A Roman Catholic cardinal joined Milan’s chief rabbi in a ceremony unveiling the first public monument to the Jews and anti-fascists deported from the Italian city to Nazi death camps.
The memorial plaque commemorates the 1,580 people, including 1,237 Jews, who were deported during World War II for political reasons.
The city’s chief rabbi, Giuseppe Laras, told the gathering, “When the eyewitnesses are dead, the time of forgetting may begin.
“It is that which troubles us, because silence can be the condition in which that evil repeats itself. But as long as there are young people to acquire the lesson of their fathers, as now, this concern will be tempered.”
The plaque, located at the Italian city’s central train station, reads:”Between December 1943 and May 1944, from the basement of this station, Jewish men, women and children and political opponents began the long journey to Auschwitz and other Nazi camps.
“Their memory lives among us together with the memory of all victims of the genocides of the twentieth century.”
It ends with a quote from Italian Auschwitz survivor and author Primo Levi: “Since the anguish, each of them is our own.”
Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini said at the ceremony, “I want everyone who passes in front of this plaque to feel a part of what happened and what could happen again, if anti-Semitism, racism and contempt for others is not removed from their hearts.”
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