International Holocaust Remembrance Day is observed on the anniversary of the day US troops liberated the Nazi concentration camp in Auschwitz, revealing to the world for the first time the enormous incomprehensible reality of the Final Solution that was intended to exterminate all the Jews of Europe.
Holocaust Memorial Day:
It is a duty to remember
Translated from the Italian service of
January 26, 20143
"The duty of memory" is the title of a Page 1 article above the fold in the January 27, 2013 issue of
L'Osservatore Romano by Carmelite sister and theologian Cristiana Dobner.
On Holocaust Memorial Day, the Vatican newspaper also has an article by Anna Foa entitled "Let it not become an empty shell" and one by Gaetano Vallini on the persecution of Jewish children by the Nazis and Fascists.
Theologian Dobner underscores that "today the Catholic Church and the Jewish people are experiencing a rapprochement and understanding that was unthinkable a few decades ago".
She adds: "It is not a transient fashion: It is an awareness based on the lives that were snuffed out in the heart of the 20th century, but which is borne along a memory that will link generations like a chain with a hope that traverses the centuries".
Anna Foa points out that Holocaust Memorial Day, instituted in 2000 to commemorate the victims of the Shoah, has become a phenomenon of great importance, which in various ways involves educational institutions of every kind and level, institutions, and media", but that "in this enormous development of the initiative, there is no reference to the international significance of such a day, and in the common perception of Italians, it seems to be simply the result of laws passed by the Italian Parliament".
But Foa, the first Jewish woman asked to contribute regularly to the Vatican newspaper, says that "In all the countries of the world, the risk is great for the fossilization of memory, of its separation from the need to deepen knowledge of the historical aspects of the Shoah, of its transformation into a vague symbol filled only with good intentions. But the alternative, which no one wants, is oblivion, though coming gradually, when everyone would prefer to fill the existing framework with content that is not banal rather than to raise new discussions about it, especially in the presence today in many parts of Europe of anti-Semitic and negationist attacks on the reality of the Shoah itself and its memory, attacks that denigrate the observance of Holocaust Memorial Day and are aiming to suppress it".
Vallini reconstructs the fate of Jewish children in the Hotel Meina on Lago Maggiore, which was the theater for the first massacres of Jews in Italy.
In this connection, Einaudi publishing house recently published the book
La Shoah dei bambini. La persecuzione dell'infanzia ebraica in Italia 1938-1945,, by historian Bruno Maida.
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 27/01/2013 07:02]