Memory makes you free. Since 2012, the Italian Jewish Center Pitigliani in Rome has been filled with families on the occasion of the Day of Remembrance, January 27, the international anniversary to commemorate the victims of the Holocaust. On that day in 1945 the troops of the Red Army liberated the Auschwitz concentration camp and since 2005, when the United Nations General Assembly established the anniversary, witnesses to the extermination remember. And the world listens. But when there will be no more direct spectators of the Shoah, and that day is not very far away, what will we do?
Pitigliani answers this question: sharing memory. Grandparents open the suitcases in which they have incardinated their worst nightmare for grandchildren and great-grandchildren by handing them worn postcards, old letters and faded documents, all illustrated by vivid memory. In the war period – explains Anna Foa historical consultant of the Jewish Center – in Italy between concentration or work camps and places of confinement or forced residence, there were over a thousand prison structures for Jews. At Pitigliani, surviving elders tell their lives to future generations because personal stories are universal and every human madness is always about to return.
The “Family Memories” project has reached its eleventh edition and this year, the second remotely due to the pandemic, sixteen young readers, grandchildren and great-grandchildren of witnesses to the Shoah, retrace the history of foreign Jews in Italy by reading the legacies of great-grandparents and great-great-grandparents. The video is available to schools and the testimonies are collected and published in a volume.
The Jewish Center becomes a living room where the Shoah is told in an intimate way, where the listener becomes a witness and memory is not just a word. The elderly and the young, together, think, suffer or more simply ask themselves why. Melancholy prevails but it is the force with which the survivors bend the pain of memory. The “Family Memoirs” are impregnated with darkness, but also with light: the banal torturers, of course, but also those who promptly helped the Italian Jews persecuted by the Fascist regime. The many compatriots, seriously good people, who were named ‘Righteous among the Nations’ are also celebrated at the Pitigliani.
In Hebrew the word ‘history’ does not exist, the word ‘memory’ exists and history is only what we pass on. The good news is that there is still someone who reminds us of the torment of the Shoah, the bad is that we still need it