We know that If this is a man, Primo Levi’s masterpiece who told without saving anything the tragedy of deportation and the Holocaust, is not fiction. It is the horrible more of realities. We know that all women, men, children who appear, often with name and surname, in those pages are human beings who have had a life, just like oursbefore being swept by the cruelty of racial laws and war. Levi, in the first chapter, tells us about the journey of his convoy, 12 wagons with 650 people. He tells us that of his wagon, which transported 45 people to Auschwitz, only 4 returned back.
But slowly their names, too long forgotten, return from the oblivion appearing on the stumbling blocks, those small square stone blocks covered with brass, which since 1992 have been placed, for intuition and will of the German artist Gunter Demnig, throughout Europe in front of the door of the house where for the last time, many human beings, have seen freedom before being deported to the extermination camps.
This year in Milan “sprout”, new stumbling stones (in all at the moment there are 224, over 100,000 in Europe) and In via Donatello 26/a, there is that of a girl and her family. He was killed as soon as he arrived in Auschwitz When the SS decided who to send to work in the fields and who to eliminate immediately because they are considered useless for that purpose. He was called Emilia Levi and the writer talks about her, in the first chapter, telling the arrival at the concentration camp at the end of four days of travel and the moment when the valid men, who got off the wagon, came, in ten munuti, gathered by one part. But of all the other people of the convoy, nothing is learned: “What happened of others, of women, children, old people, we could not establish then or after: at night he swallowed them, purely and simply”.
The girl disappeared forever with her mother and her brother Italo a thirteen -year -old boy: «So Emilia died, who was three years old; Since the Germans appeared to the Germans the historical need to put the children of the Jews to death “says the writer” Emilia, daughter of the engineer Aldo Levi of Milan, who was a curious, ambitious, cheerful and intelligent child; To which, during the journey to the crowded wagon, the father and mother had managed to swim in a zinc tub, in warm water that the degenerate German driver had agreed to tap the locomotive that dragged us all to death “.
