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

The period lasted four years, he said.

However, Renon town clerk Klaus Ramoser says Capecchi's name was stricken from the town records on July 17, 1942, with a note that he was moving to Reggio Emilia, 165 miles south. He shows up on the records of Reggio Emilia the very next day: July 18, 1942. Also, those records have him registered at the same address as his father, making it likely that his father himself came to get the boy.

What happened to him once he got to Reggio Emilia is unclear.

In a 1999 interview with Scientific American, Capecchi said he lived with his father at times during this time, but that his father would kick him out periodically. "He was a very loose soul," Capecchi said in the interview.

He told The Associated Press that he lived with him for short periods of time: "I would guess, I remember three times each for a duration of about at most a week."

In between those stays there indeed may have been the window for a young boy to have wandered about on his own. He has spoken of briefly joining a Fascist youth army, begging food, always staying on the move.

The university president's statement said Capecchi "has always acknowledged spending a few weeks with his father, but that he also did wander the streets for most of the time after his mother was taken away."

His father, like his mother, also emerges as a figure of mystery.

The Renon registry in 1937 lists him as a telegraph operator. Capecchi says he was a pilot in the Africa campaign, and he was quoted in an Italian newspaper the day after he won the Nobel Prize as saying he believed he went missing in action.

However, in a telephone interview a day after winning the Nobel, he told the AP in Rome that his father had survived the war but contracted malaria, suggesting he was sent home from North Africa. He said the last time he saw him was after the war, when his father relinquished custody so he could emigrate.

The Italian Defense Ministry has so far been unable to locate Luciano Capecchi's wartime records. Capecchi says his last year before being reunited with his mother was spent hospitalized in Reggio Emilia with typhoid and malnutrition. It was there that his mother found him on his ninth birthday, in 1946, he recalls.

Reggio Emilia hospital officials have searched for records on Capecchi, so far without result, looking under both his first name Mario and middle name Renato, and also under Ramberg, his mother's surname. They also take into consideration that his name may have been given incorrectly, due to his young age, or if very sickly, he may have been listed as a foundling.

"He would have been hospitalized at the Santa Maria Nuova, it was the main hospital. But without a piece of paper, I cannot confirm it," said spokeswoman Irene Marcello.

South Tyrol state historian Gerard Steinacher says Capecchi's description of events pertaining to his mother's detention don't easily match the historical record, but he said he may never have been given the full story as it was quite common for those traumatized in the war to avoid talking about their experiences.

"As a historian, and trying to fit the story into the general history, the way he told it -- the story doesn't fit," Steinacher said.

It is possible that the German government could have sought the mother's arrest for political reasons, given that Italian authorities in the South Tyrol were complying with such demands as early as 1939, handing over German nationals at the border, Steinacher said.

Raim said if she wound up in Gestapo custody, she would have likely been put in one of its jails, of which there were several in Munich, rather than a concentration camp.

Capecchi said that when growing up in Pennsylvania, he asked his mother about her wartime experiences. He said she once told him how she would pretend she was cooking a meal for herself and eating it. "But she did not want to go into details."

He said that while he was at college she married and moved to Tucson, Ariz.

Her probate file says she broke her hip in June 1987 and that "for a period of 5 years, she has suffered physical and mental disabilities such that she is unable to care for herself or her financial or personal affairs."

Other records show she died in October 1987, aged 82. Her husband, Victor Szymanski, died two years later, aged 69.

Capecchi had previously described his mother as glamorous and free-spirited. But in the AP interview he said her wartime experiences broke her. When they were reunited, he said, she was so physically changed he did not recognize her. She had withdrawn into herself and refused to talk about the years in which they had been apart, he said.

"She lived a lot of her remaining life in an imaginary world," he said.

   1 2 3   

   1 2 3