Mario Capecchi’s story of his mother’s arrest by the Gestapo, and his life on the streets of Italy as a young boy, only piqued interest in the story of his winning a Nobel Prize in Medicine or Physiology, earlier this year.
It is such a great story, people set out to write it down in detail. Some of the details discovered, however, don’t quite square with historical records.
A group of reporters with the Associated Press uncovered the discrepancies. Realizing that the story comes from the memory of a very young child, so far the headlines and the stories have been corrective, but gently and adoringly so.
The story Capecchi has told repeatedly over the years in speeches and interviews begins when he is 3 and the Gestapo, Adolf Hitler’s secret police, snatch his mother before his very eyes and dispatch her to Dachau concentration camp. The peasant family that takes him in abandons him and he spends four years wandering about northern Italy – a street urchin, alone and begging for food.
At war’s end – on the boy’s ninth birthday – mother and son are reunited in the hospital ward where he is being treated for malnutrition and typhoid. They set sail for America where he flourishes, embarks on a brilliant research career – and goes on to win the Nobel Prize for medicine.
But The Associated Press, which set out to chronicle his extraordinary story in greater detail, has uncovered several inconsistencies and unanswered questions, chief among them whether his mother was in Dachau, and whether he really was for a long time a homeless street child.
You can read the full story at The Salt Lake Tribune.
This is a classic case. Memory differs from the facts. Human minds fill in details that would otherwise leave a mystery, and the details filled in differ from the details that can be corroborated.
This is part of what keeps history lively.
We see here also a demonstration that there is much we can never really know for sure. Historians work from imperfect records in the best of circumstances.
The director of the Dachau Memorial, Barbara Distel, said women weren’t imprisoned at Dachau until September 1943 – more than two years after Capecchi says his mother was arrested. She also said only Jewish women from eastern Europe were held in Dachau’s satellite camps.
”I do remember – I remember the Gestapo coming to the Wolfsgruben chalet,” Capecchi told AP in the interview, conducted days after his Nobel Prize was announced. ”It’s sort of like a photograph. I can tell you how many people were in the room, which ones were in uniform and which ones weren’t. Just boom. It’s there.”
Pressed to explain how he could be certain he was just 3 1/2 at the time and remember it so clearly, he stood by his account.
The big question we want answered here is this: How can we get more great people like Mario Capecchi? Can we get a few Nobelists out of the current generation of children?
No one proposes revisiting war to make kids great, so the fascination with Capecchi’s childhood is more academic, if still for inspiration.
In the end, we have a mystery. How did Capecchi get to be such a great man? There remains that great chapter near the end of the book; early chapters are missing.
Perhaps AP could put a team of reporters on a story to explain exactly how Capecchi’ s research explains what it does, and what it means down the road. That’s a story that needs to be told, too.
Posted by Ed Darrell 
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