"How is this night different from the others?”: it is the first question recited by the youngest member of the family in the ritual dinner of the Jewish Easter, to commemorate the liberation of the Jews from Egypt. Yesterday, at the La Fenice Theater, this question closed the theatrical performance staged on the occasion of the Official Ceremony for the Memorial Day. Not by chance, since The Three Nights of '43: Three Voices – Giorgio Bassani, Florestano Vancini and Guido Fink- tells one of the most dramatic pages in our country's history. The night of November 15, 1943, in Ferrara. When fascist squads rounded up Jews and anti-fascists, eleven were immediately killed in the Estense Castle massacre. Many others were imprisoned and later deported and murdered in Auschwitz.
Author of the show and speaking voice, as well as flute of the Multiethnic Orchestra of Arezzo, Enrico Fink, Guido Fink's son. Between music and words, following the thread of Giorgio Bassani's story. One night in '43 and the film Florestano Vancini made of it in 1960, Enrico Fink reconstructed the fear of that night, the anxiety, and the silences that followed. Drawing on firsthand accounts, particularly that of Father Guido.
“The Holocaust has nothing to do with what is happening in Israel and Palestine”
Yesterday's ceremony was particularly moving. A leap back into that night. In the fear, terror, and pain of those years. It brought the past to life, but also spoke volumes about today. As if, in Enrico Fink's words, "It turns out that everything is still there”. And it was precisely an intervention between past and present that of the President of the Jewish Community of Venice, Dario Calimani"Holocaust Remembrance Day, established in 2000 to commemorate January 27, 1945, when the gates of Auschwitz were torn down, was meant to be an invitation to reflection. Instead, the words genocide and Holocaust are the most used and trivialized words today, with the risk of losing the sense not of six million deaths, but of six million lives erased".
"It is not enough to talk about and remember the Shoah, because nothing about the Shoah can be compensated for. And Terms like genocide cannot be manipulated by uprooting them from their historical contextThe Holocaust, which has now become a story to be manipulated and then exploited, has nothing to do with what is happening in Israel and Palestine. Today, however, reality presents us with a disturbing and distorted climate: Gaza is discussed without debate, Palestine only in one sense, even though Palestinian rights must be defended. The Jew is guilty only because he has ties to Israel. Since that October 7, 2023 - he concluded - anti-Semitic incidents have increased by 400 percent.”
"Shalom, friends: Venice is an open house, but immune to the culture of hate."
The Ceremony was opened by Superintendent of the Fenice Nicola Colabianchi who recalled how the Venetian Theatre has always been "A place of welcome and dialogue”. And how art and music are “Powerful tools against barbarism". The mayor of Venice, Luigi Brugnaro, opened and closed his greeting with the word Shalom, Peace: “Today the ghosts of the past - he said - They return updated and amplified by the internet. We cannot allow ambiguity about anti-Semitism. Venice is an open house, but immune to the culture of hate.".
(Featured photo credit: Venice City Council press office)
