You’ve probably seen Schindler’s List, Steven Spielberg’s 1993 film, based on Thomas Keneally’s book about a German industrialist who uses his factory in Poland as a cover for saving Jewish lives during the Holocaust. What could be better than a film based on a true story about a heroic Gentile saving Jewish lives?

Well…how about an actual film that saved Jewish lives?

A couple of day ago, idly following links related to late-Fascist and early-postwar film stars and directors in Italy, I came across the following notes in the Wikipedia article about the film The Gate of Heaven (La porta del cielo), produced in Rome in 1944 and released in 1945, and directed by Vittorio De Sica, known in the U.S. for his later, groundbreaking film, The Bicycle Thief:

Vittorio De Sica hired approximately 300 extras, who were Jewish or simply being persecuted by the Nazi regime, because of their physical oddity. To avoid their deportation and later execution, he prolonged the shooting of the film as long as he could, awaiting the arrival of the allied armies.

These two sentences are stunning, mystifying, and lots of other -ings. Could this story really be true? If so, why had I never heard or read about it?

And what did it mean that De Sica was hiring Jews “because of their physical oddity?” Was he making Nazi propaganda? This turns out to be a simple matter of grammatical misdirection; move up the comma after “regime” to after “Jewish,” and the intended meaning is clear.

And what exactly did “as long as he could” mean? Was he able to hold out until the American army liberated Rome, or did the Jews in his cast in fact get rounded up and deported to death camps?

Following the links cited in the Wikipedia article were no help. But I did find an excellent online article by Jeff Mathews from 2012, “Gate of Heaven.” He cites as his sources De Sica’s own memoirs, those of his son Christian, and a 2001 article by the film journalist Carlo Celli. His findings? Well…inconclusive.

Some background: The movie was shot in German-occupied Rome in the first half of 1944, while the Allied armies were slowly fighting their way towards the city. In September 1943, Allied armies had landed in Salerno in southern Italy, and the Italian government switched sides and joined the Allies.  Germany still had control of northern Italy, and began rounding up and deporting Jewish Italians. Meanwhile, the organs of Nazi and Italian fascist propaganda were coercing Italian film talent to leave Rome, the center of the Italian film industry, for places farther away from the front lines and more firmly under the control of the Italian Fascist puppet state.

The story of La porta del cielo differs according to the teller. On the “most heroic” end of the scale, the film itself was a complete fabrication, cooked up by De Sica and a certain young priest, the future Pope Paul VI, and produced on Vatican property in Rome (the Church Of St. Paul Beyond the Walls), with the express purpose of saving as many Jewish and partisan lives as possible. De Sica’s production ended up saving as many as 3,000 lives, through the hiring of cast, crew, and extras, and using the church both as a hiding place and a nominally protected space.

On the “least heroic” end of the scale, De Sica himself made the film up out of thin air when he was on the point of being forced to leave Rome for Venice to work on state propaganda, claiming that he was already committed to completing a project for the Vatican. De Sica then scrambled to create an actual project to match his alibi. Being a decent guy, he intentionally included some Jews and partisans in his cast and crew of 300 in order to keep them safe.

All the accounts agree that De Sica was able to keep shooting, or to pretend to keep shooting, until the Americans reached Rome on June 5, 1944, with his original cast and crew nearly intact.  There is no serious dispute that an actual film was produced, at least partly on Vatican property, with the Vatican’s consent if not actual sponsorship, and (in 1945) released.

The most serious problem with these accounts, especially towards the “most heroic” end of the scale, is that Mathews tried and was unable to find any mention by Jewish survivors of De Sica’s role in saving them.

Mathews’ conclusion? “To me, in spite of the different accounts of the details, the substance still rings true to me —Vittorio De Sica risked his own life to save many others, and I am happy to believe that that is true.” I guess that’s good enough for me.

UPDATE (8/27/25) Since this post was first published in December, 2024, we’ve made an interesting discovery: an interview with De Sica in the New York Times on the occasion of the American release of his film The Garden of the Finzi-Continis. It includes a wide-ranging discussion in which De Sica is at pains to distance himself from Mussolini and Fascism, and defends Italians in general against the charge of anti-Semitism. He discusses the making of The Gate of Heaven at some length, but makes no mention of using the film as a cover for saving any Jewish lives. Instead he claims that he hid “four adults and five children” in an apartment he had in Rome. The fact that De Sica seems eager to display his anti-Fascist credentials, yet doesn’t mention the Heaven episode here, makes me believe that the figure of hundreds of Jewish lives saved is apocryphal.