Olga Blumenthal was born in Venice on April 20, 1873. She was the daughter of Carlo Blumenthal, a banker and prominent figure in the social and political life of the city, and Minna Goldschmidt. Olga’s brother Alessandro enjoyed a fair reputation as a composer and singer, but died early in 1919, at the age of forty-six.
Information on Olga’s childhood is scarce: she studied at the Royal Higher Institute of Economic and Commercial Sciences in Venice.
In 1919, on the proposal of the German professor Adriano Belli, she attained the position of assistant professor of German language and literature and from 1926 she also undertook the teaching of the Italian language to foreign pupils.
In 1921 she married Gilberto Secrétant, professor of Italian literature at the same institute, who died only a few months later. In agreement with her husband’s brothers, Olga donated 1500 volumes of literature, economics and law to the Library of Ca’ Foscari, of which the Blumenthal-Secrétant fund is still an integral part.
Olga was a German language assistant until 1934 and after that date she became a German reader until 1937, when she was no longer eligible to continue teaching: she was by now over sixty years of age and ten years had passed without her having a permanent position. She was suspended from work, but under pressure from some colleagues she still managed to be hired as a “volunteer assistant”.
In August 1938, a survey was carried out in all educational institutions in order to identify staff of “Jewish race”. On her card, Olga declared that both parents were Jewish, but her spouse was not. Although the order was to send all completed questionnaires back to Rome, that of Olga Blumenthal remains in Ca’ Foscari. Olga’s name was not even mentioned on the list of Jewish professors present at Ca’ Foscari. Her failure to report is perhaps an extreme form of protection for the elderly teacher by colleagues who only the previous year had worked to ensure that she could continue teaching.
Despite this, following the introduction of the Racial Laws and Royal Decree No. 1390 “Measures for the defence of race in the fascist school” Olga was definitively removed from teaching. She retired to private life and continued to work as a teacher at the Jewish School.
Olga was arrested by the Germans on 30 October 1944, and taken to Giudecca Prison. She was 71 and sick. She was later moved to Trieste, to the Risiera di San Sabba, and on 28 November she was deported to Ravensbrück, where she died on 24 February 1945.
On November 10, 1945, during the opening speech of the new academic year, Gino Luzzatto, the first post-war rector (also removed from teaching at Ca’ Foscari in 1938) recalled Olga Blumenthal, “who colleagues and students have always remembered and remember with deep veneration“
On January 22, 2018, a stumbling stone was laid in her memory in front of the Headquarters of Ca’ Foscari in Dorsoduro.
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