(Agencies)
Updated: 2007-11-07 09:47

During a lengthy interview at his home overlooking Salt Lake City, Capecchi took an almost scholarly interest in the AP's findings, poring patiently over dates and matching his recollection against the historical record. At no point did he become defensive or uncooperative.

Regarding Capecchi's mother, Lucy Ramberg, experts in the period and an official at the Dachau memorial say she almost certainly could not have been in Dachau or its satellite camps, and the Gestapo was not operating in Italy in 1941 — the year Capecchi says she was arrested.

His recollection of being thrown onto the streets at age 4 1/2 also doesn't mesh with documents on file with authorities in northern Italy. They suggest that he was in fact taken by his father to live in the city of Reggio Emilia near Bologna, contradicting his account of trudging southward as a small boy on his own.

Lucy Ramberg was the daughter of a German named Walter Ramberg and American painter Lucy Dodd, who had been living in Italy. She had an affair with Luciano Capecchi which produced Mario, the future Nobelist, born on Oct. 6, 1937. The liaison did not last, and when Mario was only 16 months old, his mother -- by another brief affair with a different man -- gave birth to Marlene Lucy Ramberg, on Feb. 8, 1939.

The central figure in the young Capecchi's story is his mother, whom he described in 1996 as "a beautiful woman with a passion for language and a flair for the dramatic."

In a speech he gave that year, titled "The Making of a Scientist," he recalled in vivid detail her purported arrest by the Gestapo for anti-Nazi and anti-Fascist activity and her incarceration at Dachau. He repeated the details in an interview with the AP and other news outlets after he won the Nobel Prize.

But the Dachau Memorial says that while the end of the war was a chaotic period, the Germans kept records at Dachau until April 28, 1945, one day before the Americans liberated it, and there is no record of Lucy Ramberg.

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.

All this makes it "highly improbable" Lucy Ramberg was at Dachau or its auxiliary camps, she said.

The International Tracing Service for war victims in Bad Arolsen, Germany, has a card that summarizes the record of Lucy Ramberg (Luzia Ramberg). It says that in 1939 she was living in Renon, a town comprised of several villages perched above Bolzano, in the Italian South Tyrol, that she was later detained or made a prisoner in Perugia, in central Italy, and that she probably was deported to Germany.

"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.

When shown the AP's findings, he said, "I would swear differently." But later he became less certain about Dachau.

He acknowledged that the information about Dachau -- which he had previously presented as fact -- had been passed on "secondhand " by his uncle, the famous physicist Edward Ramberg, who was in the US during the war and trying to locate his sister.

"He said it was in Munich. In Munich itself, there's Dachau, which is the main camp, and then there's actually a few satellite camps there also. I don't know whether my uncle specifically knew it was Dachau or whether it was one of those satellite camps within a few miles of each other," Capecchi said.

He later conceded that the information he received from his uncle was not solid.

"He was pretty sure she was in Munich. I mean, he tried very hard during the war to figure out where she was. He spent a fair amount of money trying to locate her during the war."

Edith Raim, an expert on Dachau's satellite camps at the Institute for Contemporary History in Munich, said that if Lucy Ramberg had been at one of these camps, she would have shown up on either the ITS or the Dachau records.

Town records in Renon, updated to remove his mother from the registry in 1946 after officials were unable to locate her for six years, indicate she had gone abroad to Germany. There is no elaboration.

In a brief statement Tuesday, Capecchi said: "What I have said and written is my most accurate recollection of my early childhood. My recollections are based on my own memory and that of my uncle, who also was a scientist and was prone to understatement, and the memories of my mother, who purposely provided few details because she wanted to forget that period."

The same records also hold clues to the circumstances under which Capecchi left South Tyrol. He says his solitary life of wandering began when Lucy Ramberg's money dried up and the peasant family threw him out.

"For reasons that have never been clear to me, my mother's money ran out after one year and at age 4 1/2, I set off on my own. I headed south, sometimes living in the streets, sometimes joining gangs of other homeless children, sometimes living in orphanages and most of the time being hungry," Capecchi said in his 1996 speech.

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