Anzio, Edith Bruck refuses Peace Award. The mayor: "Very serious misunderstanding"

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02 November 2021 Writer Edith Bruck, winner of the Strega Giovani 2021 Award, refuses an honor from the city of Anzio, in controversy over the refusal of honorary citizenship to a survivor of concentration camps and the failure to revoke that of Benito Mussolini.

A refusal that led to discussions on social media and provoked the reaction of the mayor Candido De Angelis: "So it mortifies not me, but the whole city".

"Dear Mayor De Angelis - underlined Bruck in an open letter -, I would have gladly returned to your city for the Peace Prize if in the meantime I had not known that merit was denied to one of my co-religionists, Adele Di Consiglio. A woman alone, survived the Nazi-Fascist barbarism that annihilated her family like mine. Instead, honorary citizenship was reconfirmed to Mussolini who still has many followers in his territory and not only but in Europe itself which has little memory ".

Edith Bruck, to whom the President of the Republic, Sergio Mattarella has conferred the honor of Knight of the Grand Cross of the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic, is a poet and writer, a survivor of concentration camps. On February 20, 2021, he received a visit from Pope Francis at his home and at the age of 90 he won the Strega Giovani 2021 Award with "Il pane perduto" (La nave di Teseo).

"I, a Holocaust survivor, who for a lifetime have written and witnessed in Italian schools - the letter reads again -, an arduous and tiring task, without hatred towards anyone, indeed in the name of peace and human brotherhood, having had the visit of Pope Francis who asked me for forgiveness extended to the martyr people, I owe loyalty to myself and for solidarity with Mrs. Di Consiglio (whom I do not know), I thank you but I cannot accept the Peace Prize where the active nostalgia for the most shameful era, indelible for those who lived it ".

A stance that does not convince the mayor De Angelis, elected by a center-right coalition and formerly of the National Alliance. "If Edith Bruck does not accept our award, which we had thought of with two thousand young people as we do every year - she tells Ansa -, it is a mortification not to me, but to our city, gold medal for civil merit, which does not deserved ". On honorary citizenship, Mussolini adds: "He has had it since 1924. Before me there were three communist mayors, two socialists, one republican, one DS and no one has ever revoked it. Indeed this topic has never been discussed in the City Council from 1946 to 2021 ".

The mayor of Anzio addressed a letter to Edith Bruck, and for information to the Jewish Community of Rome, in which he said he was "deeply embittered by his refusal" and convinced that "it was the subject of a very serious misunderstanding generated by a complete information without foundation or even deliberately manipulated by those who in recent years have tried to continually boycott the work of this administration ".

"Never, I stress never, was this administration reconfirmed honorary citizenship of Mussolini, probably referring to the 1924 obligation of all Italian municipalities to confer the honor on the then head of the government. It should be remembered that my first office as mayor of Anzio dates back to 1998 and that none of the previous administrations opened the debate on the revocation of the award from 1946 onwards. Excuse the frankness but your words - reads the document - mortify years of cultural and social commitment led to the decision to establish the peace prize of the city of Anzio ", he explains.

De Angelis therefore makes himself "available" for a discussion on the matter.