Events

Question

Senator Segre, you were expelled at the age of eight from your school because of the Italian racial laws. “You were expelled from school because we are Jews,” your father explained to you. From that moment on, the situation worsened: initially you were moved to a private school and then—displaced to Brianza [north of Milan]—you were forced out of school. You were arrested in 1943 and the situation degenerated further: deportation; arrival at the Auschwitz concentration camp with your father on January 30, 1944; the immediate separation from him (he did not make it out alive, nor did other members of his family); and the beginning of the nightmare. What was that young teenager thinking, especially in the early days in the camp? And how did her awareness grow during her imprisonment? How could an adolescent process that unprecedented ugliness and violence? 

Answer

The camp is a place without color and without time. Some have spoken of “senselessness” or loss of meaning; I would add, “loss of the senses.” The enormity of the tragedy was evident from the very first moment: it was already part of the journey that took us from Track 21 of the Milan railway station directly to the end of History. The process of mourning is never-ending. I was an adolescent only on paper: in Auschwitz, one grew old in an instant. It began with the loss of identity, with the cancellation of one’s name. Everything else was pure barbarity. 

Q

Over the years, I have seen many of your interviews and public talks. One that was particularly touching and profound for me—and not only for me, of course—was your speech in January 2020 at the European Parliament (on the occasion of the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz and of the Remembrance Day ceremony). As a woman and as the mother of a teenager, I can’t forget these words of yours: “We were young, but we looked old. Without sex, without age, without breasts, without menstruation, without underpants. That’s how you take away a woman’s dignity. That’s how.” How complex and painful was it later, to reclaim your female dignity? 

A

I believe that the knot was loosened naturally, definitively, when I met my husband, Alfredo, on the seafront in Pesaro. It was love at first sight and it lasted a lifetime. Love wins!

Q

You once said that no one has ever really come out of Auschwitz— that it is not possible to leave it. The Nazis stamped the number 75190 on your arm, with the intention of erasing your name, the first element of your identity. But your name, Liliana, remained. That number remained too, though. What was the psychological process that made you declare that that number, imposed on you by the Nazis, should be written on your tombstone someday?

A

That’s a good question. The loss of identity is the most heartrending of woes. So I am leaving a little message to posterity, a sort of reverse “Memento mori.” I will die as I have lived, with history on my skin.

Q

You have said that the date of January 27 [marking the liberation of Auschwitz, in 1945, as Holocaust Remembrance Day] is used wrongly because, actually, the violence did not end suddenly on that day. On the contrary, as the Allied armies continued to advance, the Nazis devised death marches to move many of you (often on foot, in the snow and over long distances) before and after January 27. You were 14 years old when, in January 1945—along with thousands of other prisoners—you left Auschwitz after a year of living in the camp. Your march stretched on for months, into April 1945. What do you remember about this second phase? What experiences, feelings, and thoughts did you have during this long, terrible, and exhausting march from Poland to Germany?

A

I remember everything, perfectly. It is an indelible journey that I have recounted a thousand times: exhaustion, pain, loneliness, but above all hunger and cold, cold and hunger. And the presence—I would say the physical presence—of death. That’s it.

Q

You were 14 years old and you had already had the unimaginably horrible experience of a year in a concentration camp, followed by the long months of the death march. During the days of the Liberation, you tell of picking up a dried apricot thrown by the American soldiers and, as you ate it, tasting “the taste of freedom” after so long. What happened within you when you realized that the nightmare was ending? Above all, who had Liliana become by then?

A

The taste of freedom is an alienating feeling. Sudden. Invasive. The memory still makes me dizzy. I didn’t understand the scope of it; inside me, peace had not yet “broken out.” I was a skeleton of a 14-year-old girl, hairless and nameless, alone in the world. I didn’t know what my future would be, even the next day.

Q

After returning to normal life you did not speak—especially in public—of your tragic experience; not for about 45 years, until you finished the long and troubled processing of the trauma. At that point you began your exceptional work of educating young people with your testimony. And also, when you were appointed a Senator for life you began your political/legislative activity. In 2018 you introduced a bill for the establishment of a parliamentary commission to address and monitor the phenomena of intolerance, racism, antisemitism, and incitement to hatred and violence. In 2019, you co-wrote a bill to declare the former prison camp of Servigliano a national monument. How have you meshed these two missions and different responsibilities? What is the role of the schools, and what is the role of law, in the battle against racism and antisemitism? 

A

When I was appointed Senator for life by the President of the Republic, Sergio Mattarella, three years ago, I declared that I would be guided by the Constitution, from which all else flows. I carry in my heart its untouchable Article 3. . . which speaks of equality without any limits or boundaries. Reconciling the role of witness with the role of parliamentarian is a simple action, quite natural. What changes are the modalities. I would say that my new role reinforces the action. I often say (and I repeat myself here), that Memory serves to keep democracy healthy. Keeping it healthy can be done in a thousand ways. I have recently stopped doing public testimony, but I do not intend to disregard my institutional commitments.

Q

You often reiterate that the child Liliana, who experienced the ugliness and the horrors of Nazi-Fascism, gives you no peace. In an extremely intense phrase—which is poetic, despite its tragic nature—you say, “I am my own grandmother. I am the grandmother of that little girl.” Among the reasons that have prompted your educational work for so many years—and your political/legislative work now—is there also a fear that, one day, other children and teens might face the same atrocities experienced by little Liliana?

A

The answer is yes, but I prefer to use Primo Levi’s incomparable words: Reflect on this. . . it happened, so it could happen again.I would add, given the temporal distance: not necessarily in the same ways. The device of our era is the web, an immaterial infrastructure that has transformed all our behaviors. If social networks are the verbal firing range, one can and must become a digital sower of peace against all forms of hostility. The words of peace are compensation and denunciation of the limits of the web itself, because if there is any field in which wisdom and knowledge get lost, it’s the field of information. We must cultivate mildness, a virtue that unites us against all divisive passions.

Q

Sadly, we have witnessed, for some time now, what you call the legitimization of behaviors, terms, and attitudes of frank intolerance and racial hatred. It almost seems that now we can once again be openly and publicly racist and antisemitic, without any shame or, at least, scruples. Where have we failed—as citizens or, simply, as human beings—from the end of Nazism and Fascism up to today? What could have been done that hasn’t been done?

A

The Europe we inhabit, a continent burned by Nazi-Fascist savagery, was born from the smoke in the winds over Auschwitz. Simone Veil, the first woman president of the European Parliament, a survivor of the death camps, spoke of Europe as the greatest project of the (last) century. What remains of that project? Very little. The emperor has no clothes; the democratic antibodies are beginning to show their first wrinkles. Fascism never died, and the failure of the ruling classes is out there for all to see. The aggressiveness of this phenomenon is taking a bad turn—so much that I, personally, have resorted, in my new role as Senator, to an innovative tool: a parliamentary committee on the phenomena of intolerance, racism, antisemitism, and incitement to hatred and violence, which could get going in a few weeks from now. The specter of hate speech from old Europe spans the planet, creating new digital monsters. Harnessing this phenomenon is the civil duty of all democratic countries.

Q

Do you have a particular message for the American youth of today?

A

Your distinguished university, Columbia, organized a symposium back in April 1995 to celebrate the liberation of Europe. On that occasion Umberto Eco presented a paper entitled “Eternal Fascism,” published later in “The New York Review of Books,” which I would suggest your students go back to read.* I guarantee the relevance of these words, which I endorse here and now. It is war, always, because Fascism can still return, in the most innocent guise. The assault on Capitol Hill is nothing but a dress rehearsal. Reflect.

(Talks marked with an * appear in the Academy's 2016 book, Present and Future Memory: Holocaust Studies at the Italian Academy, 2008–2016)

2008 Law and Science in the Service of Racism: the “Leggi Razziali”
Speakers:
Ruth Ben-Ghiat
New York University
The Italian Racial Laws: Pretexts, Subtexts, Aftermaths
Lidia Santarelli
New York University
The Righteous Enemy?
Fascist Italy and the Jews in Axis-Occupied Europe
Alexander Stille
Columbia University
The Holocaust and the Case of Italy

2009 Antisemitism at Home and Abroad
Speakers:
Ira Katznelson
Ruggles Professor of Political Science and History, Columbia University
The Liberal Alternative: Jews in the United States during the Decades of Italian Fascism *
Claudio Lomnitz [originally scheduled]
Director, Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity; Professor, Anthropology Department, Columbia University
Dreyfus in Latin America: Anti-Semitism and the Ideology of the Mexican Revolution

2010 Rome’s Jewish Ghetto 
Speakers:
Kenneth Stow
Professor of Jewish History Emeritus, University of Haifa
“Doing as the Romans Do” . . . But Also Staying Jewish.
The Challenge of Life in the Roman Ghetto, 1555–1870 *
Irina Oryshkevich
Society of Fellows, Columbia University
Accommodating the Jews in the “New Jerusalem” *

2011 “Racially Inferior”: Roma, Sinti, and Other Holocaust Victims 
Speakers:
Krista Hegburg
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies
“Unknown Holocaust”: Roma and Sinti in Hitler’s Europe
Robert Kushen
Executive Director, European Roma Rights Centre
Roma in Today’s Europe: Contemporary Patterns of Prejudice and Discrimination *

2012 “Unnatural Indecency”: Sexuality and Homosexuality during Nazism and Fascism 
Speakers:
Ted Phillips
Director, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
Nazi Persecution of Homosexuals 1933–1945 *
Elizabeth Leake
Department of Italian, Columbia University
Fascism and Sexuality in Italian Literature and Film

2013 “The Unfit”: Disability under Nazism and Fascism 
Speakers:
Patricia Heberer Rice
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
Giving a Face to Faceless Victims: Profiles of Disabled Victims of the Nazi “Euthanasia” Program *
Susan Bachrach 
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
Deadly Medicine: Creating the Master Race *
David Forgacs
New York University
Photographing Places of Social Exclusion

2014 Gender and Antisemitism: Women’s Rights Yesterday and Today
Speakers:
Victoria de Grazia
Columbia University
Fascist Men and Jewish Women
Yasmine Ergas
Columbia University
Women’s Rights and Women’s Freedoms: A View from the Present *
Elissa Bemporad
Queens College of the City University of New York
Female Voices of the Holocaust

2015 Music, Fascism, and the Holocaust 
Speakers:
Michael Beckerman
New York University
Moravia and the Wild Goose: Terezin, Summer 1944
Harvey Sachs
Curtis Institute of Music
Jewish and Anti-Fascist Musicians in Mussolini’s Italy *

2016 To Be a Child during the Holocaust
Speakers:
Patricia Heberer Rice
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
In Their Own Words: The World of the Child during the Holocaust *
Emily Langer
The Washington Post
“We Are Very Lucky”: Two Young Italian Sisters Who Survived Auschwitz

2017 Looted Art, Nazism, and Fascism
Speakers:
Monica Dugot
Senior Vice President/International Director of Restitution, Christie's;
formerly Deputy Director, Holocaust Claims Processing Office, NY State Banking Department
Jasmin Hartmann
Department for Provenance Research, City of Düsseldorf
"Non signalés par les Anglais." Provenance research on French drawings acquired in France in 1944
Ilaria Pavan
Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa; Italian Academy Fellow 2017
Jewish persecution and looted art in Italy: evidence and denial, 1938–2015
Moderator:
Lynn Rother
Senior Provenance Specialist, The Museum of Modern Art

2018 Spaces and Geographies of Concentration Camps: How to Preserve the Memory of Discrimination
Speakers:
Lisa Ackerman
Executive Vice President, World Monuments Fund
Remembering a Difficult Past
Alberto Giordano
Chair, Geography Dept., Texas State University
From the National to the Individual: Narratives of the Holocaust in Italy

2019 Antisemitism, Hate Speech, and Social Media 
Speakers:
Susan McGregor
Assistant Director of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism; Assistant Professor, Columbia Journalism School
Memes, Misinformation, and Antisemitism: Coded Communications on Social Media
Michel Rosenfeld
University Professor of Law and Comparative Democracy & Justice; Sydney L. Robins Professor of Human Rights, Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, Yeshiva University
Reassessing Antisemitism in an Age of Online Hate

2020 Misinformation, Media Manipulation, and Antisemitism                                                   
Speakers: 
Ioana Literat
Assistant Professor of Communication, Media and Learning Technologies Design, Teachers College, Columbia University
“Youth political expression in online spaces” 
Rachel Deblinger (via Skype)
Director of the Modern Endangered Archives Program at the UCLA Library;
Co-Director of the Digital Jewish Studies Initiative at UC Santa Cruz
“Remix, remember, retweet: meditations on Holocaust memory, social media, and antisemitism online”   
Irene V. Pasquetto
Chief Editor, “HKS Misinformation Review,” Harvard Kennedy School
Costanza Sciubba Caniglia
Managing Editor, “HKS Misinformation Review,” Harvard Kennedy School
“De-platforming Neo-Nazis in Italy: impacts and unexpected consequences”   
Alex Abdo
Litigation Director, Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University
“Free speech in black boxes”   

2022 Emanuele Fiano on Activism against Oblivion
Interview with Barbara Faedda