Politic?

The Unspeakable Hatred That Refuses To Die

"[After the vote the abstentions made me feel] like a Martian in the Senate."
"I appealed to the conscience of everyone and thought that a commission against hatred as a principle would be accepted by all."
Liliana Segre, 89, Holocaust survivor, Senator-for-life, Italy

Liliana Segre was escorted during a visit to a Milan exhibition on Thursday (Photo: PA)

"[It was] disgusting and shocking. That efforts to combat hate are met with threats of violence show just how much anti-Semitism continues to pollute our world today and how important education and awareness is in the fight against hate."
"A Holocaust survivor, of all people, should not have to face this sort of pernicious racism today."
Karen Pollock, chief executive, Holocaust Educational Trust

The activist Holocaust survivor who like many others whom fate decreed would suffer untold horrors during the Second World War as slave labourers and concentration camp inmates who watched as others were led to the gas chambers and awaited their turn, living in desperate conditions of basic survival, succumbing to malnutrition, starvation, disease, and loss of faith that the world cared about their tormented lives, was shocked on finding that Italy's right-wing parties lacked empathy much less a commitment to shun anti-Semitism.

As an outspoken, high-profile figure as one of the 25 survivors out of a total of 775 Italian children under 14 years of age, who were deported from Italy to Auschwitz in 1944 when she was thirteen years of age, she introduced a motion for the creation of a parliamentary committee to deal with the ongoing incidence of racism and anti-Semitism that she in particular among many others was subjected to. Each and every day on social media sites, this woman has been the recipient of no fewer than 200 hate messages.

At her advanced age, she remains committed to the goal of teaching as many people as she can, by reciting to them her personal agonies suffered as a child in the death camps that took the lives of an estimated one-and-a-half million Jewish children. When she stood in Italy's parliament and asked for an expression of solidarity with the nation's Jews, the League and Brothers of Italy had opposed the call for a parliamentary commission. "Forgive us Liliana. The politics of hate will not stop your commitment, nor ours", Agriculture Minister Teresa Bellanova, responded.

The arrival and processing of an entire transport of Jews from Carpatho-Ruthenia, a region annexed in 1939 to Hungary from Czechoslovakia, at Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp in Poland, in May of 1944. The picture was donated to Yad Vashem in 1980 by Lili Jacob

Researcher Stefano Gatti of the Centre of Contemporary Jewish Documentation, revealed that 190 instances of anti-Semitism had been reported so far this year in Italy, a steady increase over the previous years' counts. Although it gives scant comfort, he pointed out that though anti-Semitism is on the rise in Italy, it was manifested to a lower degree than in France and Britain. The result of the Italian far-right parties refusing to endorse a parliamentary commission on hate, was to embolden groups who embrace anti-Semitism.

This week one such group hung a banner denouncing anti-fascism in close proximity to where the Holocaust survivor was scheduled to make a public appearance. Liliana Segre has now been placed under police protection, resulting from ongoing threats from far-right fanatics. An Italian security source pointed out the police were to accompany her to public events, not having been authorized to provide around-the-clock protection in response to the death threats she receives on a daily basis.

The arrival of a deportation train, bringing Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz, circa 1942. Getty Images

What could conceivably be more cowardly than haters targeting a 89-year-old woman, born in Italy, returned to Italy after having experienced the most horrendous assaults on human dignity and human rights when her country of origin expelled her and other Italian children, in the full knowledge that these children were being sent to their deaths. "It must be said that Liliana receives vastly more messages of support and solidarity than she does hate messages", commented Ms.Segre's parliamentary chief of staff.

Small comfort to the memories that a child was forced to suffer in a fascist cult of death to Jews, Gypsies, political dissenters and homosexuals. The courage and resilience of such survivors in the face of ongoing messages of hate is monumental. As is her determination to continue visiting schools to speak of the horrors she had witnessed and herself suffered. "An 89-year-old Holocaust survivor under guard symbolizes the danger that Jewish communities still face in Europe today", wrote Israel's ambassador to Italy, Dror Eydar.