The Italian Holocaust survivor and Senator Liliana Segre has received police protection after countless anti-Semitic abuses. This is reported by several Italian media, citing the Milan authorities. The 89-year-old had been appointed as Senator for life by President Sergio Mattarella in early 2018.
According to the newspaper "Corriere della sera", Segre receives about 200 hate news online alone - every day. Two police officers from now on were always on the security of the elderly politician, reports "La Repubblica".
Segre was born in 1930 in a Jewish family in Milan. After a failed escape with her father to Switzerland, she was arrested at the end of 1943 and deported to the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp in January 1944. She survived there as a worker in an armaments factory.
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In October, it had become known that Segre is threatened and insulted by social media every day by Holocaust deniers and other right-wing extremists. The Senate then set up a special committee against intolerance, racism and anti-Semitism. The center-right parties abstained on what triggered heated controversy in Italy.
Segre himself has repeatedly raised his voice in the face of growing right-wing extremism in Italy. In June last year she signaled in the House of Lords when she recalled the complicity of Italian fascists in the crimes of the National Socialists and called for "vigilance" (read more about the rise of neo-fascism in Italy here).
Socialist MEP Emanuele Fiano, son of a Holocaust survivor, was dismayed. "It's a terrible signal, it's a world in reverse, defending someone who has gone through hell is a duty, but also a defeat," he said.