« Luckily, I didn't pick up that gun and I became a woman of peace, for life », this is how Senator for Life Liliana Segre remembered the moment of her choice not to pick up the gun thrown to the ground by her jailer on May 1, 1945, when the doors of the Auschwitz concentration camp opened and the camp kapos took off their uniforms, drove away the dogs and tried to mingle with the survivors.
Iliana Segre spoke at the Quirinale, in the presence of the President of the Republic Sergio Mattarella, and the highest officials of the State, for the celebrations of the Day of Remembrance.
Liliana Segre, who was thirteen at the time, also remembers the moment of her arrest: "We were uncertain, we didn't know what to do, then my father decided that we would escape to Switzerland, he prepared us, he got a permit from the authorities in Como. We didn't imagine that once we entered Switzerland the Swiss would reject us, take us back to the border and arrest us there ."
Again: «I was 13 years old and it seemed impossible to me, an Italian, to be arrested by Italians, so I began the tour of Italian prisons until one day from San Vittore we were taken to the Central Station, in the basement of the station where today there is the Shoah Memorial ».
From there, "with great indifference from the city of Milan , on January 30, 1944 we were taken on open trucks, kicked and punched by Germans and fascists, we were loaded onto cattle wagons, with a little straw on the ground."
The journey to Auschwitz "lasted a week , the luckiest were those who prayed, I didn't, I came from an atheist family". Liliana Segre also remembers the indifference of those times: "Only three of my schoolmates remained my friends and they continued to invite me after the approval of the racial laws. Even the teacher was indifferent, like the world around me".
(Online Union)
