Anzio, Edith Bruck against the mayor, refuses the delivery of the Peace Prize. “Mussolini honorary citizen”
The Hungarian naturalized Italian writer, of Jewish family, winner of the Strega Giovani 2021 has rejected the invitation of the mayor Candido De Angelis to go to collect the Peace Prize, after the denial of merit to Adele di Consiglio, a survivor of the concentration camps, and the confirmation by the city council of honorary citizenship in Mussolini.
The writer who received from President Mattarella the honor of Knight of the Grand Cross of the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic, veteran of the concentration camps, received a visit from the Pope at home on February 20, 2021. At the age of 90 she won the competition with ‘The lost bread’.
In a open letter to the mayor said: “Dear Mayor De Angelis, I would have gladly returned to your city for the Peace Prize if in the meantime I had not known that merit was denied to one of my co-religionists, Adele di Consiglio. A lonely woman, survivor of the Nazi-fascist barbarism that destroyed her family like mine. Instead, honorary citizenship was reconfirmed to Mussolini who still has many followers in his territory and not only in Europe itself, which has little memory “.
“I, a Holocaust survivor, have been writing and witnessing for a lifetime in Italian schools, an arduous and tiring task, without hatred towards anyone, indeed in the name of peace and human brotherhood, having had the visit of Pope Francis who asked me for forgiveness extended to the martyr people, I owe loyalty to myself and for solidarity with the lady of the Council (whom I do not know), I thank you but I cannot accept the Peace Prize where the active nostalgia of the most shameful era is in turmoil, indelible for those who lived it “.
The mayor replied: “If Bruck does not accept mortification not to me, but to the city ”. With reference to Mussolini, he added: “He has had honorary citizenship since 1924. Before me there were three communist mayors, two socialists, one republican, one DS and no one has ever revoked it. Indeed this topic has never been discussed in City Council from 1946 to 2021 “.
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