«I began to testify when I became a grandmother»- Corriere TV

by time news

The senator for life, a survivor of the Holocaust, explains the choice to tell the horror after forty-five years of silence

«When a silence, due to the impossibility of speaking about a subject, lasts forty-five years, the witness wonders if her voice will come out, who will be interested in her words…». Thus begins the video interview of Liliana Segre which we publish above, in which the senator for life, survivor of the Shoah, recounts his choice to testify. A decision made “when I became a grandmother, an extraordinary experience for someone who should have died”. You spoke for thirty years, Liliana Segre, in hundreds of schools, in front of thousands of students, until at the age of ninety the pain of reliving the tragic experience of Auschwitz every time and her physical fatigue did not driven to quit. Her last unforgettable testimony came on 9 October 2020 in the Citadel of Peace in Rondine, a very symbolic place where, in an international student residence, young people from countries in conflict live together and build dialogue.

The video we publish, online in the Memorial Daywas born from a dialogue with the director Roger Gabbai and is produced by Contemporary Jewish Documentation Center Foundation (Cdec), to which the senator has decided to donate the archive of her testimony in schools. Notes on scattered papers and vintage block notes, but also many letters received from pupils and teachers, newspaper articles, educational content. From 1992 to today. “Around the age of eighty – Liliana Segre told the Corriere last June – I thought of throwing away all those materials. I didn’t want them to stay with my children, already involved in the traumas of a surviving mother. But I didn’t. And when the CDEC asked me if it could take care of it, I said yes ». They are documents “that I kept religiously from the beginning because they were the mirror of a profound choice of life I made at the age of sixty, a sea that overwhelmed me, an unstoppable drive to break the silence”.

«In the course of our work — they explain now the archivists Francesco Lisanti and Rori Mancino — we found ourselves faced with the construction and continuous reworking of the story of the individual experience of a direct witness and of those who, alongside her, did not survive. An experience shared with students of different age groups and from different educational backgrounds who often took up what they had heard, reworking Liliana Segre’s words in a personal way and sending her the result».

In the video the senator, who she never returned to Auschwitz, where she was deported at the age of thirteen, also recounts an episode from 1995. «On the fiftieth anniversary of the liberation, I was in the car with my husband and we heard a live report describing the Queen of Holland and others who were there. All in fur. Since I know what cold is, I said: how right I was not to go. I would have forced them to undress and be cold, because you can’t go in Auschwitz in fur. If one wants to visit that place, one must be cold and even a little hungry».

On the evening of January 27th Liliana Segre, accompanied by Fabio Faziowill lead viewers to the Shoah Memorial in Milan during the televised event «Platform 21», live on Rai 1 at 20.35. In addition to the basement of the Central Station from which she was deported, she will show other places in Milan, such as the school from which she was expelled and the San Vittore prison in which she was confined.

(by Ruggero Gabbai, with text by Alessia Rastelli)

January 27, 2023 – Updated January 27, 2023, 4:06 PM

© Time.News

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