A Memorial not to be repeated

Published: 2008 - December/2009 - January, Current Affairs

A gate, a sign: “Arbeit macht frei”, work makes you free. 27th January 1945, there are 7 thousand survivors of Auschwitz. Now the 27th January is the Holocaust Remembrance day, when the menorah is blown out, eyes lowered in a darkness that seems to shout, the mind lost in memories of death.
“It’s not about a Jewish moment – says Elias Ricchetti, Rabbi for the Jewish community in Venice – but a day founded to remember the insanity of Nazi fascism, to not commit the same horrors”. You open a drawer of nightmares; voices, screams, those who were deprived of the goodness of life. “A message to our conscience – says Riccardo Calimani, Jewish historian – in a dedicated and delicate moment. All told but not all heard; the moment in which every man listens to himself”. Moni Ovadia, actor and musician, underlines: “It’s the occasion for more detailed reflections on an event. Not a celebration, but a reflection, so as not to reduce the Shoah, meant in the more general term and not just referring to the Jewish people, an empty shell”. There is no vendetta, only memories; of voices, hands, smoke. Man’s judgment has already been expressed. Nuremberg was the stage for the trial of the winners against the vanquished. After a task. Grave, difficult; remembering all that had happened so that the madness would not be repeated. “He who has no memory of the past, does not have a future”, quotes the Talmud. “Memory – affirms Ricchetti – is not valued. It is the work of parents and society to reverse the tendency”. “It’s the day – remembers Calimani – for all those who died for a non existent idea: race”. Years of orders in German, shouts, whippings and the fear of seeing gas and not water coming out of the showers. An electrified fence, the quick escape from suffering; but in the hearts energy, a strength that doesn’t feel beatings, humiliations or hunger. The desire to be witness, remember, not allow anyone to crush a will stronger than life. The dawn of 1945 lit up cathedrals of death where human beings walked around like skeletons. Novelli “Lazzaro” came back to life regaining conscience and looking for dignity. The world had discovered a black story, of lies, denials; the beginning of a hidden nightmare that became reality. In 2009 World Holocaust Remembrance Day will be celebrated in New York and will be attended by the Italian state institutions.
In the rooms of the Italian Academy at Columbia University the dead without graves will be remembered with the voices of the living. “Venice and New York – underlines the Rabbi – are opposite and congruent Jewish realities. Venice lives her history, symbolic in it’s isolation but glorious for the consequences in the cultural field. In New York 99% of the synagogues don’t survive twenty years. Jewish life jumps about, from the shops to the banks. There is nothing Jewish that can’t be found in New York the two cities have one aspect in common that represents the Jewish vitality: the continuous search for stimuli and services at a cult level and a cultural level”. Calimani affirms: New York and Venice are twinned in this memory; for the first time unite two cities, non typical in there own countries but at the same time, exactly for this reason, the most cosmopolitan”. “The USA always surprises – echoes Ovadia – even on Remembrance Day. They have recently reawakened their sensibilities, and to do so they used a communication system for which they are masters. It just needed a television series, Holocaust, to relive the tragedy of the Nazi fascist exterminations. But on the other hand American culture owes a lot to the Jewish culture, from Gershwin to Spielberg”. Italy saw the Holocaust pass through Trieste, Rome, and Venice. World capitals of culture and art, theaters of purges during Nazi fascism.
The Jewish people have left the world a lesson, finding the strength to carry with them an inauspicious memory. The vocation to remember: this is what needs to be learned.