Segre a Rondine says: “I decided to be the woman of peace that I am” – Chronicle

Arezzo, October 9, 2020 – “Rondine, several years ago, had already taken me as an enchantment of what I wanted to achieve in life. An example”. Thus began his intervention La Segre a Rondine. Prime Minister Conte and the other authorities waiting at the Citadel of Peace are already present.

“My little interrupted life turned me into the other. The Jewish. I remember that day, I was at the table and they told me that I could no longer go to school. Why? Because I was expelled. We are Jews and we can’t do many things anymore. They explained it to me. It was the racial laws. Among the ugliest things they did was make the children invisible. ”

“An escalation of fear began in my family. Policemen and relatives came and went and they left. We stayed because basically nothing would happen in Italy.”

“After September 8, people started to flee. We were not prepared. But a friend knocked on our door, proposed to help me, to hide me. Only later did he realize that they had risked their lives. ”

“When I entered the Senate I said: I was an asylum seeker, I know what it means to be rejected.”

Segre and his father managed to escape to Switzerland, but were sent back. “They arrested us. I remember how we walked as prisoners. With our father’s stamps, he threw them in the mud, he thought there was no hope.”

Little Segre entered the prison. “Why? There was no answer.”

From prison to prison he ended up in San Vittore, where he spent 40 days with his father. “In those days I was his mother.”

DEPORTATION Then came the communication that we had to leave for an unknown destination. ”

“We crossed a deserted Milan. They kicked and punched us into the wagons even by our neighbors, merciless people. There was straw on the ground and a bucket. That wagon was terrible, there was no light, there was no water. Only proximity to the that you loved. For a week I watched Italy pass, then the border, then Austria amid continuous crying, prayer and silence “.

GOODBYE AND ENTRANCE TO THE FIELD OF DEATH “I made little regards to my father. They were the last, but I did not know. Then I started walking behind about thirty women. Walking I entered the Birkenau concentration camp Auschwitz. Upon entering I thought he was crazy. It was hell. We began to understand that we should forget our name, we became a number. Mine is still perfectly tattooed. Then he stripped naked, shaved under the laughter of the Nazis. They took everything from us. Our life was gone. ”

“I didn’t understand. What place was it. What was there, what was that building with the chimney from which the smoke came out? The French women explained it to us, who at first thought they were crazy. For Normally it was not possible to believe that we had passed in such a place “.

FACTORY “Fortunately I had become a worker. It allowed me to mark the day. We saw the men, I started asking where my dad was. Then I stopped.”

“In the afternoon we would come back and see the flame or the smoke from the fireplace. At night we slept, we did not want to hear the noises from the camp, the cries, the screams of those who went to the gas. Day after day we became more selfish. I no longer turned. looking at the groups of corpses ready to be burned ”.

“We had to choose life So don’t look, don’t listen Holding on to the little things in life: a cloud, a memory ”.

“I had become horrible. I no longer accepted the posts. I didn’t turn around when a French friend I worked with every day at the factory was sent on gasoline. The next day I started working with another worker who took her place. It was January 1945, we were beginning to hear the noise of the planes ”.

“I HAVE NOT FORGIVEN As I have not forgotten.”

THE DEATH MARCH “We walked for months, hundreds of kilometers because the Russians were coming ”.

“We found a dead horse, we began to eat it raw. We were horrible, we were dead inside, but we wanted to live. In this march we found dead horses, but never men. Nobody ever opened a window. We no longer hear anything, but in a small field we saw spring, grass and trees. Nature had run its course. The French prisoners passed by and had become peasants, they told us poor things. Until then we had only received horrible words. ”

“They told us that the war was about to end and that the Germans were losing it. Don’t die now, resist.”

“I decided not to take revenge, I did not take the weapon to kill. At that moment I became the free and peaceful woman with whom I have lived until now”. This is how La Segre closes its speech, moved by thunderous applause.

Conte: “SI came here not to speak but to listen. I give my assurance and that of the government that this testimony will not be lost and will be preserved. I bring you greetings from the President of the Senate Casellati and the Fico Chamber ”.

Following the video of the president of the European Parliament David Sassoli.

They received her with a bouquet of flowers outside the hotel: Rondine’s students came to receive her, as if anticipating the relay race that will take place today on the hill of La Paz. The relay between Liliana Segre, the “girl” who survived Auschwitz and since then the historical memory of the concentration camps, and who is destined to take the baton. “Thank you,” he whispered with a tired but happy smile. And then he went up to his room to rest.

And from there, from the heart of the Continentale, today the Setteponti will rise until it reaches Rondine. Who knows if crossing the blue cars that at the same time from Rome will overthrow the great politicians of the country in the Arno. A town abandoned many years ago, the last was the shepherd to resign himself to following his people. And over time it has become the emblematic place not so much for peace as for coexistence between enemies.

Students from countries in conflict. The last of whom were there, in Piazza Guido Monaco, behind that bouquet of flowers that I bring to those who have chosen them as heirs. A step in the presence of the most prestigious “notaries” in the country. Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte, for the second time in two years in Rondine. many of its ministers, from Luigi Di Maio to Luciana Lamorgese to Gaetano Manfredi to the owner of Education Lucia Azzolina, who would like all the Italian students stuck to follow the live broadcast of the event for an hour. A live broadcast that will come out on Rai 3, commented by Ferruccio De Bortoli.

And together also in streaming. “There will be millions of students who will follow us,” says Franco Vaccari, president of the Citadel for once. He had imagined this event in the stadium but with the regret of not being able to do it in Rondine: and in Rondine he returns, even through the back door of the Covid. Turn on all the lights for a day on that creature built in the early years with the labor camps of many high school students and then went up to the UN.

And to the Quirinal, from where today will come Mattarella’s gift and greeting to Liliana Segre. Instead, there will be the second and third positions of the state, the president of the Senate Casellati and the president of the Fico Chamber. In a parterre also crowded with ambassadors and also varied on a religious level. In the front row the president of the CEI Gualtiero Bassetti, a friend of Liliana and a friend of Rondine.

Then the leaders of the great religious families, the Jewish and Islamic communities. The guardian of La Verna, the general of Camaldoli. And even Bose Luciano Manicardi, prior of a community that is resisting the storm that has affected it in recent months, due to the dismissal of founder Enzo Bianchi. All in a large covered space, from which Liliana, today also a senator for life. will release his latest testimony.

Rewinding the thread of a story that starts from the escape to Switzerland, continues in the cell of San Vittore by the hand of the father, ends in the train of death and in the months of the concentration camp. “Rondine is the future I would like to live”: in a few words she embodies the meaning of a choice, natural for her, for the almost dizzying citadel. And that starts from here: more structures, more schools, more students in the world and in 4th grade.

An hour-long speech, preceded and followed by institutional greetings. But that hour, in the usual style, will be one to continue with bated breath, dragged beyond one’s will to the heart of the greatest plague of the 20th century. And on Rondine Arezzo will converge, with the mayor, with Bishop Fontana, with the parliamentarians and the regional councilors.

Authorities like the others willing to recognize someone even greater than them. The one with the disarmed memory. That of an “old woman” capable of looking horror in the face

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