Who is Liliana Segre, the abyss of Auschwitz and rebirth – Politics

An Italian girl like many others who in 1938 suffers the shameful violence of racial discrimination. Since then, nothing will ever be the same for many Italian Jews such as Liliana, who was expelled from school at the age of eight.

Discrimination is followed by persecution. In the early days of December 1943, Segre with his father and two cousins ​​tried to escape to Switzerland. "It was the first time I heard this word: 'escape'. Escape – he said in Marcello Pezzetti's (Einaudi) 'Book of the Italian Shoah' – it is so terribly negative as a term … he is a thief who runs away, he is someone chased who runs away. Well, we were not thieves, but we were certainly pursued ". Captured by the Swiss police, she is sent back to Italy: arrested, closed first in the Varese prison, then in the Como prison and finally in Milan, in San Vittore, where she remains for 40 days. The following January she was handed over to the SS and deported with her father to Germany: interned in the Birkenau-Auschwitz extermination camp, she was locked up in the women's section along with 700 other girls and 60,000 women of all nationalities. A matriculation number tattooed on her arm (number 75190) is imposed on her: she is not yet 14 years old.

The father was killed on April 27, 1944. In 1945 the Nazis, fleeing the advance of the Red Army, evacuated the camp and transferred to Liliana Germany and another 56,000 prisoners in the terrible 'March of Death'. Interned first in the Ravensbruck women's camp and then in the Malchow camp in northern Germany, the Italian girl was liberated by the Soviets on April 30, 1945. Of the 776 Italian children younger than 14 years deported to Auschwitz, La Segre and among the only 25 survivors.

He returned to Milan in August 1945. It took Liliana 45 years to "break the silence" on the Holocaust, as happened to many survivors: only in 1990 did he begin to talk about meeting students and professors. He hasn't stopped since. "I hope that at least one of those who listened to these memories of life lived today – he said in his testimony – imprints them in his memory and transmits them to others, because when none of our voices will stand up and say 'I remember "there is someone who has picked up this message of life and makes it so that 6 million people are not dead in vain for the sole fault of being born. Otherwise all this can take place again, in other forms, with other names, in others places, for other reasons. But if sometimes someone will be a lighted and living candle of memory, the hope of good and peace will be stronger than fanaticism and hatred ".