Italian President Sergio Mattarella
who joined international leaders at Auschwitz on International
Holocaust Remembrance Day Monday for the ceremony to mark the
80th anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi death camp said
on Tuesday that he experienced an historic event which connects
past and future, memory and today's responsibility.
The head of State was speaking at a ceremony to mark Holocaust
Remembrance Day at the Quirinale palace in Rome.
In his address, he quoted author Primo Levi who wrote that
Auschwitz is "outside of us, but it is all around us, in the air
- the plague has died away, but the infection still lingers".
The commemoration at Auschwitz was an "event that also expressed
the meaning of renewing a pact between nations and peoples
which, during the difficult times we are experiencing in which
violence, aggression, unfriendliness, war appear to seek to
dominate, sparks hope".
Auschwitz, he said, "always causes infinite horror, shakes our
consciences, our convictions, generates anguish, anxiety,
ripping questions" but, he warned, "it is not a parenthesis, no
matter how terrible - it resides deep in the man's soul".
"It is an insuperable warning and, together, a temptation that
surfaces often", he noted.
The head of State went on to note that "Auschwitz is the direct
consequence of the racial laws, which were ignominiously issued
also in Italy by the Fascist regime and of the Nazi anti-Jewish
fury, of which the Fascist regime and the Republic of Salò were
accomplices and collaborators, until the "final solution".
"Auschwitz represents the deepest and most obscure abyss ever
touched in the history of humanity", Mattarella said.
The president went on to note that, "even with the final defeat
of Nazi-Fascism in Europe, with the recovery of democracies, the
wounds never completely healed".
He quoted the Auschwitz survivor, chemist and author Primo Levi,
discussing the "shadows, words and ghosts that continued - and
continue - to generate disquiet" after World War II.
"Auschwitz is outside of us, but it is all around us, in the
air. The plague has died away, but the infection still lingers",
wrote the author of If This Is a Man in The Black Hole of
Auschwitz.
He said the suffering endured during those times and the
sacrifice of all those who died for freedom "shaped the spirit
and form of our Constitution, which was born - and lives - to
cancel the principles, actions, the code words of the dark
Nazi-Fascist domain, of which the bloody world conflict and
death camps were the cruel and inevitable outcome".
In his address at the Quirinale palace, Mattarella also spoke
about racial insults on social media directed at Italian Life
Senator and Holocaust survivor Liliana Segre, slamming them as
"painful and unacceptable", saying they needed to be stopped.
"They are grave crimes that must be prosecuted to safeguard
freedom and justice", he said.
"Let's not give in to dejection", Mattarella went on to say,
expressing "confidence in the future of humanity" as well as in
the "determination of many women and many men who are able to
prevent, with honesty and courage, obscure forces from
prevailing over the natural desire for peace, justice and
brotherhood of humankind".
He urged to repeat "with even more determination these days", in
schools, universities, workplaces, homes and squares that
"strong and high cry which comes, each day and forever, from
Auschwitz's fence: 'Never again!", concluded the president.
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