Italy marks Int'l Holocaust Remembrance Day with celebrations addressed to students

The International Holocaust Remembrance Day was marked across Italy on Wednesday with celebrations especially addressed to young generations, which started with a major ceremony hosted by President Sergio Mattarella at the presidential palace in Rome.

"Auschwitz, with its barbed wire, gas chambers, huts and ovens does not leave us," Mattarella said in the presence of representatives of the Jewish community in Italy, students and a survivor of the Holocaust, Sami Modiano, renowned for his full commitment in warning young generations against racism and intolerance.

"Auschwitz asks us constantly, it forces us every time to return to the edge of the abyss and stare down into it, with our eyes and minds full of pain and moral revulsion," Mattarella went on saying.

The Remembrance Day is an international memorial day for the victims of the Holocaust. The largest Nazi death camp, Auschwitz-Birkenau, was liberated by the Allies on Jan. 27, 1945. At least 1.1 million prisoners have been estimated to have died there.

The Holocaust also took a heavy toll on the Jewish community in Italy, which consisted of around 40,000 people at that time. Some 7,000 Jews were sent to the Nazi camps and only 12.5 percent of them survived, according to Jewish archive's data.

Jewish people in Italy had been suffering discrimination due to the racial laws introduced by Mussolini's fascist regime since 1938, which led to them being banned from public offices and schools, with their civil rights restricted and their assets confiscated.

Today, despite a higher public awareness and anti-racism campaigns, Italy and the entire world are still struggling with "other deadly types of racism, discrimination and intolerance" which continue to cause innocent deaths around the world, Mattarella went on saying.

Echoing his words, Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi posted on a social network his memory of visiting Auschwitz with a group of students led by another Holocaust survivor, Nedo Fiano, stressing that what happened shall happen "never again."

Education Minister Stefania Giannini on the Remembrance Day highlighted the fundamental role of school and education in explaining the roots of prejudice, exploring the dangers of remaining indifferent to the oppression of others and developing an awareness of the value of acceptance of diversity.

"Memory must be cultivated in daily life, with the study that you do at school and that allows you to transform an emotion into a valuable knowledge that you have to treasure," she said.

Thousands of students gathered at a forum organized in Florence to listen to the testimonies of Holocaust survivors, while another commemorative ceremony attended by many young people was held in San Sabba, on the outskirts of Trieste in northern Italy, the only example of a Nazi concentration camp in Italy.

The large complex of buildings making up a rice husking factory constructed in 1913 was used as a transit camp for deportees bound for Germany and Poland, for the storage of confiscated property and for the internment and execution of hostages, partisans, political prisoners and Jews. Endit