11. The doctors created a fearsome disease for refugees at the hospital
According to Ossicini, the doctors decided to shield the refugees by labeling them as patients, stricken with a disease calculated to create revulsion in the minds of their pursuers. The disease needed to be one of easily faked symptoms. It needed to be highly contagious, in order to strike fear in the men who would be required to guard the patients if they were taken. At the time, Rome was in a near epidemic of tuberculosis, and the symptoms they selected resembled the latter stages of that dreaded disease. Some of the refugees who arrived at the hospital had been previously treated there and their records were quickly found and modified accordingly.
Those who were not previous patients needed new records created immediately, with the appropriate diagnosis and treatment noted. The Jewish “patients” were isolated in a wing of the hospital, as would be the case with contagious diseases, and their records were open to inspection by the Germans. Drs’. Borromeo, Sacerdoti, Ossicini, and several others participated in the subterfuge, though who initially proposed the idea is disputed among the sources who were present at the time. They carefully avoided labeling the illness tuberculosis, though they instructed their patients on how to mimic the symptoms of that disease. When SS personnel inspected the medical records, they learned the patients were being treated for a new, highly contagious and potentially fatal respiratory disease.