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July 18, 2020 President of the Republic Sergio Mattarella has appointed Sami Modiano, direct witness of the horrors of Auschwitz, Knight of the Grand Cross of the Order of Merit of the Republic. On the occasion of his 90th birthday, which falls today, President Mattarella sent Sami Modiano his best wishes. The Quirinale has made it known.

"When they ask me, are you a survivor? I answer yes, but in reality I am still there in Auschwitz-Birkenau, I never got out of there. I was a boy, how can I forget what I saw?". Samuel Modiano, known as Sami, was born in Rhodes on July 18 1930, when the island was an Italian colony. He is an Italian Jewish deportee, a Holocaust survivor who survived the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp. After the armistice, the Germans invaded Rhodes and on 23 July 1944 they took all the Jews present on the island, without anyone being able to escape, loading them into the hold of an old merchant ship in inhuman conditions. The journey lasted from Rhodes to Piraeus: there they were loaded onto the trains, on August 3, 1944, crammed in the suffocating darkness of the sealed carriages, bound for the Nazi camp of Birkenau.

Sami Modiano survived and struggled to regain his life. Since then, in the winter in Italy, Modiano has dedicated himself to making his experience known to children in middle and high schools. Summer, on the other hand, is always spent in Rhodes where it deals with the ancient synagogue and the small Jewish community on the island. Its story reaches the general public on the occasion of the Memorial Day of 2018, when the documentary film "Everything in front of these eyes" by Walter Veltroni which tells the story of Modiano is broadcast on all Italian broadcasters and main broadcasters.