Home » Shoah, honor from Germany to Liliana Segre: “For me a long and painful path of reconciliation”

Shoah, honor from Germany to Liliana Segre: “For me a long and painful path of reconciliation”

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“I feel all the weight of the years today, I have millions of questions that I haven’t really found an answer to and this is perhaps the greatest torment of my life”. Liliana Segre he speaks softly, scans the words one by one, behind the lectern in the Sala Zuccari of Palazzo Giustiniani, in the Senate. “Today” is the day when the senator for life, Holocaust survivor and witness, recently turned 91, received from the ambassador Viktor Elbing the honor of the Order of Merit of the German Republic “for the extraordinary commitment to remember the Shoah and the tireless fight against hatred and intolerance”. A touching and intense ceremony, kept confidential until the end and held behind closed doors, because it was particularly painful for Segre. “One of those moments – he says Elisabetta Casellati, president of the Senate, opening the event – which give us a sense of history as a guarantor of truth and justice “.

It is she who retraces the life stages of the senator, arrested because she was Jewish in ’43, then imprisoned, deported, interned, forced to forced labor, led to the “death march towards Germany”. That Germany where, after sixteen and a half months of hell up to the Liberation, Segre never returned. Today, eighty years later, “that little girl, then thirteen, now ninety-one, considered dangerous and potentially harmful to the Reich is decorated for her commitment as a Holocaust survivor and active witness. From outcast to worthy. From prisoner to honored. A long march through life to transform horror and oppression into memory and sharing “explains Casellati, forced to stop, visibly moved, because that of Segre” is an incredible story, if it had not been handed down to us we would never have thought of witness so much atrocity “.

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A story within history, “a long and painful path of reconciliation with Germany” private and personal for Segre. But “also the path of two countries and an entire continent” Casellati recalls.

“I am very honored but also deeply impressed” says Segre, before a long hug with the President of the Senate and the president of the Union of Italian Jewish Communities, Noemi Di Segni. “It’s like when in the cinema you see a crazy roundup of bison running around in the countryside and you don’t know where they are going. In the end, you don’t know if they went to the slaughterhouse or not. I have millions of questions that I haven’t really found an answer to. . And this lack of answers is perhaps the greatest torment of my life – confesses the senator for life – I have great difficulty crying while a beautiful liberating cry would be very good for me. head”.

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