Liliana Segre is 92 years old. At 13, in December 1943, sought refuge in Switzerland with his father, to escape arrest as Jews. But they were rejected and ended up in San Vittore. Loaded on a convoy, from Platform 21 of Milan Central Station, they were taken to Auschwitz. The paternal grandparents were also interned in a camp. In 1945 Liliana returned. Sole survivor of the family. She graduated, married a lawyer, had three children. For 45 years she told nothing of what she had lived through. Then for 30 years he testified to this, speaking in front of ever-growing audiences of students.
Senator Liliana Segre
She was appointed in 2018 Senator for Life by the President of the Republic Sergio Mattarella. From 15 April 2021 he has chaired the Extraordinary commission for combating the phenomena of intolerance, racism, anti-Semitism and incitement to hatred and violence.
Senator Segre, what has transformed the silent pain, which you have carried with it for 45 years, into a public testimony given for over 30 years?
Now I am 92 years old, but for half of my life, it is not a little, it was impossible for my voice to come out. A hard thing to imagine today is that any nonsense ends up on Instagram. Year after year, it was not easy to ignore anything, whatever was mentioned in the many bourgeois occasions that I had the opportunity to participate in in Milan, the city where I have always lived. I heard incredible things and I kept quiet, because the pain was so enormous … it was the pain of a little girl, much loved, very happy, even spoiled, who lost everything to the crime of hate. I was silent, but the internship number I have shown all my life. I have never been ashamed of it as others who have canceled it. When my children, as a child, asked me what she was, I replied “I’ll tell you when you are older”. But I never did. To them in person, I never told them. However, unlike many who have kept silent and who, like Primo Levi, felt overwhelmed by the tragedy, we who felt quite saved – I am thinking of Nedo Fiano, Edith Bruck, Goti Bauer – we told our story .
What made it impossible at one point to be silent?
It was like vomit. If you wanted to give this interview a title you would have to call it “the vomit”. For years I was also happy, I was very much in love with my husband I had a … nice life, but inside me there was this thing, I saw the house, with the furniture, my bedroom, my dolls. And the grandparents, whom I had loved madly, and my dad, to know how they ended up… At a certain point, the very tight gag that prevented me from talking about all this melted. I got there through a very heavy depression that lasted years, which was not justified by my life at the time. I was an independent woman, I drove, and I found myself confined to bed, listening to my heartbeat, with constant panic attacks for my health. When I healed, with the drugs, when I got back to my place in the world, something clicked there. In the dark years I felt like a worm, I felt that I had not done my duty towards those I loved, towards the hundreds, thousands of people who had seen going towards tragedy. And so, with great effort I made this decision, first using the wrong way, proposing to some teacher “I would go to a class to talk, but if you are there, that if I feel like crying, if I can’t find the words, I help… ”I was very aware that I might not be able to carry on this testimony. Then, to my great surprise, since I had never had the opportunity to speak in public, I opened my mouth and this irrepressible vomit came out, a series of facts and words, which at a certain point I forced myself to stop, for myself and for who was listening to me. First I spoke in front of two classrooms, then at a school, then to a thousand people, then to an entire building of listeners. I went on with absolute tranquility for 30 years, even if having started this enterprise at a very mature age, there was always someone who reassured me … “look, there’s the Red Cross ambulance here, we also have the defibrillator “. When I turned 90, I had my last meeting (in Rondine Cittadella della pace, in 2020).
The decision to speak made her enter another dimension …
I am the first to be amazed at everything that has happened to me over the years. I still have millions of curiosities and I’m sorry to be so old now that I have all these ease of movement, of meeting … I have a thousand opportunities, they gave me 500-600 honorary citizenships, six or seven important degrees, to me who interrupted you study after high school because I got married. Then I became a senator for life, arriving very worried in the Senate, (but during the session, you can get up to go to the bathroom, I was wondering …). I entered a completely different life from what mine had been, in which now even cats recognize me …
When did you realize that your testimony had a particular impact on who was there to hear it?
There hasn’t been a single episode, there have been tons of them. While I was inside the Teatro della Scala talking, or inside the Pala Dozza in Bologna and in all the larger places, there was such attention to what I said that after my meeting of an hour and a half or two, the teachers asked me: “Madam, but how is it possible? After 35 minutes the boys are no longer listening to us and here for the whole time no one has moved … ” I have continued for 30 years, I have done my duty, what seemed right to me: without hurting anyone and never, ever talking about hatred and revenge, precisely because I tried them on myself. And so mine has always been a completely different message.
Liliana Segre, grandmother of all
Has this repeated so often, to ever wider audiences, changed your story?
One can reach one hundred years, but life as a child, especially if one has been loved, cannot be forgotten. That child that is in each of us remains until the last day and that pain that that child has suffered never changes. I had a beloved husband for 60 years, two sons as well as a daughter, all now very mature. I have three male grandchildren whom I love, who I follow, who are the future and my best qualification is to be a grandmother, in spite of those who wanted me to die, GRANDMA! But the man of my life, the male figure of reference for me, is my dad whom I had for only 13 years. I am still that little girl who was sent away from the public school in via Ruffini in Milan, because she was Jewish. A little girl who has become invisible and who has been invisible then again, again, and again and who she never forgets. Even if, after, life gave me a lot of things.
It is his presence as a witness that strikes those who listen to him. Who or what can replace it?
I would like to tell you that surely there will be a passing of the baton, but I believe that when we are all really dead except for a few teachers who have fallen in love with the subject, a line of the Holocaust will remain in the history books. As is the case with the extermination of the Armenians. In 2015 it was 100 years since the forced march of the Armenians towards death, celebrations and conferences could have been held. Anything. And there has never been an anti-Armenianism as there is an anti-Semitism, the questioning that the camps were aimed at extermination, that the prisoners died gassed and then burned in the ovens. It’s nicer not to believe it. It is so much more beautiful that it will be so. After all, indifference reigned supreme then and reigns now, in the face of evil for the daze that causes the chronicle of crimes told to extenuation; for the cracked earth, for the snowless mountains, the dry lakes and rivers, of which so much is talked about without, it seems to me, doing anything.
However, he wanted Chiara Ferragni with him, at the Memorial of the Shoah, at Binario 21 in Milan.
I took her to the Memorial and I must say that despite her amazing success, with 27 million followers! on the two occasions I met her both at my home and then at Platform 21, she was humble. Humble. One that has 27 million followers, that’s no small feat. She was very attentive to hear that she knew little about this thing, she was extraordinary and she was interested in everything I said. The meeting was very positive, from grandmother to granddaughter. Then, what will come of it I don’t know. You know, I have 41 feet. I am rather anchored to the ground. I don’t fly fancy.
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