Nathan Cassuto (? – 1944/45)

Son of Umberto, first eye specialist then Chief Rabbi in Florence in the time of the German occupation. He organised refuge for the persecuted Jews but was himself arrested by the SS and he perished in the death camps. His wife survived, but was killed in an ambush on an autobus full of nurses on its way to the Hospital on Mount Scopus in Jerusalem 1948.
Parts of the witness of Hulda about her brother in a verbatim of the Eichmann proces:

A. (=Hulda): And my brother, who was an eye specialist and also an assistant at the University of Florence, returned to Jewish studies, which were also very close to his heart, and this became his occupation up to his last years; he returned to this, was ordained Rabbi, and served afterwards as Assistant Rabbi in Milan, and later on as Chief Rabbi in Florence.
Q. Did your brother also live in Florence?
A. He lived in Florence and was Rabbi of the community.
Q. Was any attempt made by the Jews in those days to escape?
A. In those days there was general panic among the Jews of Florence, but they did not properly understand the danger. My brother, Dr. Nathan Cassuto, took energetic action and tried hard to make the Jews aware of the great danger threatening all the Jews of Italy.
Q. How did he try to do that?
A. He tried, he actually went from house to house, warned the Jews to enter monasteries, to flee to the villages where they were not known as Jews, to hide under assumed names. Furthermore, he also tried to find financial help for those who needed it. At that time, he organized a kind of committee for the aid of needy Jews, consisting of a very small number of local Jews, and a priest from Florence also worked with them, but I do not remember his name. They helped not only the Jews of Florence, but also tens and hundreds of Jews who came from Northern Italy, to cross over into the area where the Allies were already stationed.
…………………
A. ….. On 27 November of that year, after there had already been a number of operations against Jews, who were simply taken from their homes – on that day, a Sabbath, my husband came to the monastery, a very rare occurrence, since we had indeed met him and my brother before, but outside the place. That day he came to look for me and told me that the day before, Friday afternoon, my brother had been taken, together with the members of his committee, while they were having a meeting somewhere, organizing their assistance work for the Jews.
Q. By whom was he taken?
A. He was taken by the SS.
………………..
A. About my brother’s fate I know only that he was taken from one camp to another. After he had been in prison in Florence for three months, they – both my sister-in-law and my brother – were transferred to camps. They were both, for a certain time, in Auschwitz, and they even managed to exchange some words in writing; he would send a note to her, and once she sent a note to him. Afterwards they were separated. She was sent to Bergen-Belsen and finally to Theresienstadt, and there she was liberated. She reached this country in 1945. It is from her that I heard many of the details I have just told you. Later she was herself killed by Arabs in the convoy that went up to Mount Scopus in 1948.
Of my brother’s fate we only know that he was taken from one camp to another and that, in the end, he was in a camp of which one part was apparently in Russian hands and another part in American hands. People who came out of there and were liberated by the Americans gave us information about him, about the final days, but since then we have heard nothing more to this day.

Apparently a book about Narhan Cassuto has been published:
Title: Scritti Memoria Di Nathan Cassuto (Italian and Hebrew) Author: Cassuto, Nathan

Description: Jeruasalem: Yad Ben Zvi, 1986. 100 pages in Italian and 100 pages in Hebrew. In Florence, Rabbi Nathan Cassuto, a physician and the son of a renowned biblical scholar, went from house to house urging Jews to hide during the holocaust. As a result, only 400 Jews were deported from florence. This book remembers the Rabbi in his own language. S. Good.
(see: http://www.judaicabooks.net/)
I found a review of the book om internet, a copy of a page from the Jewish Quarterly:

from The Beth ha-Tefutsoth website: Recollections from the Synagogue in Florence
Dr. Enzo Nitzani :

The Great Synagogue of Florence, Italy.
Model in the Permanent Exhibition of Beth Hatefutsoth
Beth Hatefutsoth Visual Documentation Center

On the Ninth of Av, 1938, I sat with my father and brother on low benches in a room adjacent to the synagogue. We had already heard of the imminent racial decrees. In the dark we sang AL HEYKhALI ChEVLI KENAChASh NOShEKh (“For my Temple I ache like someone bitten by a serpent”). I was too young to understand the note of anguish in the conversation between my father and Prof. David Cassuto – he too was planning his immigration to Eretz Israel – but I remember the sadness of the meeting to this day.
Fate was particularly cruel to the Cassuto family. After immigrating to Israel and joining the ranks of the Hebrew University, his son Nathan – a doctor and rabbi of Florence – was killed in Auschwitz. His daughter in law Hannah – who was saved from the furnaces of Auschwitz – was killed by a sniper when a convoy to the Hebrew University campus on Mount Scopus was attacked by the Arabs in 1948.