Aldo Cazzullo (photo by Carlo Furgeri Gilbert).
Liliana Segre is a tough woman. She has nothing condescending. To survive Auschwitz, and to tell what you have suffered, you have to be very strong, and sometimes tough.
This does not mean not knowing love. On the contrary, it is love that saved Liliana Segre.
A love contained in two handshakes. The farewell to his father, who was among the drowned in Auschwitz, not among the saved. And the welcome of the man of her life, her husband.
It is a beautiful work, the podcast that Myrta Merlino dedicated to Liliana Segremade by Chora Media with the Corriere della Sera.
You can hear it on all free podcast platforms, as well as on the corriere.it
I know Myrta well. She is a woman who knows how to listen and understand other women. She has been friends with Liliana Segre for years. For her life-long senator’s 92nd birthday, she picked up the story.
In the first episode Liliana is a little girl, surrounded by the affection of her father and grandparents, when due to racial laws she is forbidden to go to school. In third episodeLiliana goes back to school as an adultafter the terrible experience of deportation and the long decades of silence, to convey to the children the sense of the supreme injustice suffered and the supreme courage with which he was able to react.
But the heart of the podcast is the second episode. Here we understand better the overall title, “Hold my hand”. It is the story of how Liliana, after having to let go of her father’s hand, finds Alfredo’s, her man in her life. She is eighteen and has already seen the worst a person can see.
He meets her, recognizes her, finds the number tattooed on her skin, comforts her, makes her feel like a human being again, a woman. He saves her in all the ways in which he can be saved. And she becomes her husband, the father of her children.
Surviving the concentration camp leaves indelible wounds. Liliana Segre talked about it with the most famous witness, Primo Levi. For Levi, it was not possible to really get out of Auschwitz safely; in fact he chose death. Liliana instead chose life thanks to love.
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