• Shoah, Mattarella: "The deportation from the Ghetto is an incurable wound"
  • Shoah, Mattarella: memory is an antidote against the ghosts of the past

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24 January 2019 "We Italians, who have lived the indelible shame of fascist racial laws and the consequent persecution of Jews, have a moral duty. Towards history and towards all humanity. The duty to remember, first of all". The President of the Republic Sergio Mattarella said it, celebrating the Day of Remembrance at the Quirinale, which "is not only an anniversary, in which one meditates on one of the greatest tragedies in history, but is an invitation, constant and compelling, to the commitment and vigilance. "

Deadly virus ready to wake up
The Shoah, extermination in concentration camps, Auschwitz represent "an unspeakable horror". Auschwitz is "a dramatically real event" which "remains a symbol of absolute evil". That evil that "hides hidden, like a deadly virus in the slums of society, in the hidden folds of ideologies, in the blinding darkness of stereotypes and prudences". An evil "ready to wake up, to strike, to infect, to destroy as soon as the conditions return," says Mattarella.

Racism and anti-Semitism are on the rise
"Acts of anti-Semitism and racism, inspired by old doctrines and new and perverse ideologies, are increasing in Italy and in the world. It is true, it is minorities. But they are increasingly minorities in the open, who use modern cunning cunningly. means of communication, which poisonously creep into stadiums, schools, situations of unease, "said Mattarella.

"The re-presentation of symbols, languages, pseudo-cultural references, old and discredited false documents, based on ridiculous conspiracy theories, are all signs of a past that must not return in any form and require our firmest and most determined reaction" . It is the admonition that Sergio Mattarella came also in reference to recent episodes.

"Exasperated nationalism is an enemy of coexistence," said the president of the republic. "The Nazi persecutions - he recalled - were part of a project of society based on the predominance of so-called strong and pure peoples over weak peoples, on exasperated nationalism enemy of coexistence, on war as a source of regeneration and greatness, on imperialism fueled by delusion of omnipotence, on the submission of the individual to the state, on the denial of freedom of conscience, on the ferocious repression of all forms of dissent ".

The Constitution provides "the method of international cooperation for peaceful coexistence between peoples and states," said Mattarella.

The duty to remember
"The duty to remember, first of all, But above all to fight, without hesitation and without opportunism, every outbreak of hatred, anti-Semitism, racism, denial, wherever it lurks. And to refuse, as Senator Liliana Segre always warns , indifference: an evil among the worst ". It is the imperative that comes from Sergio Mattarella on the day when racial persecutions are remembered. Celebrating the day of remembrance at the Quirinale, the head of state said that "Auschwitz, the largest and most lethal of the extermination camps - with his cries, his blood, his acrid smoke, his tears and his despair, the brutality of the executioners - was often, and understandably, described as hell on earth. But it was, of this hell, only the last group, the most brutal and perverse ".

"A hellish system that has been able to destroy millions of innocent lives in the heart of European civilization, only because, alongside the nefarious pillar of hatred, that of indifference had grown", concluded the President of the Republic.