I have never loved the anniversaries that return punctually swollen with rhetoric every year, but today it’s different, it’s not a day to remember, it’s, instead, a date to be superimposed on every other day of the year of every year. On January 27th, as a forbidden obsession, someone tries to exorcise the memories with the hope, in the end, to forget, others claim the right to hate and, completely submissive to the memory, relive the tragedy on living skin. The day of remembrance, however, must not only be a compensatory moment for the victims, it must not interpret the posthumous solidarity of those who were passive witnesses of those years, in a word the Shoah is not and must not be a problem only Jewish.
The Shoah is a problem that overwhelms each of us, of course the victims and the torment of the survivors must be honored always and everywhere, but to make this late January day less empty every year that passes, we need to question the illogicality of the alibis that the States Democrats gave passivity in the face of genocide. We must ask ourselves how it was possible, in our Europe, to close our eyes and indeed enjoy numerous advantages from the Jewish deportation and from the vast plunder of their goods, and from that economy which they had intelligently created out of nothing.
Just remember, doesn’t save.
Telling the unreachable today is not enough.
We have always dreamed a future of peace, we have always produced visions of democratic and multi-ethnic societies with a keen eye on memory, but only virtually. The reality, the real one, still combines today with the pig heads sent to the symbols of Judaism, with the anti-Semitic slogans on the walls of Rome, with the negationist theories, with the misinformation about the policies of the State of Israel towards the Authority Palestinian national.
This is my January 27, remember to change every day, I’m writing with the idea of tomorrow, this is the check against fascism, Nazism and all anti-Jewish xenophobic theories.
Despite the darkness of the tragedy, there will always be sunshine.
by Sergio Giangregorio
