Memory, because the villas do not arise instead of horror

Reading serves to know, seeing serves to understand. This is the meaning of Journey of memory which will end today and which has seen engaged 142 students of the Roman high schools Organized by the Municipality of Rome, the Metropolitan City and the Shoah Museum Foundation of Rome. The last day started from Juden ramp Where millions of Jews were downloaded outside the Nazi fields, today a place that returns to memory for the obstinate will of the Jewish community and the funding of the French government of Chirac that financed its restoration.

A doublely monstrous place because today in front of those tracks, about 30 steps, there are villas with garden. As if to deny what it was. A normality in a place delivered to history as a place of death and suffering. Here’s what it means trivializing evil, incorporating it into normalcy It means not only to diminish it, but make it daily. Another lesson that starts from Poland, but as the mayor recalled must be remembered every time in our cities, in the stadiums, they appear Nazi symbols, anti -Semitic slogans, Because those things lead directly here, to this death machine, to the gas chambers, to the babies wrapped in a sheet and beaten against the wagons to kill them.

During the morning the mayor laid a crown on wagon parked on the Juden Ramp in BirkenauTo remember also “Jews of the Pope” who arrived here: among them the Bucci sisters e Venice Shlomo. The mayor Gualtieri present in the first part of the visit reiterated the profound meaning of this journey which is “touching with the hand and descending into the abyss of a world that will not only return with the commitment of each”.

Transforming the tales of the witnesses into vivas, the dates studied on school books, is listening to and try to collect the witness not only to preserve this story, but to recognize the worrying signals that surround us and have “a role as protagonists , taking on their responsibility so that it never happens again “, the boys urged the councilor for school, Claudia Pratelli. Also present are i Pronipotes of two deportees, Jacopo Tagliacozzo and Lyel Dabush, who are going through these places with an extra weight.

“Being here today is a victory. If he had not returned I would not be here to tell his story. The fact that I came here is the symbol that we have won against this thing,” says Lyel, 15 years old. His grandfather Lone sabatello He was among the deportees of the Porch of Ottavia that October 16, 1943, of his family he was the only one to save herself and precisely in these Auschwitz barracks, from where this girl speaks now, he remained 15 months that he described as “5 years” , days and hours that will never forget again.

“He no longer slept, at night he woke up with a start, shouting that the Germans arrived- Lyel says that this morning he received a message:” My mother wrote me a message telling me that they came here with a one way ticket and I am coming Here it is as if I brought them back to home. “Just this year that the trip took place without the precious presence of the survivors, the sense of these trips becomes more tangible: delivering the witness of the memory to the younger generations, transforming these guys in peace messengers, so that it is truly “never again”.