On the evening of Remembrance Day 2026 and 28 January, Rai 1 pays homage to the victims of the Holocaust with the fiction Morbo K, who saves a life, saves the whole world by Francesco Patierno. Although there are fictionalized elements within it, the series tells the true story of the doctor Giovanni Borromeo, head physician at the Fatebenefratelli hospital who together with his collaborators managed to save some Jews from the roundup of the Rome ghetto, inventing in 1943 the existence of a contagious disease that actually never existed.
The idea of the false disease came to Borromeo during the Nazi-fascist persecutions of 16 October 1943 against the Jewish citizens of Rome, when the Gestapo entered the city and other homes to arrest around a thousand people. Some of them managed to take refuge inside the Fatebenefratelli, and the doctor promptly thought of a plan to protect the fugitives (Roman Jewish citizens and of Polish origin). So it was that the doctors invented an entire ward in which they hospitalized the unfortunates under a false name, and compiled a series of false medical records with “K disease”. The disease was named after German General Albert Kesselring, and all patients “affected” by the disease were known as “Kesslering patients.”
The doctor, who could speak German, explained to the officers that the disease was “very contagious” to make them desist from inspecting the affected patients’ ward, and to discourage them from even looking at the names on the files, because “death was practically certain”.
The fake patients were then declared dead once they received false identity documents that would have allowed them to escape.
The fact that the fugitives had taken refuge inside the hospital was no coincidence: among Doctor Borromeo’s collaborators there was the doctor of Jewish origins Vittorio Emanuele Sacerdoti, who at the time was working in the hospital under a false name – who had continued to practice his profession thanks to the recommendation of his uncle, a famous physiopathologist of whom Borromeo had been a student as a boy – and the people who arrived at Fatebenefratelli that day were his patients who did not know who else contact. Later, Sacerdoti said that after that episode the hospital became a refuge for many persecuted people, such as the partisans. After the armistice of 8 September 1943, some former fascists also arrived worried about suffering reprisals.
Once Rome was liberated and the war was over, Giovanni Borromeo received the Cross of Merit of the Order of Malta and the Silver Medal of Valor. After his death in 1961, he also obtained the recognition of Righteous Among the Nations, as an example of civil resistance against fascist and Nazi abuse and hatred.
