A thirteen-year-old girl, an only child, already an orphan of her mother, forced to leave her father’s hand forever condemned to an atrocious fate. A chilling farewell that marks an entire existence and at the same time the very symbol of the Shoah seen through the eyes of a desperate daughter. Now, at ninety years of age, he speaks to the very young of today: I am addressing the boys. Do not think that your parents are always very strong, do not think that you can ask them everything. Sometimes you are stronger than your parents, don’t be stingy with an extra hug, or in saying “I’m here, can I do something for you?”.
The memory of a persecution also in this moving one, heartfelt phrase intended for those who are children today, in our contemporaneity. Parents are not omnipotent, they are not eternal, they are fragile and can disappear like Liliana Segre’s beloved father. Although in this case he was killed in Auschwitz-Birkenau for the sole fault of being Jewish, a fate shared with six million other human beings, victims of the Nazi extermination. Love fathers and mothers, Liliana Segre tells us, they are often the ones who need you.
Liliana Segre’s book I chose life. My latest public testimony on the Shoah, edited by Solferino, edited by Alessia Rastelli, with a preface by Ferruccio de Bortoli, represents a point of arrival and, at the same time, of departure. Arrival, because the volume in its first part contains the last public speech of the senator for life, survivor of Auschwitz-Birkenau, delivered after thirty years of shared memory of the atrocities she experienced and saw: an unforgettable testimony given on the 9th October 2020 at the Rondine association, in Arezzo, accompanied by Ferruccio de Bortoli. There, for years, young people who come from countries in conflict have been living together, and for war they replace dialogue and brotherhood. The arrival, therefore, is represented by the density of Liliana Segre’s memories, symbolically handed over to the new generations. But right here is also the starting point, especially when he tells of the collapse of Nazism, the escape of the torturers, the decision not to pick up an abandoned gun on the ground and not to kill the cruel commander of the last camp, who remained in his underwear for escape: It was a very important moment, decisive in my life. I realized that for no reason in the world I could never kill anyone. I realized that I was not like my killer. I didn’t pick up that gun and from that moment – I’ve always finished my testimony like this over the years – I’ve become that free woman and that woman of peace that I am even now.
In Rondine’s story to the boys, Liliana Segre retraces all the stages of his imprisonment: the bolted wagon, the journey to nowhere that lasted a week, the abandonment of his father’s hand (a sacred hand), the farewell to his own name (nobody cares, from now on you then you will be a number, the one tattooed on your arm, so well done that after so many years mine still reads perfectly: 75190). And then the hunger, the frost, the gas chambers and the crematorium ovens, the life of a prisoner-slave, the figure of Doctor Mengele, an infernal judge, who decided on life and death. The constant asking of the father around, a ritual that then ended in desperation. And the dream of being out there, the sound of a child playing, a kitten, a green lawn, a cloud, anything beautiful.
In the second part, in the dense interview with Alessia Rastelli appeared on 30 August 2020 in the Corriere della Sera in view of the ninety years of the senator for life, Liliana Segre summarizes her experience but above all talks about the after, when, after having miraculously survived the concentration camp, she returned to Milan, with the weight of impossibility to tell. An episode for everyone: A Greek teacher in the classroom, in front of everyone, said that my deportation was an “interesting experience”. It was awful. For years I didn’t speak. Only after a heavy depression, around the age of sixty, did I realize that I had to do my duty.
That is the duty of remembrance, the story intended for young people. Ferruccio de Bortoli, honorary president of the Memorial Foundation of the Shoah in Milan, explains clearly in the introduction: Memory is a posthumous act of justice but above all a civil prayer without which the direction of history is lost and the same reasons for which we are together, as families, as a community. Without memory the destiny marked by others. And they are never the best. Also for this reason we will never stop thanking Liliana for her courage and her youthful strength.
A force that never leaves it. In fact, the title of the book says, he has chosen life. Again from the interview with Alessia Rastelli: In the concentration camp, a step forward or back could change destiny. I’m old, but I never really got out of myself back then. And every year that passes I ask myself: “But how did I do it, but how did I do it, but how did I do it?” I could go on forever but I don’t have the answer.
The book enriched by an in-depth section. First of all, a biographical note by Liliana Segre, then an accurate chronology that starts from 1919, with the foundation of the Italian Fasces of Combat by Benito Mussolini, and ends with the start of the Nuremberg Trials in November 1945. Finally a series of reading proposals, including historical essays, collections of testimonies, films and sites of associations and memory funds. All material useful to them, to young people, to the new generations for which Liliana Segre has spent thirty years of tireless witness.
Memories, documents, photographs
The volume by Liliana Segre I chose life. My latest public testimony on the Shoah (preface by Ferruccio de Bortoli, edited by Alessia Rastelli, from Thursday 22 April in the bookstore) collects the speech that the senator for life, a survivor of Auschwitz-Birkenau, gave on 9 October 2020 in Rondine (Arezzo). A symbolic handover took place in the small village where Rondine Cittadella della Pace is based, an organization created in 1998 by Franco Vaccari, where young people from countries in conflict live together. The book also contains Liliana Segre’s long interview with Corriere on the occasion of her 90th birthday (10 September 2020). The testimony and the interview had been published in a previous volume that Corriere readers received for free with the newspaper on October 30th. Now the volume, whose copyright proceeds are entirely donated to charity, arrives in all bookstores, enriched with other contents. First of all, a text by Liliana Segre, in which she recalls when in the lager they shaved her hair and the few words exchanged with a prisoner of a different language, thanks to the Latin she learned at school. The text, written by hand on a notebook (in the picture) several years after returning from Auschwitz-Birkenau, was later published in the Corriere.
In the book, there are also photographs of the senator from childhood to life after the concentration camp, up to the inscription Indifference which she strongly desired at the Memorial of the Shoah in Milan. A detailed chronology and a rich series of reading proposals, divided by topic, also allow you to deepen what was. Why it never happens again.
April 20, 2021 (change April 20, 2021 | 20:53)
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