Forgetting would be a crime, but remembering without acting would be a condemnation.

(Simon Wiesenthal)

A story of the tragedy of a survivor of Auschwitz and a profound reflection on the transmission of trauma through generations. The work opens up to a philosophical exploration of existence and memory, revealing how pain, while never fully expressible, takes root and is transmitted, permeating family relationships, personal experiences, and social dynamics. This is not just a film about a historical witness, but a meditation on the impossibility of fully freeing oneself from History and its implications on our being in the present.

The documentary develops through a mosaic of voices, ranging from public figures like Mario Monti, Ferruccio De Bortoli, and Fabio Fazio, to members of Liliana Segre’s security detail and friends like Geppi Cucciari. Each of them offers their own portrait of Liliana, revealing how her public image has evolved over the years. But, as Gabbai points out, what struck him most during the making of the documentary was the delicate relationship Liliana has with her children – Alberto, Luciano, and Federica – who were unaware of their mother’s past suffering for many years. This relationship, so secretive yet so full of meaning, becomes the essence of the film.

Gabbai emphasizes the importance of how, for the first time, the documentary explores the trauma of the second generation. It’s not Liliana’s children who carry the direct weight of her experience, but they are still marked by it. Their suffering is not visible or immediate, but a subterranean pain, rooted in the impossibility of fully accessing the parent's memory. The episode that most highlights this dynamic is when Federica, at 13, the age Liliana was when she was deported, hears her mother read from her diaries for the first time. Federica speaks of her deep suffering: a pain that is not even an accusation but an existential observation. From that moment on, Federica feels that she has taken hold of a "witness" she did not choose and which, unfortunately, became inevitable. Gabbai's narrative thus becomes a reflection on the weight that the past and trauma carry for those who live in the shadow of another's memory, but also on the unspoken barriers that often permeate family bonds.

It is not just the story of Liliana Segre, but a "family story," as Gabbai puts it. The Segre who emerges from the film is not just a witness to absolute evil, but a mother, a grandmother, a woman who has learned to live despite the memory of suffering. This does not mean forgetting, but rather choosing to survive without giving up one’s freedom and humanity. Despite the prolonged silence and the pain represented by the severe depression that afflicted her, Segre has maintained an unyielding desire for freedom, justice, and truth through the representation of meaning, language, and public presence. Her clarity, that extraordinary ability to recount reality without indulging in emotion, is reflected in the precision of her words, which, as Ferruccio De Bortoli observed, are "relentless in their details." What stands out in her narration is precisely this absence of embellishments, this clarity that leaves no room for sophistry but, on the contrary, illuminates our ignorance and indifference. Liliana has managed to build a lucid, precise, and disenchanted vision of the world, one capable of facing horror without succumbing to the temptation of being consumed by it.

The film does not limit itself to showing us a historical figure but makes us participants in her daily struggle against violence, racism, and discrimination. The figure of Segre is that of a woman who continues to resist, despite the threats and violence that still haunt her today: some wish for her to die in horrible agony, as if what life has already destined for her wasn’t enough. Her struggle is a civil one, but also existential, a continual questioning of the nature of evil, of the meaning of an existence that, for many, seems to be prey to hatred and fear. Liliana is the woman who, despite the death threats – as unacceptable and foolish as they are – has chosen not to flee anymore, not to let her life be reduced to fear. “If someone wants to kill me, let them, but I won’t run away anymore!”: this phrase, which closes the documentary, becomes the testament of an entire life, lived under the sign of struggle and choice.

Her statement, “I chose life and became free,” is not just a personal reflection but a public act that calls on all of us.

The documentary leaves us with a universal reflection: memory is an act of freedom, but also a burden passed down from generation to generation.

Liliana Segre’s memorial to historical and collective memory is a journey that not only traverses the experiences of survival in Auschwitz but also offers a profound reflection on human destiny and the idea of indifference, that cursed indifference that made the hell of concentration camps possible and that, all too often, still seems to permeate our daily lives. Her story is, indeed, the expression of a painful passage: from the empty school desk, symbolizing her lost youth and the brutality of deportation, to the desk in the Senate, a desk that, though marked by her advanced age, has never lacked meaning and value. It is the desk where Liliana Segre today offers her testimony as a senator, committed to keeping the memory alive, to fighting the indifference that all too often becomes the most dangerous weapon of our society.

The Memorial in Milan, a place that gathers the memories and voices of those who are no longer with us, cannot just be a symbol of regret for broken lives, but a cry of resistance against the temptation to forget. The word "indifference," which returns as an unsettling shadow in her stories, is the element that pervades the entire experience of Liliana and other survivors. Nothing was of use, she reminds us, millions of deaths in vain. Yet, every testimony, every effort to tell that truth, is not a futile act. Because it is not oblivion, but memory, that saves.

On February 6, 1944, the train carrying Liliana and the other prisoners made the fateful stop at the Birkenau platform, where death, embodied in the inhumane mechanism of gas chambers and crematorium ovens, awaited them. It is there that a number was tattooed on Liliana’s skin: 75190, a number that annihilated her identity but at the same time gave her a new one: that of the survivor, the living memory of a genocide. This number, which was not only a sign of dehumanization but a sign of survival, is now the symbol of her struggle.

Liliana also speaks of the French women, the prisoners who arrived before her at the camp and who, in the first days, tried to describe the horror that was about to engulf them. Those voices, describing the gas deaths, the bodies burned in the ovens, and the sickly sweet smell of human flesh burning, were considered insane: “We thought they were crazy,” says Liliana, while it was all true.

Liliana Segre also raises a troubling prediction, a thought that seems increasingly relevant in the current context: “In a few years, there will only be a line in history textbooks about the Shoah.” A reflection that is not limited to a mere historical observation, but which denounces a growing trend in Europe and the United States to minimize, forget, and reduce to a mere note a crime that marked all of humanity; current policies seem to follow an opposite path, undermining any attempt to preserve collective memory.

The risk of the Shoah being progressively reduced to a "line" in textbooks is not just a historical issue, but a political one. It is an alarm that Europe, as well as other parts of the world, is returning to confront ideologies we thought we had defeated forever. In an era marked by the return of nationalism, the strengthening of authoritarian policies, and the spread of xenophobic ideologies, the memory of the Shoah is endangered not only by a lack of historical education but by a true desire to marginalize the universal value of memory. And this is a fact that goes far beyond simple historical revisionism; it is a form of rejection of the lessons we should have learned from the tragedy of the 20th century.

Today, more than ever, indifference is returning to permeate European politics. The growing intolerance toward the "other," the strengthening of policies of closure, the criminalization of immigration, and the erosion of civil rights are just some of the examples we see across Europe. The policies we see today in many European countries, and beyond, that fuel racism, xenophobia, and hatred toward minorities, are nothing more than fertile ground for the seeds of violence and exclusion to take root.

Liliana and the Shoah teach us that every step toward indifference, every time a society abdicates its humanity, every time we fail to react to intolerance, opens a door to new horrors.

We can never let our guard down against the evil we have seen, or it will be too late to stop it.

(Natan Sharansky)

13-Jan-2025 by Beatrice