Lucia Servadio

https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucia_Bedarida_Servadio

Dr. Lucia Servadio Bedarida, was first the youngest doctor in Italy and then the first female doctor in a Muslim country and mother, Mama Rida, of all her patients”

“... I had a revelation and I knew that studying medicine was the path that I was to follow. I have to say that in my 65 years in the medical field I have never regretted it.... When I remember how I felt, this influence on the female spirit to cure those in suffering, it must have been strong in that moment because many young lives were being shattered and many others were subjected to incredible suffering”.

Lucia Servadio receives her medical degree in 1922 in Surgery and Obstetrics at the University of Rome. A short while later she marries a doctor from Turin, Dr. Nino Vittorio Bedarida. They have three daughters: Paola, Mirella, Adria. He is transferred to the hospital in Vasto. They are in this small town in Abruzzi when suddenly they lose everything due to the Racial Laws of 1938. Nino and Lucia have to save their family, and try to leave Italy. They succeed, after many unsuccessful and costly tries, thanks to one of Nino’s former students, who is able to get him a job in a private clinic in Tangiers, Morocco.

Lucia tries to get her mother Gemma Vitale Servadio to come to Tangiers as well, succeeding through many difficulties in getting a permit for her, but Gemma is not able to leave her own mother, Nina Levi Vitale – Lucia’s grandmother – behind. Both will later suffer the wrath of the Nazis and Fascists.

Nino and Lucia work side by side in North Africa, with great success. He dies in 1965, after a long illness, and she continues alone, practicing her profession in Morocco until 1980. At the end of the war she had sent her daughters to study in the United States, where they would be able to start new lives. She crosses the ocean many times, but she never lets go, as long as she has her strength, of her Muslim women who only want to be treated by “Mama Rida”, for years the only Jewish, as well as female, doctor in an Islamic country.

In the early eighties Lucia goes to the United States to live with her daughters in Cornwall-on-Hudson. A quarter of a century later, and a few days before her death, comes the meeting with Olivia and Renato. A book emerges from this incredible meeting between two women captured in D’Agostin’s amazing photographs (the photographs are on exhibit at the Italian Cultural Institute in New York).

When Olivia asks “what has guided and accompanied her through that century – witness to violent changes, survivor of the unjustifiable Nazi hatred and courageous in letting herself be affected” here is Lucia’s answer: “Having faith in life, life is stronger than death. The Jewish faith emphasizes life”.