was read­ing through them (most­ly dry read­ing), but then I came to a brief men­tion, a foot­note real­ly, of a deten­tion cen­ter in the out­skirts of Alber­o­bel­lo called the Red House. I turned to my hus­band on the flight. ​“We have to go back to Alber­o­bel­lo,” I told him. He nod­ded. He already knew. Some­times, as a writer, a sto­ry grabs you, and this one had already grabbed me back in 2016. 

A few days after we arrived, we drove to Alber­o­bel­lo and I walked around, look­ing for the Red House. But I couldn’t find a trace of any­thing that might have been a deten­tion cen­ter. Mirac­u­lous­ly, some­one in the tourist office recalled an old struc­ture out­side of town that was about to be turned into a dis­cotheque. It sat on the prop­er­ty of what was now a hotel. 

We drove five kilo­me­ters out of town and there I saw it. Sit­ting squat in a field, was this mono­lith of a drea­ry red build­ing that had been an orphan­age, an agri­cul­tur­al school, and, final­ly, a deten­tion cen­ter. I walked around it. I peered inside. And I knew that I could not walk away from this house and its story,whatever that might be. When we got home, I phoned Cinzia. I told her about find­ing the Red House. ​“I have to go inside,” I told her. 

Through a series of minor mir­a­cles, Cinzia found the man named Car­lo who had the keys to the Red House and he met us there a few days lat­er. Togeth­er we walked through an over­grown field to the large pad­locked door which he opened for us. We entered a dark, cav­ernous room that had the rem­nants of the car the com­man­der drove, var­i­ous arti­facts from the res­i­dents who stayed here, and a list of books for a lend­ing library. We walked silent­ly through the rooms of crum­bling brick and plas­ter, wood­en palettes, soup caul­drons. We saw an incred­i­ble chapel that one of the res­i­dents paint­ed and the tree where a man hung himself. 

A ghost­ly feel­ing haunt­ed me as we moved among the rooms. Car­lo explained that in the years before World War II, Nazis had come to Puglia to see the Red House. Its design had been used, in part, as a mod­el for Auschwitz. He told us about the hunger and the cold that the res­i­dents suf­fered from and also of the kind­ness of the towns­peo­ple to the Jews who were trapped in the Red House, on the out­skirts of Alber­o­bel­lo. Car­lo revealed to me that the Red House was going to be turned into a dis­cotheque until some­one in the his­toric land­marks office real­ized the role it had served in WWII. The Red House was a deten­tion cen­ter for Jews dur­ing the Nazi regime, but only nine of its inhab­i­tants were ulti­mate­ly deport­ed because of the efforts of the community. 

As I stood there inside this cold, crum­bling build­ing, I thought of all the cir­cum­stances that led to this moment: the house exchange I didn’t want to do, the town I didn’t want to vis­it, the small com­mem­o­ra­tion plaque on the scrawny tree, and the chance encounter with my neigh­bor. And it seemed to me that once I had walked into the Red House, I couldn’t walk out. Not until I wrote about it.