On 27 and 28 March 2024 a series of events entitled ‘First do no harm. Deportations from Trieste's hospitals during the Nazi occupation’, organised by the Museum of the Jewish Community of Trieste ‘Carlo and Vera Wagner’, the Local Health Service (ASUGI) Department of Mental Health and Addictions and the Humanities Department of the University of Trieste.

All events are open to the public. For details of the various event locations, see the attached programme.

On 28 March 1944, SS squads appeared at the directorates of the two main hospitals in Trieste, demanding the surrender of inmates of the 'Jewish race', based on lists of names requested in the previous days. As a result, 24 people were arrested at the Provincial Psychiatric Hospital, 13 at the Chronic Care Hospital and 10 at the Maggiore Hospital. All these patients, including six over 80 years old, were taken to the San Sabba Rice Mill to be deported to the Nazi Lagers. None returned. For this reason, the Italian title of the event is La cura tradita, referencing the betrayal of Jewish patients who were promised care during the Nazi occupation.

This project aims to commemorate the tragic events of 1944 through educational public engagement activities aimed especially at younger generations. It is a painful but necessary reflective journey that winds its way through history, memory, bioethics and medicine today.

A number of everyday clinical practices in medicine - such as informed patient consent to treatment or experimentation, genetic screening, sterilisation, and the inclusivity of and free access to healthcare systems - can be better understood in the light of these stories.

The event is open to the public, but it is particularly designed for secondary school students, university students (in both medicine and the humanities) and health and social workers, that is, doctors, psychologists, psychiatrists, nurses, midwives and social workers.

As the scientific journal The Lancet recently pointed out, studying the history of medicine, Nazism and the Holocaust can help to understand complex issues of modern biomedical ethics, including contemporary interactions between health professionals and the state, health equity, caring for vulnerable individuals, the responsibility to uphold patients' rights, combating anti-Semitism, racism and other forms of discrimination, and promoting public health.

For more information about the initiative, please see the attached annex. 

For further information: museumcarloeverawagner@triestebraica.it