It is estimated that about 10,000 Italian Jews were deported to concentration and death camps, of whom 7,700 perished in the Holocaust, out of a pre-war Jewish population that amounted to 58,500 (46,500 by Jewish religion and 12,000 converted or non-Jewish sons of mixed marriages).Elizabeth Bettina, "It happened in Italy: Untold stories of how the people of Italy defied the horrors of the Holocaust", p. 26, Thomas Nelson, 2011. The surviving community was able to maintain its distinctiveness throughout the following decades and continued to have a significant role in the fields of politics, literature, science and industry. Writers such as Giorgio Bassani, Natalia Ginzburg and Primo Levi were among the leading figures of the Italian culture in the post-war years.
