30 January 1944 - 30 January 2014: seventy years after the departure of the convoy that led to Auschwitz Liliana Segre and 604 other deportees, on the evening of last 30 January, many, including many young people, gathered at the Memorial of the Shoah
(Platform 21), the place in Milan's central station from which trains departed to the extermination camps.
Since 1997, every year the Community of Sant'Egidio, along with the Jewish Community of Milan and many citizens loyal to this appointment, has remembered the victims of the Shoah and all genocides of the 20th century.
The testimony by Liliana Segre moved the audience with the memory of her father Alberto, deported with her, her only 13-years-old daughter and Susanna, a simple woman, not a Jew, who worked in the home of her grandparents, who were deported too. Susanna’s love and affection for Liliana Segre’s grandparents is an example of the
"banality of good" and a choice for the good that everyone can do.
Another exceptional witness, Vera Vigevani Jarach, an Italian Jewish woman that fled to Argentina with the family following the racial laws, who later became "mother and grandmother of Plaza de Mayo", as she has defined herself, spoke with enthusiasm and hope to the young people giving a loud call: "Nunca mas! (never again) but also solidarity “yes always”.
In the words of Minister of Heritage and Culture Max Bray, who attended the commemoration, Primo Levi’s warning echoed: "If it is impossible to understand, it is necessary to know".
The meeting was accompanied by Jovica Jovic’s music, Roma musician that remembered the extermination of the Roma and Sinti during World War II. |