Italian Holocaust survivor wonders if she ‘lived in vain’

MILAN – For decades, Liliana Segre has visited Italian classrooms to talk about her expulsion from school under Italy’s anti-Semitic racial laws. Benito Mussolini, his failed attempt to escape Nazi-controlled Italy, his deportation from the Milan train station to the extermination camps of Auschwitz.

Her naked testimony about the gas chambers, the tattooed arms, the random atrocities and the murders of her father, grandparents and thousands of other Italian Jews has made her the conscience and living memory of a country that often prefers do not remember. .

Now you wonder if everything was in vain.

“Why have I suffered for 30 years to share intimate things about my family, my pain, my desperation?

From who?

Why?”

Segre, 93 years old, hair as white as cotton, a steel cage memory and an official status of Senator for lifehe said last week in his beautiful Milan apartment, where he sat next to a police escort.

He wondered, not for the first time in recent days, if “I have lived in vain.”

Although Segre accepted another honorary degree on Saturday to commemorate the Holocaust Remembrance Daythe rise of anti-Semitism and what she sees as a general climate of hatred have put her in a pessimistic mood.

The Hamas-led massacre of Jews in Israel on October 7 disgusted her, she said, and Israel’s reaction in Gaza Strip It left her “desperate,” as did what she saw as the exploitation of the conflict to spread anti-Semitism in the guise of a pro-Palestinian cause.

In Europe, Moscow’s aggression against Ukraine has led it to question the Russian president Vladimir Putin:

“What is this, another Hitler?”, while the rise of the far right in France and Germany makes him nauseous.

In Italy, Segre is dismayed by the recent mass gathering of far-right extremists giving the fascist salute, by unpleasant language against immigrants whose plight reminds her of her own, and by a right-wing government led by Giorgia Meloniwho condemned the Italian racial laws and the horrors of the Shoah, but she herself grew up in parties born from the ashes of fascism.

Reflecting on a cyclical view of history, Segre wondered if he had lived long enough to see history repeat itself.

“This is nothing new,” he said, making a circle with his hands.

Experiences

And so, Segre abandoned the comfort of his living room – with the “Reserved for grandmother” cushion on the sofa, family photographs (“it’s me and my father”), paintings, books and stacks of opera CDs that he adores – to remember again.

On television shows, at universities where he receives honorary degrees and at the Holocaust Memorial in Milan, he tells a story he hoped he would never have to tell again.

Born in 1930 to a secular Milanese Jewish family, she lost her mother at an early age due to cancer. Her father Alberto di lei, who worked in the family textile company, raised her with the help of her parents. He was so cute, she says, that she stopped driving after accidentally hitting a beautiful bird on a mountain road.

An only child, she greatly appreciated her classmates, where she excelled at reading but hated arithmetic.

At night he fell asleep listening to his father, still at home, in the next room, leafing through the pages of his stamp collection.

When she was 8 years old, Italian racial laws came into force and she was expelled from public school.

All but three of her classmates ignored her on the street, listening to their mothers tell them so “it was useless” say hello to her

His uncle, a convinced fascist, became an enemy of his homeland.

His father’s faith that Italy would protect the family was exhausted.

In 1943 he packed a wallet of valuable stamps and slipped some diamonds into his belt to pay for a new life in Switzerland.

They crossed the mountains, but that December a Swiss border guard turned them back.

Alberto Segre threw his stamps and diamonds into the mud to avoid handing them over to his kidnappers.

The Italians arrested them in Varese, not far from the border, and handed them over to the Nazis.

He realized all was lost when they handcuffed him.

“My father had beautiful hands,” she says.

On January 30, 1944, after weeks spent in the San Vittore prison in Milan, Liliana Segre, her father and more than 600 Jews were transferred, under cover of darkness, to track 21 of the subway, intended for goods, at the Central Station of Milan .

Loaded among barking dogs onto hay-covered freight trains, equipped with only one bucket, they headed out of the city.

They arrived at Auschwitzin Poland, at the beginning of February.

Most of the Jews were sent to gas chambers and burned in ovens.

They put Liliana Segre’s father in one row, her in another.

He never saw him again.

The Nazis tattooed the number 75190 on him.

During the day she worked as a slave in a munitions factory.

At night he fought for the covers.

As the Soviets closed in January 1945, the Nazis forced her, along with tens of thousands of prisoners, to march into Germany along a road paved with the dead.

As the Germans took off their military uniforms and tried to flee, he saw a gun on the ground.

Her decision not to kill a guard, she said, was her birth as a “free woman” who was better than her captors.

“I was strong in my absolute weakness,” he said.

Although, he chuckled, “maybe I could have shot him in the foot.”

Freedom

After his liberation and return to Italy, he desperately searched for news of his father.

An uncle who converted to Catholicism arranged a private audience with Pope Pius XII, where he asked for help in finding his father.

“My presence made him very uncomfortable,” she said, recalling that when she started to kneel, he stopped her and said:

“I’m the one who has to kneel before you.”

Investigations into her father were unsuccessful and only years later, when she searched the Jewish documentation center in Milan, did she discover that he had died two months after arriving in Auschwitz.

His life continued.

He re-enrolled in school, feeling uncomfortable around his now younger classmates, and went on holiday with his maternal grandparents, who spent the end of the war in hiding.

In the summer of 1948, in Pesaro, on the east coast of Italy, he met Alfredo Belli Paci.

He noticed the tattoo on her arm and told her that he had spent years in a German prison camp for refusing to fight for Mussolini and his new Nazi-allied state after Italy switched sides in 1943.

He was ten years older than him, he was Catholic and was a lawyer.

Her grandparents disapproved, but she saw it behind their backs.

The couple married in 1951 and settled in Milan, where they had a good time:

he with his studio and she with the family textile company.

They had three children, but she rarely spoke about her past.

Her husband told her They won’t ask.

But in the late seventies her husband began to serve in the Italian Social Movement, the party of extreme right created by former fascists who sided with the Nazis. She hoped it was a passing flirtation, but when he ran for office, They argued bitterly.

“I fell into depression,” he says, and days passed without him being able to get out of bed.

Finally he gave him an ultimatum and one minute to decide:

“Me or this.”

He chose her, and over the next decade, she felt a sense building within her that she had an important story to tell.

When her first grandchild was born, she said, she felt like she had finally emerged from a long fog.

“It was different,” he says.

“I was 60 years old, on the threshold of old age, and I felt it I could not wait”.

He began telling his story in schools and continued to do so for 30 years.

In January 2018, on the occasion of the 80th anniversary of the entry into force of Mussolini’s racial laws, Segre was purchasing a battery for his Swatch watch when he received a phone call from the office of the President of the Republic.

Segre had been nominated Senator for lifethe country’s highest honor.

Segre used his platform.

In 2018, when the leader of the far-right Liga party, Matteo Salvini, brandished rosaries at political rallies, said in Parliament that campaigning with Catholic icons seemed like a “Dangerous awakening” of “God is with us” slogans on Nazi uniforms. And in 2019, the year Italian authorities decided that online threats against her justified a full-time police escort, she proposed a Senate commission against the incitement to hatred.

Trial

After Meloni’s victory in the 2022 general elections, Segre presided over the inaugural legislative session that would elect Ignazio La Russa – who had long had a bust of Mussolini in his home – president of the Senate. Segre said his office made him rehearse his speech “because they didn’t know how I would perform.”

In his speech he recalled that 100 years had passed since the fascists marched on Rome.

“It is impossible for me not to feel a kind of vertigo,” she said, “when I remember that same girl, who on this day in 1938, heartbroken and lost, was forced by racist laws to leave her elementary school desk empty . . .

And that, by a strange fate, that same girl is today in the most prestigious bank, in the Senate.”

Last week, he accompanied La Russa, who has condemned the Holocaust as evil and is a supporter of Israel, officials and members of his commission to the Runway 21 Holocaust memorial, usually filled with schoolchildren learning about the Holocaust . many others were deported and from these few returned.

“Whether it will help or not, I don’t know,” she said in her living room, in front of a stamp painting that her father commissioned and that her family discovered and was forced to buy back years later. war. “But she helped me because I felt I needed to.”

“But it helped me because I felt the need to do it.”

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