Memorial trips "are not trips", to Auschwitz "one goes in silence, with suitable clothes", as in "a sanctuary", in "a civil, religious, nostalgic way" and "perhaps having skipped breakfast in the morning" .
Shortly before the first unanimous go-ahead for the bill for a fund in favor of high schools to visit the Nazi camps arrived at Palazzo Madama, Liliana Segre sent a clear message to those who go to those places of extermination, to whom the Senator for life she survived and where she never wanted to return.
In the Senate - where, on the proposal of President Ignazio La Russa, Remembrance Day will be commemorated on the eve of January 26 - Segre recalled the images "of a group of Dutch boys" who entered the camp under the inscription Arbeit macht frei "listening to the music and licking an ice cream".
But also the declined invitation for the fiftieth anniversary of the liberation, in 1995, with heads of state and government: "I didn't feel like it. Then when I read and heard on the radio the description of the fur coats of the Queen of Holland and Berlusconi, I was happy that I didn't accept."
The visits of school groups to the concentration camps "have an unequaled scope for demonstrating the results of anti-Semitism and a perverse ideology", underlined the undersecretary to the Presidency of the Council Alfredo Mantovano, presenting the initiatives for the Day of Remembrance sponsored from Palazzo Chigi.
However, "an effort is needed to look for a language close to young people so as not to make that drama seem far away", he added, after stigmatizing the phrase of Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov bounced back early in the morning from Moscow: to say that the US and its allies want to put into practice "a final solution" against Russia "like Hitler for the Jews", they are "nonsense" and "trivializations of the Shoah",
clarified the undersecretary in charge of the secret services, who then defined "the government's attention to the increase in episodes of anti-Semitism, especially on social media, where anti-Semitic rancor is growing, is very concrete".
Indifference is another ever-present risk, agreed the president of the Union of Italian Jewish communities, Noemi Di Segni, who thanked the government "for its attention".
While awaiting a new Segre commission (the Senate will vote on Thursday), the president of UCEI warned that "the challenge is to implement the recommendations of the old one: there is the hypothesis of making the crime of incitement to hatred, trivialization and denialism, which today is an aggravating circumstance. And then there is the speech on the apology of fascism".
The initiatives sponsored by Palazzo Chigi begin on 23 January with the 'Concert of Memory 2023' at the Teatro dell'Opera in Rome, with the preview of the documentary film 'Shlomo's Breath' and Jan Hillebrand's violin, played for five years in the Lager Kapelle of Auschwitz.
On the 29th the non-competitive race to discover the "places of memory" will be staged in Milan.
The exhibition "1938-1945. The persecution of the Jews in Italy. Documents for a history" will be inaugurated in Trieste on the 24th.
Then on the 26th at the Casina dei Vallati in Rome the one on the history of Aktion Reinhardt, the project to exterminate Polish Jews.
Then on the 29th the biennial "Arte in Memoria" will open at the synagogue of Ostia Antica.
Meanwhile, Ucei and the Ministry of Education have launched a competition for children which has yielded a rap song, which concludes as follows: "It is still too early to sing victory".
"It's early - commented Di Segni - and we too have a lot to learn from the young players".
