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Farewell to Piero Terracina, one of the last survivors of Auschwitz

December 8, 2019

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Piero Terracina, one of the last survivors of the largest Nazi death camp, died in Rome at the age of 91. "I've been to Hell, it's called Auschwitz-Birkenau", he had said a few years ago to the audience of the Auditorium Paganini in Parma who had welcomed him so as not to forget."The memory – the former deportee told on stage – is the thread that links the past to the present and conditions the future: this is why it is necessary to remember the past, so that the past should never come back ".On the evening of 7 April 1944, the Passover family, the family of Piero Terracina, then 15, were taken to Regina Coeli, then to the Fossoli camp, near Modena. "The prisoners did not work, but I learned how I should die: I saw an officer firing a shot at the head of a deportee I knew. It was the first death I saw in my life". Thus begins the journey that will take them to Auschwitz. "A5506" is the number that Piero led for many years on his right forearm, together with the indelible memories he shared as a witness of horror, even accompanying the students in the extermination camps.

"The Jewish Community of Rome mourns the disappearance of a bastion of Memory – writes Ruth Dureghello, president of the Jewish Community of Rome – Piero Terracina represented the courage to remember, overcoming the pain of his immense family and of what was seen and suffered in the "Hell of Auschwitz, so that everyone could know the horror of the Nazi death camps. Today we mourn a great man and our pain will have to be transformed into a force of will so as not to allow deniers to revive anti-Semitic hatred".

"Piero Terracina has left us. I have no words to describe the pain that his death causes me. Piero, we always remember ready to tell the horror of Auschwitz, always ready to convey to young people the importance of memory", he writes about Facebook Nicola Zingaretti. "The testimony had become the mission of life. His words will continue to live in the eyes of the many young people he met in these years – reads the post of the secretary of the Democratic Party -. Piero was a free person even in denouncing omissions and silences of these years. His rigor, his pain, his restlessness in seeing the return of dangerous signals must be for us driven to commitment ".

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