To bring Remembrance Day up to date we have decades of photographs and videos which document thethe horror of the extermination camps Nazis. We have tears, the testimonies of survivors, monuments to a history that, it was promised, would never show its monstrous face “never again”. A “never again” invoked but not realized.
Every past and present war, distant or near, has given us other photographs, other films of humiliated men and women, violated in their bodies and in their dignity. Every day, for those who do not hide their eyes and ears, their distraught looks and their cries come from the TV or smartphone screens. But the Day of Remembrance also established by the United Nations assembly on 1 November 2005, in our Republic it was recognized with a specific law on 20 July 2000, and fixed to January 27, date of the demolition of the gates of Auschwitz.
A law tenaciously desired by a recently deceased Jew, journalist and politician, Furio Colombo, «in order to remember the Holocaustthe racial laws, the Italian persecution of Jewish citizens.” Therefore not a vague memory, but precisely that of the extermination of the Jewish people.
A fault from the past? In the last year and a half since the infamous attack orchestrated by Hamas on October 7, 2023 on defenseless citizens of Israel, cases of anti-Semitism have increased tenfold. The images of the insulting placards of young people in our universities, who attribute to a people, once again, the responsibility for a war, a horrendous war, instigated by a terrorist organization and supported economically and militarily by rogue theocracies, Iran, China, Russia
We see another synagogue, in Bologna, attacked during a demonstration that claimed to defend a boy who died in a clash with the police, and the temple had nothing to do with it.
But above all I have two printed images in mind: the faces of the female soldiers captured 474 days ago, in a filthy video in which they appear bruised, wounded, while the voice of the torturers screams: “Bitches, we will trample you”. They are faces of girls subjected in some hidden tunnel to who knows what torment.
The other image, dramatic, pacifying, poignant, is The White Crucifixion by Marc Chagallexhibited at the beginning of the Jubilee year in a new Roman museum. One and a half meters per side, it does not occupy a wall, but the entire space of the heart. The body of the dead Christ is clear, the Tallit girded at his hips is clear, because Christ is a son of Israel, the light that pierces evil is clear, to which the hope of the persecuted clings. Red flags wave setting fire to a villagescattering bodies and things. Nazi flags attack a synagogueburn and destroy sacred objects. The patriarchs lament, pray, the wandering Jew carries his bag of exile on his shoulders. But the light of the Menorah, although dim, continues to shine and the arms of the migrant Jews reach out towards the Christ who illuminates their destiny, and ours. It is a splendid painting, which illustrates memory. But memory is for the present.
Image above: a moment of the protests of the families of the Israeli hostages captured by Hamas a few days after the attack on 7 October 2023 (photo ANSA)
