(by Ida Bini) On 27 January 1945 the world discovered Auschwitz and the darkest page of our history: that day the Red Army troops, engaged in the Vistola-Oder offensive, entered the Nazi concentration camp and freed 9 thousand prisoners, few survivors compared to the 4 million who had been detained there since 1940, a few kilometers from the border with the former Czechoslovakia.
In 2005 the UN chose that date, January 27, to celebrate Remembrance Day and remember the millions of victims of the Holocaust with ceremonies, meetings, films, theatrical performances, readings and exhibitions to document the massacre and testify how important memory is for fight against all forms of discrimination and racism.
Cemeteries, celebratory monuments, concentration camps, railway stations have been transformed into museums, into places of memory to be known so as not to forget and not repeat the horror of the past.
The journey of memory starts from Milan, where the Shoah Memorial Foundation-Binario 21 (memorialeshoah.it) stands under the Central Station, the place from where convoys full of Jews and other persecuted people left for the Nazi extermination camps.
The Memorial bears witness to the lives of thousands of prisoners who passed through it between 1943 and 1945, including the senator for life Liliana Segre, who survived Auschwitz.
Visits take place every day from 10am to 4pm and on Saturday and Sunday until 6pm. On 27 January visits are free but must be booked.
To bear witness to the horrors in the concentration camps there is also the Monumentoal Museum for political and racial deportees (fondazionefossoli.org) in Fossoli, near Carpi, in the province of Modena.
Famous men of culture also passed through here, including the writer Primo Levi.
Inside, events, screenings, meetings, exhibitions and guided tours;
outside the concentration camp to imprison first the enemy soldiers, then from 1943 the Jews.
Another concentration camp that can be visited in Italy is that of Servigliano, in the Marche region: it is a prison camp where opponents, refugees, prisoners of war and Jews were incarcerated during the fascist period;
today it has become the Peace Park.
Next door is the House of Memory (lacasadellamemoria.com), founded in 2001 to recover the memory and history of the events that occurred between 1915 and 1955. Guided tours must be booked at least the day before.
In Trieste, the national monument Risiera di san Sabba (risierasansabba.it), an old structure for rice husking transformed into a detention camp, is a museum that bears witness to the tragic history of Italian soldiers, partisans, political prisoners and Jews imprisoned and then deported abroad.
Entrance is free every day from 9am to 5pm (from 1st April to 30th September until 7pm).
In Rome, a visit to the Ghetto is a must, among the oldest in the world, a place of memory par excellence: here on 16 October 1943 over a thousand Jews were captured, locked up in the Military College in Via della Lungara and transferred to the Tiburtina station to be deported to Auschwitz.
In the capital, to remember the places where Jews, dissidents, homosexuals, Roma and Sinti were arrested and deported, the German artist Gunter Demnig created the stumbling blocks in 1993, small stone blocks set along the pavements or in the pavement that remember the victims of the deportations.
The stones bear the name of the victim, the place where he lived or where, in many cases, the deportation began.
There are over 300 - 22 thousand stumbling blocks around the world - scattered in many areas of the city.
Finally, in Tarsia, in the province of Cosenza, there is the largest fascist concentration camp in Italy;
following the racial laws, foreign Italian Jews, anti-fascists and political refugees were locked up here.
Closed in 1945, since 2004 it has become the Ferramonti Memory Museum (parchiletterari.com) with a rich collection of documents, photos, police files, letters from family members and personal objects, enriched by videos and testimonies.
Abroad, the journey to symbolic places can only begin with Auschwitz where the barbed wire, the gate with the writing 'Arbeit macht frei', the ghostly railway track and, inside, a well-documented bookshop, block 11 with several cells are still visible and a gas chamber.
Just 4 km away is the Birkenau concentration camp, created only to exterminate Jews, Russians, Poles, prisoners of war, homosexuals, political opponents and gypsies from all over Europe.
In this camp you visit the infirmary, the barracks, the ramp where the train arrived, the gas chambers, the mass graves and the guard tower.
60 km away lies another suggestive place of memory: the Kazimierz Jewish district of Krakow where Oskar Schindler's enamel factory is located, today transformed into a museum that honors the memory of the entrepreneur who saved more than a thousand Jews from the concentration camp, employing some prisoners as workers.
In Germany the most significant place of remembrance is the Shoah memorial, a field of steles designed by architect Peter Eisenmann in the heart of the Mitte district of Berlin, precisely in the area occupied by the palace of Nazi leader Joseph Goebbels.
The monument is made up of almost 3 thousand stone blocks that commemorate the 6 million Jews killed by the Nazis.
Also in the German capital is the Jewish Museum which tells the story of the German Jewish community, from the Middle Ages to the Shoah; designed by Daniel Libeskind, from above it has the symbolic shape of a broken Star of David.
In the Grunewald railway station there is the Gleis 17 Memorial, a monument located on platform 17, from where the Jews left for the concentration camps between 1941 and 1945. Here 186 steel plaques remember the name, date and place of imprisonment of the deportees.
The journey down memory lane continues to Anne Frank's house-museum in Amsterdam, a symbol of the Holocaust due to her diary made public after the end of the war.
Finally, the Shoah Memorial in Paris also deserves to be known, which since 1943 has collected documents and political testimonies useful for historical investigations, including the Nuremberg trials.
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