When it comes to Holocaust Remembrance Day, something fundamental must be remembered. It concerns the Jewish people, because there have been no similar cases in history of a conscious methodical will to annihilate a people in compliance with the law. Many genocides have occurred in human history and all of them must be remembered. No one had the "rational" and premeditated purpose of totally and globally eradicating a people from human genes, from the history of the world, by law. If we think of the genocide of the American indigenous peoples, the colonial massacres, the Belgian occupation of the Congo, the Soviet gulags, Cambodia, the Armenians or the Balkan and Italian populations of Istria and Dalmatia, Rwanda and many other cases, we can find brutality similar, massacres massive in proportions, unspeakable violence, gruesome results.
The final solution
However, Himmler, Eichmann and the other architects of the "final solution" were not murderers. They were men of law and culture, without psychic disturbances, nor excessive in their fanaticism. At the table they began to study coldly means, tools and techniques to eliminate millions of people in the fastest and most efficient way, in 1942. They were in a beautiful country villa, outside Berlin. Taken as a whole, the ancient European anti-Semitic phenomenon was a "plus" compared to Himmler's technical-scientific plans. Himmler and Eichmann were intimately convinced that they were "helping evolution". Himmler "complained" of the need for his job, in his letters to the family. Eichmann, when arrested in Argentina, said he had only one regret, that he could not do better in his calculations. As if he were talking about a "math test" gone wrong.
The Banality of Evil
Hannah Arendt, a German Jewish philosopher, wrote in "Banality of Evil" that Eichmann was nothing more than a "diligent accountant". Imre Kertesz, another Holocaust survivor, Nobel Laureate in Literature, always defiantly said his question was "why not before?" Indeed, in his reading of the Holocaust Auschwitz was a declaration of the whole of humanity. It was not a moment in history, which began and ended there with Hitler and Nazism. It was something that has always been lurking and always can come back. There is nothing more dangerous than ungoverned technological progress, alongside an impoverishment of human and social relations, of interior dialogue and self-awareness. For this reason, a lowering of the threshold of the utterable on these issues can never be tolerated in public discourse. One cannot accept to undergo information without knowingly documenting oneself.
"Meditate that this was"
Dice Primo Levi in the poem that opens "If this is a man": "meditate that this was", do not forget it and repeat it to yourself! It happened not for a moment of bloody madness or barbarism, but with the distorted use of technology: gas chambers, modern ovens, medical experiments, punch cards that allowed the storage of millions of data on the numbered slaves of the concentrationary universe. This should make us stop for a moment, in an era in which it can even be insinuated that Anne Frank's "Diary" is a fake, in which no one has so many media available to stir up these ideas, falsify and mystify history. The Day of Remembrance, established by the UN and ratified by the parliaments of the EU states, is January 27, the date of the liberation of the Auschwitz concentration camp in 1945 by the Russians. It is the date that since 2005 also reminds us of the enormous global responsibilities, not only in Germany. Responsibility also in the cover-up of crimes and criminals, concealment, justificationism, reductionism.
National responsibilities
It was many common informers and often the national police themselves who arrested and handed over the Jews, in various countries. It was the Italian militiamen who liquidated the ghettos in Italian cities, starting with that of Rome, on October 16, 1943. It was King Vittorio Emanuele III who signed the racial laws, in 1938. It was Gaetano Azzariti (later judge of our Constitutional Court ), Minister of Justice of the Badoglio government, former judge of the Tribunal of the Race, not to order the destruction of the lists of Jews in the prefectures, in the two months that passed from the arrest of Mussolini to the flight of the king to Brindisi. 7.500 were the exterminated Italian Jews. Most of the death camps were located between Poland, Belarus and Ukraine. The most infamous do not even exist anymore, razed to the ground in the flight. But Fossoli , Risiera di San Sabba, were Italian camps.
The rare international solidarity
Therefore, not only Germans and not only Hungarians, Croats, Romanians, Poles, Ukrainians, Bosnians, Czechoslovakians and Latvians and Lithuanians had responsibility for the extermination of European Jews. Diligent executioners and informers have been to Holland, France, Austria, Belgium, Italy, Greece. Only the Danes they are innocent in Europe, having been the only country, despite being small and busy, to organize a mass flight of its small Jewish population to Sweden overnight. Every Dane with a boat, large or small, took up this spontaneous and popular operation. Worldwide, since 1938, the Dominican Republic alone declared its willingness to accept 100.000 Jewish refugees free of charge, but it was far away. No other country, from Great Britain, to the United States, to Switzerland, to Australia, to the Soviet Union, offered asylum and refuge to Jews, unless they were willing to pay a lot of money or were renowned and titled men of science.
As it happens, most Jews belonged to the middle and lower-middle class, despite the stereotypes still widespread today. Almost all the Ukrainian and Belarusian Jews, the most numerous and which could be more than the known 6 million, lived in populous remote and very poor marginalized villages (called shtetl). Disappeared in Majdanek, Sobibor, Treblinka or in their villages transformed into mass graves for men and women of all ages and children. Besides "Everything is illuminated", another movie "Train de vie" remembers them, a vaguely surreal film like “Life is beautiful”, which without believing it can reproduce hell, through comedy and the absurdity of a “lie”, suggests the abyss it hides.
Whoever saves one life saves the whole world
All therefore played their part in European and world anti-Semitism, either actively or in indifference, even after the Polish partisans in 1943 Karski and Pilecki they made known to the allied powers what was happening in the extermination camps. The Yad vashem, the Israeli museum of memory, reserves the special recognition of Righteous Among the Nations, to anyone in the world who has saved at least one Jew from extermination, because according to the Talmud, whoever saves one life saves the whole world. The recognized Righteous are almost 27 throughout the world and 694 are Italians. Some just Italians, like the merchant Giorgio Perlasca or the ice cream maker Francis Tirelli they operated outside national borders. Liliana Segre she is one of the last Italian survivors and since 2018 she has been a life senator in our Parliament.
