The January 27, 1945 the gates of that called hell on earth were opened Auschwitz. The world learned of the atrocities committed in Nazi concentration camps, and from that day all consciences were stirred up, made sensitive and ready to remember that what had been accomplished. The unacceptable horror of the concentration camp madness is remembered today by Memorial Day.
The greatest difficulty in dealing with a topic of this magnitude is mainly that of not falling into mere rhetoric. On the pages of this newspaper, we often deal with topical or particularly relevant news, which go beyond the sporting context in which we are immersed, but there is no intention of exempting ourselves from our duty as reporters. Many years have passed since the troops of the Red Army liberated the extermination camp of Auschwitz, one of the most sadly famous concentration camps created by the insane Nazi machine. Imagine waking up one morning and being deprived of your name, of all fundamental rights, of identity and affections, forced to carry out exhausting jobs, to the limit – and beyond – human potential, to ration meals that cannot be defined as such, and be aware of being able to die for a yes or a no at any moment.
All of this existed in Nazi Germany, an ally of Italy, and in its satellite countries during the Second World War. It was enough to have the misfortune of being born into a family with the religious belief considered ‘wrong’, belonging to an ‘impure’ ethnicity, or of wanting to resist and fight for their country to be deported and say goodbye forever to life as the you knew each other. Over the years, the memory handed down by the survivors of the extermination camps has continued to serve as a warning to remind us that this remains and will continue to be one of the darkest chapters in the history of humanity. Over six million people exterminated in the most brutal and inhuman ways require us not to forget what happened.
Victims of every atrocity, of experiments, of torture, of any brutality that the human mind could come to conceive, they ask us. Time passes, inexorable, and inevitably the survivors of those horrors will gradually close their eyes. Our task is not to forget what happened in those places, to talk about it to future generations, to pass on the memory, so that these horrors do not happen again. We can not forget. We do not want to forget, We must not forget.
There are many literary works not to forget, to combine reading with awareness. In Everyone dies only of Hans Fallada, a German writer whose real name was Rudolf Wilhelm Friedrich Ditzen, understands the value of life under the constant threat of madness. Fallada was not a Nazi, but he lived that period trying to balance the survival instinct and the desire to scream against injustice; in the book it tells of the attempts of a married couple to resist, to oppose the status quo. Published in 1947, it was defined by Primo Levi, another writer fundamental for understanding the concentration camps, as the most important book about the German resistance to Nazism. Which did not enter the history books precisely because of the difficulty in organizing it and sometimes even just in ‘thinking about it’.
“The few bourgeois were completely lost in that crowd and turned out to be insignificant and dull in the midst of so many uniforms; just as the people outside on the streets and in the factories had never meant anything to the party. The party was everything and the people nothing”, Wrote Fallada. And precisely in the sad uniforms, but this time in the sign of slavery and terror, the dark evil of the concentration camps was perpetrated.
We need an important appeal to memory, through books: “Now that the direct witnesses of the horror are leaving, postmemory becomes central“, Writes the Newspaper. The testimonies of Nedo Fiano, Liliana Segre, Sami Modiano, Piero Terracina, Luciana Nissim, Shlomo Venezia and other survivors are essential to understand the strength of the men who came out of hell alive, and the courage of those who found death. The books of those who have experienced that terrifying drama firsthand have a double value: in addition to the memory, they also derive their importance from the process that led the author to delve into pain, bringing out otherwise hidden details, even from the closest friends. . Piero Terracina (who passed away in 2019) spoke of the ‘Auschwitz disease’ when he was faced with new episodes of intolerance, and his memories were transformed into facts only in the face of the need to awaken those who, by registry office, had not been able to attend an age of war and hatred.
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