Holocaust Remembrance

Europe and the United Nations commemorate the victims of the Shoah each winter on the date of Auschwitz’s liberation in 1945: January 27. This is the occasion for the Italian Academy’s annual commemoration—a symposium in our theatre, or the publication of fresh materials—designed to share new knowledge about the systematic annihilation of millions of Jews.

The remembrance series has traced the pseudo-science behind Italy’s Racial Laws and looked at the experience of Jews in the U.S. during the Fascist era. It has brought the voices of concentration camp survivors and their closest family. It has addressed the fate of the Roman Ghetto and of detention sites in Italy. Over the years, the focus has broadened to also detail the persecution of the disabled, women, children, homosexuals, and the Roma and Sinti peoples, and to tell how art was looted and music was made under Mussolini and Hitler. The series has brought experts on past and current aggression, discrimination, disinformation, and hate speech, and (with optimism) on the efforts to foster Jewish life in Europe today.

The series was conceived by Barbara Faedda in 2008 and has been organized by her annually since then. Videos of many of the symposia can be found here below; talks from the early years of the series are gathered in the Academy’s 2016 book, Present and Future Memory: Holocaust Studies at the Italian Academy, 2008–2016.