Time.news – The mass extermination carried out by the Nazis primarily against Jews, but not only, had a very vast geographical diffusion of which little is known.
In the stereotyped imagination of the general public there is almost only Auschwitz, but there are thousands of localities in Europe that have witnessed massacres: they are the ‘unknown places’ of the Holocaust, of which absolutely nothing remains at times.
To remedy this ‘hole’ in memory, Davide Romanin Jacur wrote ‘KZ lager’ in 2020, a journey through 23 concentration and extermination camps that he himself visited, accompanying young people and adults traveling to the places of Jewish extermination.
Now he has published a sequel, ‘KZ2’, published by Ronzani Editore (316 pp., €20), in which lists hundreds of lesser known, if not completely unknown, places where the killings took place.
The goal, he underlines to Time.news in an interview, is informative: “People know nothing and the best way to become aware of what this event was is to get to know it”.
“I have been making these trips since 2003, there have been about fifty so far: in the first book I wanted to talk about all the camps I had visited, 23 camps and 13 other sites linked to the Shoah”, he says. “But I realized that people are completely ignorant – benevolently ignorant – of what it was, also because unfortunately for those who are not familiar with things, there is a tendency to stereotype, for which the concentration camp is only Auschwitz”.
Instead, “these events concerned all of Europe”, the spread of the sites of the massacres was “very vast” and “not know each other, of some there is absolutely nothing left. I did this search and only listed 372“, even if “there were perhaps 40,000 places where something happened. Historians put the concentration camps at at least 1,600.”
Strengthened by the “engineer’s forma mentis that tries to show things as they are” and by the belief that it is “necessary for people to touch reality with their hands”, Romanin Jacur has created a path also made up of geographical maps, country by country, which “show where these places used to be.” Thus “the data becomes irrefutable: we must always watch our backs from the denialism or reductionism that are always behind the door”, he recalls.
A common tendency, especially among young people who on these journeys find themselves faced with certain events they cannot understand, is to attribute everything to “madness, the word in which everyone normally takes refuge. But it is completely wrong, because it was not at all crazy, but perfectly rational, what was happening. It is a distortion at a certain moment of European culture”.
The intent of the book, he reiterates, is “informative, it must not create controversy”. That’s why, with regard to Italy, he did not want to comment on what happened but limited himself to listing “77 places of internment, the raids carried out city by city, with dates, and some events that did not particularly concern the Jews, except for one case, but massacres carried out in Italy. It’s just a list, not a comment so as not to enter into a controversy with various political parties”.
“Unfortunately Italy, unlike Germany itself, has not made an examination of conscience, with the amnesty of Togliatti and ‘the Italians are good people’ a veil has been cast over what had happened before: the people who even had signed the racial laws or had previously participated in the fascist period have been recycled and there has never been an examination of conscience. I want to stick to the facts and not to political readings”, underlines Romanin Jacur.
After twenty years of travelling, thousands of questions received and answers given, the author of KZ2 is well aware of the context in which he moves and of how the memory should be carried forward. “Italy, like all of Europe, has established the Day of Remembrance. The first mistake is to consider this date as a Jewish anniversary: the Shoah unfortunately had Jews as its main victims but it is not a Jewish question, it has nothing to anything to do with Judaism – except mourning the victims – and therefore has nothing to do with victimhood either. The Shoah is a problem of European culture which at a certain moment rotted away and therefore in the various parts of Europe people began to reason in the wrong way”.
The other mistake is “to think that such a great thing that invests all of humanity, in its cannibalism, can be concentrated in one date. We must not create the memory of a day, but we must create awareness: this is also the reason why from Padua we take the boys by bus, with at least four days of very tiring travel, because in that time frame we have a “travelling classroom” where we continue to explain all these things to them. So, in the end, there is awareness, or at least – he concludes – let’s hope there is”.