The journeys of memory “are not trips”, in places like Auschwitz “one goes in silence, with suitable clothes”, as if one were entering “a sanctuary”, in a “civil, religious, nostalgic” way and “perhaps having skipped breakfast in the morning”: Liliana Segre sends a message especially to the younger ones trying to explain to them how to approach places like the extermination camps with sensitivity, which have now become important museums that preserve the testimony of one of the greatest horrors of the Second World War.
The senator for life spoke about it precisely at Palazzo Madama, in view of the Day of Remembrance, on 27 January: in the classroom, meanwhile, the first “green light” was given to a bill establishing a fund for high schools to visit the extermination camps.
The Auschwitz survivor bitterly recalled the images of “a group of Dutch boys” who entered the concentration camp passing under the writing “Arbeit macht frei” listening to loud music and “licking an ice cream”.
And he also spoke of the invitation, refused, for the fiftieth anniversary of the liberation, to the presence of heads of state and government: “I didn’t feel like it. Then when I read and heard on the radio the description of the fur coats of the Queen of Holland and of Berlusconi, I was glad I hadn’t accepted”.
According to the undersecretary of the Presidency of the Council Alfredo Mantovano “the visits of school groups to the concentration camps have an unequaled scope to demonstrate the result of anti-Semitism and a perverse ideology”, but it takes “an effort to look for a language close to young people so as not to make that drama seem far away”.
The government’s approach finds the applause of the president of the Union of Italian Jewish communities, Noemi Di Segni, who hopes the establishment of a Segre commission (the Senate will express its opinion on Thursday) to keep attention high on the anti-Semitic phenomena in the Country: “There is the hypothesis of making the crime of incitement to hatred, trivialization and denialism an autonomous offense, which today is an aggravating circumstance. And then there is the speech on the apology of fascism”.
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