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I’m visualizing
the gates being fully opened,
the noise of those iron gates,
and endless queues of people
marching in to take a shower, and never coming out,
which is what happened to us later.
We heard the noise of batons.
We heard the smashing of batons.
They would hit us and we were told,
"You enter through the door and exit from the chimney."
Cattle wagons remind me
of when we stood in them. We travelled in them.
Those memories are always with me.
The colours I see if I close my eyes
are the white of the snow, and the white of the corpses.
Flames from the chimney, snow,
cold...
and loneliness.
I do not feel hatred.
Actually, I learned to love people.
But I hate the Nazis.
I shall never forgive them
for what they have done to the children
who were sent to the gas chambers.
BORN NOVEMBER TH 16TH, 1939 DEPORTED MAY THE 3RD, 1944
My children are my revenge against the Nazis,
and my grandchildren and great-grandchildren
are my way of taking the mickey out of them.
I decided to get her tattoo on me
after reading her book.
I felt very, very close to the story,
and also physically connected
to what happened to my grandmother.
I am Jewish, my mother is Jewish, my father is Catholic.
More than 40 relatives of mine
never came back from the camps.
I believe that growing up with this awareness
has always been at the base of who I am.
I remember having a terrible crisis in primary school
when I began to study history at seven years old.
I realized that this matter concerned me and my family
and the extent of what human beings could do.
Had I been born 65 years earlier
I probably would have been one of the victims.
Everything can help you survive.
Reciting all the poems you know,
exchanging cooking recipes,
singing Edith Piaf's songs.
Italians sang "Mamma" and cried,
cried while singing,
but it was nice.
This was resistance.
JEW
One day a friend of my mother told me,
"Do you know that in my shack there
is a Dutch girl called Anne?"
The girl was standing at the front door.
She overheard what my friend said and smiled at me.
She turned her head like this and smiled briefly and timidly.
She was already very thin,
but she had this truly adorable smile.
INDIFFERENCE
The disaster in Bergen-Belsen
begins with the evacuations of the camps in the East,
particularly the Auschwitz Birkenau camps.
Beginning in November 1944,
thousands of people arrive in a situation where typhus,
from a certain point of view, has the same function of the gas chambers.
Because people die, and die in a terrible state.
So the only thing that the Nazis are left to do is dig common graves,
which they have the prisoners themselves dig.
They throw in the corpses without even needing to dispose of them.
I sort of ran for a short distance
and then, almost in front of my block, I slowed down,
because I saw coming towards me
three or four well-dressed Nazis.
Irma Grese was behind me.
And they were all in love with her.
Like children do, I suddenly turned around, just because I was curious,
and Irma Grese had a gun pointed at me.
That was the only time I realized I could die.
I remember that this one person came,
he might have been Mengele,
and asked us if we wanted to go see mum.
A hack doctor from Neuengamme
who had carried out some experiments
on tuberculosis and lymph glands on some adults
thought to experiment on children too,
and asked Mengele for these children.
We warned Sergio not to step forward,
but he did not listen to us.
And 20 children,
ten males and ten females stepped forward.
To think that he left believing that he was going
to meet his mum,
and instead, walked to his death on his seventh birthday,
still feels like such
a burden on my heart. It's indescribable.
Jews in Western Europe were faced
with a different situation.
Here, there are too few Jews to set up ghettos, like in the East.
Therefore, the Nazis work out a different strategy.
They organize raids based on the cooperation of local people.
At this point, they built transit camps.
The final destination is just one camp.
A place created to kill the Jews
and have a small minority of them work,
as if to grant them an extension to just delay their death.
The only other people who occasionally are mixed with them
are the Sinti and Roma.
She is a very smart teenager, a very lively girl,
curious about the world,
full of ambition, feelings, love, full of imagination.
The situation of confinement, in which she finds herself,
develops her intelligence and ability to think.
I remember that we used to play with snowballs.
But we were always surrounded by death.
Because in the camp, among the barracks
there were heaps of corpses.
To see these corpses
that they tried to push inside this barrack
had become normal to us.
JEW
I did my first drawing in Terezín
of children making a snowman.
Of course, it was very far from being the real thing,
because in Terezín we couldn’t do this.
It was, rather, a memory of my childhood.
In one way or another, I was able to give it secretly
to my dad, and he said to me, “Draw what you see”.
So I started to draw my daily life in Terezín.
And so this snowman was my first drawing in Terezín,
but also the last drawing of mine as a little girl.
They had us play round and round.
We had to sing this song, in German...
"Show your feet, show your shoes."
My feet were already aching,
and I didn’t have shoes. I had only one with no sole.
And it bothered me to sing in German and do a merry-go-round.
Also because my mother was standing outside,
maybe waiting for her meal.
The kapo whipped me so much,
because she kept yelling at me, "Sing, sing and turn around."
I had bruises all over my legs, because those witches
had rubber lashes
with an iron wire inside.
I would have loved to play,
but not in that camp.
We used to play with lice.
I feel like scratching my head when I think about it.
There were maybe five or six of us. Each of us took her lice,
we put them five centimetres from the hem of a dress.
The one which reached the hem was the winner.
There was nothing to win, but it was a game.
I began to find ways of building barriers to shield me through art.
Adorno said that after Auschwitz poetry can no longer exist.
Actually, I believe that it is perhaps the opposite.
What that creation of beauty, art, music,
gives to human beings
is the only answer to the horror that is human history.
We, who have been in charge
of survivors and their families for the last 30 years,
have seen an element
which can also be seen in the fourth generation.
What is it?
It's the dead from the Shoah.
The dead of Shoah ask for revenge.
It is a burden for their descendants.
It is a mission. The dead of the Shoah say,
"Avenge us even though we are dead.
Say I am the son or daughter of such and such, Jewish,
destroy what the Nazis did to us,
say Kaddish for us."
My grandfather died in the camp.
My father was deported.
I believe that this trauma can be passed on, definitely.
I passed it on to my daughters.
Although I believe that probably more than a trauma,
I have passed on a story, a legacy and a responsibility,
I created a magazine online.
It's called Jewpop, and to my surprise,
the most read stories are about Shoah.
THE WAR IS OVER
I am a hidden girl,
a bearer of remembrance
of my grandfather who died from starvation in the Łódź Ghetto,
of my father deported on board of Convoy number four and who returned,
of my husband’s father who was savagely murdered
and drowned by the kapos in Auschwitz.
When I speak about the Shoah, I may even make children laugh.
"Madame," they tell me,
"you are telling us about the Shoah, and yet we are not frightened."
I am not doing it to frighten you.
I am telling you all this, because you too can tell others
that this is no fiction, there is no legend here,
it is the truth.
With Omer, who was a soldier,
we entered in Auschwitz carrying the Israeli flag
and we left Auschwitz carrying the Israeli flag.
I believe that there is nothing more terrible
than wanting to tell something like the survivors went through
and have someone who says to you,
"Okay, but you are not the only one who suffered."
There are people who are 70 years old
who have decided to participate in our meetings only today.
They say, "At last, I emerge from anonymity
and I become Jewish once again."
My children were raised Catholic, my husband is Catholic,
but now we don't need to hide anymore.
I need to meet other Jews and to say I'm Jewish.
I was born in 1961,
during the Eichmann’s trial.
I was born 20 days late.
And many years afterwards, I came to know that this delay
was due to the fear that my mother had of bearing children.
Therefore, I sense that I had always known it.
I remember the stories she told me when I was just a very, very little girl
I remember weird answers from Mum,
like when I needed something, she would typically answer:
"Do as if you were all alone in the world."
She raised us with great autonomy.
The tattoo has to do with identity.
I could not tell whether this identity may mean
that I missed having some of my family members
whom I never met.
First I talked about it with grandma,
since she really was the only one
whose opinion counted for me.
At the beginning she said "no" right away.
A protective "no." I think she was afraid
that something similar could happen,
but now I think she is rather proud about it.
What hurt me the most is knowing she was alone on the way back.
The terrible pain of returning without her family.
Because this is a loneliness that can’t be filled.
It is a loneliness... and maybe we, her children,
also feel a little responsible for it.
That’s it. I'm getting emotional.
A son or a daughter is there on the front row.
A baby born from a survivor,
and without a specific job aimed at clearing up history,
his or her mission is to fill up what can never be filled.
What can you fill up after the camps?
I do not believe that she’s ever come out of the camps.
There is a part of her that remained in the camps.
We were forced to load the corpses.
Two girls had to hold the arms, and two girls had to hold the legs
Yet four of us were not strong enough.
So we had to drag those corpses along.
Until one day, one of the Nazis realised
that we could not do it and beat us.
He punished us, made us stand for hours holding a stone in our hand,
just to show that they were stronger,
and we absolutely had to do what they wanted.
My number is 7142.
Once in my grave, the worms will eat it off me,
but for the time being, this is my mark,
a mark of life, and I'll keep it.
My mother had a very bright intuition,
which later turned out to be useful to reunite our family.
She always reminded us of our name, surname
and that we were from Italy.
We didn't dare step closer to her,
because we were probably frightened.
She wasn't any longer our beautiful mum.
She was incredibly thin.
The fact that we didn't want to hug her
came back to my mind
when I found myself holding my eldest son, Stefano,
and my thought went to my mum, in those days,
and to how much we must have made her suffer.
Sometimes mum was able to come to visit me
and when one afternoon I saw her I said to her,
"I want to give you something nice."
And I gave her a square of butter
and two boiled potatoes.
And then I ran away to cry.
My sister said to me, "If we see you cry again
through the barbed wire,
I will never take mum to see you again."
From that moment on I tried to become stronger and smarter.
I mean, I pretended not to cry.
But I always kept something aside for my mum.
All the people who were confined in Drancy
knew that they were going to be taken eastward on a convoy,
they didn't know where,
and they started to say, "We are going to Pitchipoi."
Pitchipoi is a mythical place, undefinable.
Together with my friend, photographer Jean Francois Lami,
we wanted to make the same death journey.
When you approach Eastern Germany, or Poland,
it seems you are going back in history.
If we talk about traces or marks left behind until now,
there are places with graffiti, with Nazi symbols.
It's really upsetting to still see the marks of hatred.
We said to ourselves it wasn't possible
for this form of hatred to still be there now.
It's not possible for this barbarism to still exist today.
We see the Neo-Nazis,
we see attacks, anti-Semitism, racism,
and all this actually tells me
that nothing was learnt from what happened.
With the actual situation in France I'm afraid.
With certain movements and rallies,
we are seeing a very fast rise in racism.
I say to young people, "We are the last witnesses
and you are my witnesses, you must close the door
to deniers and Neo-Nazis,
because there are many of them everywhere."
Anne Frank, in spite of herself,
has become the icon of the Shoah.
It is true that Anne Frank is being used by people
who are clearly anti -Semitic or racist.
We saw that in some Italian stadiums.
I believe that her iconic status is behind it.
If you have to hurt someone, be evil,
you have to find very strong words, and strong pictures.
And what’s more powerful than Anne Frank’s face to say
it's nothing, what happened never really existed
and this is just a face.
Anne and I were born on the same year, 1929.
We were 14,
and we experienced our first love.
Anne Frank talks about it in her diary.
And I mention it in my diary.
I had my first love there, in Terezín.
I had hidden two of Otto’s shirts.
I do not know why I had them for years.
I kept them as a memory.
I know he was in Dachau,
and he died a few days after the liberation.
I remember I once read the story
of a cellist.
She says she survived, she remained sane,
because she kept on thinking about music.
She played over and over in her mind.
Thinking about a musician
who held onto her whole repertoire,
to all the music she knew, really touched me.
The Nazis wanted to show to the world
that while the Germans are at war or under bombardment,
the Jews live with no fears in a fortress city
where they can go as far as organizing cultural events
and they show these Jews who seem to be living in heaven.
And they even arrange to shoot a movie.
The Führer
gifts a city to the Jews.
They also organize
a visit by the Red Cross,
which sadly will endorse this big hoax,
this gigantic camouflage.
My mother died there at 50
and she was ill.
My grandma died two weeks after arriving.
As for my father,
I knew that he was deported,
but I always hoped that he would come back.
I never saw him again.
I can only visualize Terezín
with my eyes as a young girl.
I was there for almost three and a half years
and I celebrated four birthdays there.
I was 16, 17, 18, and 19,
and I was unable to experience what living free meant.
There is an anthem of Terezín
written by Karel Švenk.
I'll quote it for you.
"Everything goes if one wants
United we’ll hold our hands
And on the ruins of the ghetto We shall laugh"
Poor Karel Švenk didn't laugh at all,
since he died during the death march.
As a German,
I have thought a lot about whether I should
have felt guilty or not.
I think I have the responsibility
to give back to the men who lost their humanity here,
and to fight so that their faces are not forgotten.
These destinies remind me that today
there is a lot of suffering in the world,
that so many children and adults still suffer in war zones,
and I find this inconceivable.
There are still people today
who are considered worthless, expelled, killed and exiled,
simply because they are not understood.
We tell our story to young people,
and we have always done it,
so that the memory of the Holocaust is not lost.
But today, this is beginning to feel like a duty,
because there are too many people
who do not accept those who are different
and are looking for a better life here,
and end up drowning in our seas.
Subtitle translation by Giulia Rissini