The senator entrusts thirty years of texts and notes on her testimony to the Center for Contemporary Jewish Documentation Cdec. The institute joined the Shoah Memorial to create a historical research center and laboratory on the present in Milan. Inauguration on June 15th
They tell me that when I go to testify in schools I am cold and detached as if I were talking about other people, about other things. different in front of a blank sheet of paper that awaits and that only writing, a conventional sign of man, will fill, telling places and people, faces and colors and sounds and smells etc. A whole vanished world to which I, I, belonged, belong, belong.
It puts the chills directly from his handwriting, on scattered papers and vintage notepads, the thoughts of life senator Liliana Segre as she begins to speak publicly about the Shoah and her experience as a survivor. Notes from the early nineties when she, after a deep depression, she decides to become a witness and to reconnect in some way to that vanished world. And so, while her memory becomes memory, she transfers the horrors of Auschwitz to the blank sheet of paper, but also the reflections and moods that accompany her on that painful journey. Where do you start when there are so many things and inside her head the hours, whistles, songs, voices beat in a crazy jumble which then calms down in agonizing amazement, she notes. It’s still: We are and must be vigilant and attentive but hope must never die. Or, as he relives the day of his liberation, he wonders: The nightmare was over but what would become of our minds and hearts?
The testimony papers in hundreds of schools, in front of thousands of students, along with the many letters received from pupils and teachers, newspaper articles, teaching materials have been kept for years by the senator. That you have now decided to entrust them to the Foundation for Contemporary Jewish Documentation (Cdec), just as the latter – the main research institute on the history of Jews in Italy – is giving life in Milan, with the Memorial Foundation of the Shoah, in a new center that will be inaugurated on June 15 and open to the public from 20. A structure of over 750 square meters, designed by the Morpurgo de Curtis studio, with a library, a classroom and an agor. Location: the Memorial itself, the space not to forget active since 2013 around the platform from which Liliana Segre and thousands of other Jews and political opponents were deported from the Central Station. There the Cdec has transferred and unified both the book patrimony and the archive – including the 53 folders of the Segre Fund, with materials from 1992 to today – opening up even more to citizenship.
Il Corriere, present the deputy director Venanzio Postiglione, had the opportunity to see the new spaces, some unpublished papers of the senator relating to the first periods of the testimony and to talk about it with her. Around the age of eighty – he says – I thought about throwing away all those materials. I didn’t want them to stay with my children, already caught up in the trauma of a surviving mother. But I didn’t. And when the CDEC asked me if he could take care of it, I said yes. They are documents that from the beginning I religiously guarded – he continues – because they were the mirror of a profound choice of life made at the age of sixty. After having been terribly ill with what was then called a “nervous breakdown”, I felt that I had to do my duty. it was like a sea that overwhelmed me, an unstoppable push to break the silence. Thus one of the first notes was entitled typical day – not to be forgotten, relating to the terrible everyday life of Auschwitz: beatings, promiscuit even in the toilet – never loneliness, lousy soup, no spoon, sips – episode of the mouse. That is, Liliana Segre reconstructs, of when in the broth up to a rat, but in any case I did not refuse it. I took a ladle, and a nearby companion commented: “It was almost better with the mouse”, so much was the hunger.
There are several references to Primo Levi among the papers. The senator explained in the past how she too, thanks to the surviving writer of Auschwitz, she had found the words to say the unspeakable. In the folders there are some verses of the poem placed in the epigraph a If this a man, full-page transcribed: Consider if this is a woman, / with no hair and no name / no more strength to remember / empty eyes and cold womb / like a frog in winter. Or single thoughts: dehumanization: Primo Levi could not stand it 40 years later. She too, explains Liliana Segre, among those who believe he took his own life. After what we had gone through, it took very strong opposing forces not to give in to that temptation.
Here it is, then, the question: What then would become of our minds and hearts?. Each survivor – the senator replies today – reacted differently. When we returned there was a gulf between us and those who hadn’t had our experience. here the meaning of that title by Primo Levi, Truce: the need for a temporal and geographical space in which to get used to normalcy again in small steps. He tells a detail, symbolic of much more: For a year I had spent the nights on a plank, with my fingers in my ears so as not to hear what was around me. When I got back, even though I had a bed, I slept on the floor for a while. From what she lived, she saved herself by throwing herself headlong into the study and then the love of her husband Alfredo: I met him at eighteen, she has never left me alone.
The senator was one of the founders of the Shoah Memorial. L, in that place below the level of the passenger platforms, wanted the great inscription Indifference. And now satisfied with the new spaces: In a place of deportation, the books arrive. And anyone who comes out of a library generally resists indifference. The Cdec’s assets include 31,000 monographs, 700 degree theses and 2,000 periodicals; the archive collects most of the testimonies of Italian Jews on the Shoah and other documents on their history from the mid-nineteenth century to today. Liliana Segre’s material, rearranged by archivists Francesco Lisanti and Rori Mancino, will become an object of study. It will be useful – observes Laura Brazzo, director of the archive – to reconstruct the evolution of memory from the 1990s to today. She seeks that she will enrich herself with other recently acquired documents, such as those of Goti Bauer, who was also a survivor of Auschwitz. Much more than a closing circle. Goths – says Liliana Segre – an extraordinary friend. It was she who encouraged me to become a witness.
The senator cares that the Memorial is as well known as possible, especially among young people: This is why I invited Chiara Ferragni. Meanwhile, after the break for Covid, school visits resumed and reactivated the relationship that the Memorial has been maintaining with the institutes for years, keeping in touch with those who have already come and trying to involve new ones. Our offices – says the director of the Cdec Gadi Luzzatto Voghera – have already been moved and you can immediately see how much the Memorial is inhabited by young people, both students and civil service children. Now books and documents join the experience of this place, which will help the memory even more to look to the past but also to the future. an important synergy: we will develop common programs and initiatives, adds the president of the Memorial Roberto Jarach. The content of the Testimonies Rooms, an integral part of the visit, will be renewed. The Foundations worked on a video interview by Corrado Augias with Edith Bruck and on a film by director Ruggero Gabbai with images of Liliana Segre today and thirty years ago, when she returned for the first time to the place of deportation. Also available will be the video of the dialogue between the Senator and the Minister of Justice Marta Cartabia made by La Lettura (here some moments of the Minister’s visit to the Memorial). In recent years – concludes Marco Vigevani, president of the Memorial Events Committee – we have been faithful to the idea of preserving the memory of the Shoah and at the same time opening ourselves to the issues of the present, such as racism, migration, prisons. We want to continue, and the presence of the CDEC will give us even stronger scientific support.
The project
The Memorial Foundation of the Shoah and the Contemporary Jewish Documentation Center Foundation (Cdec) give life in Milan to a center of historical memory and a laboratory on the present. Over 750 square meters with a library-archive, a teaching room and an agor. The new spaces are at the Memorial, which is expanding (inauguration on June 15 and opening of the library-archive to the public from 20; entrance from Piazza Safra 1). The library can be accessed freely; archival materials will be available upon reservation.
The other initiatives: visitors’ memories and an exhibition
From 15 June the photographic exhibition will be open in the exhibition space of the Memorial Making Memory: the construction of a place which traces the evolution of the project and will be accessible to all until the end of June. A new initiative will also be launched to collect visitor testimonies on the spot. In fact, in recent years, the experience at the Memorial has on some occasions awakened memories, direct experiences or family memories transmitted between generations.
June 4, 2022 (change June 5, 2022 | 22:12)
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