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Liliana Segre turns 90 today: the senator for life who witnessed the Shoah, survivor of the horror of Auschwitz, an Italian Jew affected by the racist laws desired by Benito Mussolini, leader of fascism and signed by King Vittorio Emanuele III, was born in Milan on September 10, 1930 into a secular Jewish family, daughter of Alberto and Lucía Foligno, who dies when he is less than a year old.
Greetings from the world of politics and institutions: The President of the Republic Sergio Mattarella telephoned Senator Segre for life this morning. Expressing his affectionate wishes for his 90th birthday, he thanked him for his noble and precious testimony against hatred and violence, in defense of the rights of all and in the rejection of all discrimination.
“Sincere and warm wishes to Senator Liliana Segre – wrote Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte on Facebook – who has contributed over the years, with her moral strength and personal testimony, to keep alive the heritage of political values, moral values and cultural aspects of our national community. “” Thank you Senator Segre. Thank you for your daily commitment against all forms of indifference, hatred, discrimination, “added Conte.
HIS OWN STORY – An Italian girl like many others who suffered the shameful violence of racial discrimination in 1938. Since then, nothing will be like before for many Italian Jews like Liliana, who was expelled from school at the age of 8. Discrimination follows persecution. In the first days of December 1943, Segre together with her father and two cousins tried to escape to Switzerland. “It was the first time I heard this word: ‘escape.’ Escape – he said in the ‘Book of the Italian Shoah’ by Marcello Pezzetti (Einaudi) – it is so terribly negative as a term … it is a thief who flees, it is someone who is chased on the run. Well, we weren’t thieves, but they certainly were after us. “
Captured by the Swiss gendarmes, she is sent back to Italy.: arrested, first she was locked up in the Varese prison, then in the Como prison and finally in Milan, in San Vittore, where she remained for 40 days. The following January she was handed over to the SS and deported with her father to Germany: interned in the Birkenau-Auschwitz extermination camp, she was locked up in the women’s section along with 700 other girls and 60,000 women of all nationalities. A serial number tattooed on her arm (# 75190) is imposed on her: she is not yet 14 years old. Her father was assassinated on April 27, 1944. In 1945 the Nazis, fleeing the advance of the Red Army, cleared the camp, transferring Liliana and 56,000 other prisoners to Germany in the terrible ‘Death March’. Interned first in the women’s camp in Ravensbruck and then in Malchow in northern Germany, the Italian girl was released by the Soviets on April 30, 1945. Of the 776 Italian children under 14 years of age deported to Auschwitz, Segre and ‘among only 25 survivors. She returned to Milan in August 1945.
It took Liliana 45 years to “break the silence” about the Shoah, as it happened to many survivors: only in 1990 did she begin to tell stories when she met students and teachers. It hasn’t stopped since. “I hope that at least one of those who today have heard these memories of real life – she said in her testimony – imprints them in her memory and passes them on to others, because when none of our voices will rise to say ‘I remember Otherwise all of this could happen again, in other ways, under other names, in other places, for other reasons. But if from time to time someone is a lit candle and lives with memory, the hope of good and peace will be stronger than fanaticism and hatred ”.
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