The Black Panther

Around the Piazza Giudea, in the heart of Rome's ancient ghetto, where loyalties are fierce and memories are long, people still remember when Celeste di Porto was a quiet, intent little girl. Like other children in the ghetto, she grew up in garbage-strewn alleys, amid the antique squalor that sometimes breeds keen wits. She did well in school and read much. Said her aunt last week: "My God, once they start reading, it's all over."

But it was not something that she read in a book that turned Celeste di Porto into the "Black Panther."

The Good Things. At 18, she was a beautiful young woman with shining eyes and jet black hair. She wanted the "good things in life." In the fall of 1943, she began to go about with one Vincenzo Antonelli, a notorious young Fascist street brawler, who roamed the Jewish quarter with a gang of toughs, plundering shops and beating up stray Jews. Then the Nazi SS (which ruled Rome) started raiding the ghetto. Whole families were sent to concentration camps.

But Celeste di Porto, the girl who used to push an old-clothes cart to the clamorous, ill-smelling market place, walked about freely, wearing beautiful dresses. Her neighbors soon noticed that anyone she stopped to chat with in the street was usually arrested by the SS. Soon they were convinced that Celeste denounced fellow Jews to the Germans on trumped-up charges. In the Piazza Giudea they said: "For every Jew, she gets 5,000 lire." They called her "la pantera nera."

One day, Celeste's aging father walked to the police station and let himself be arrested--to atone for his daughter's deeds and save his family's honor. His wife and his two other daughters took their cart and walked off into the countryside. In the ghetto, the arrests continued. Among the Jews seized was Lazzaro Anticoli, one of the Black Panther's childhood friends. In prison, so goes the story, he cut himself, and with his finger dipped in his own blood wrote on the wall of his cell: "My name is Lazzaro Anticoli, arrested by the Black Panther. If I do not see my family again, avenge me."

He did not see his family again.

Homecoming. After Rome's liberation, Celeste disappeared; for a year, there was no trace of her. Then a Jewish veteran of the Italian army recognized her in a Naples brothel. After two years in jail, she was tried and, although she denied everything, sentenced to twelve years. Last spring a general amnesty freed her. She became a Roman Catholic. But she kept thinking of the ghetto she had left. She decided she wanted to see it again. Last month, she went home.

Roaming through the familiar streets, she met an old boy friend generally known in the nickname-loving neighborhood as "The Chink." (Why he is called that, no one can say. When pressed for an explanation, a local bartender shrugged: "Why do they call me 'The Cheese'?")

One day last week, The Chink and Celeste sat in a small restaurant, and there she was recognized by the parents of Lazzaro Anticoli. Nearsighted old Mother Anticoli was not sure at first whether it was really Celeste. "Excuse me," she asked, "but are you the Black Panther?" A little girl who had seen her picture in the papers cried: "Yes, it is, it is the Black Panther!" Word spread through the close-packed backyards and alleys. A crowd of women gathered in front of the restaurant, screaming for the revenge Lazzaro Anticoli had demanded. The Chink ran. When Celeste tried to slip away, Mother Anticoli clawed at her and knocked her down. The other women swarmed over her, beat her and tore off her fine clothes. Half naked, she stumbled down the narrow, cobbled streets, into the arms of a carabiniere. He hustled her off to the police station.

Next day, the Black Panther was released and she disappeared again. It was not known where she had gone. No one in the Piazza Giudea thought that she might have joined her mother and her two sisters, who now go from village to village, still pushing their small cart of secondhand clothes.

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