NEWS Italian New Minister of Education and UCEI President Visit Auschwitz with High-School Students

By Ada Treves

Emotionally and physically exhausting, the two-day trip organized by the Italian Ministry of Education (MIUR) together with the Union of Italian Jewish Communities (UCEI) has been a very intense and formative experience for all participants. Minister Valeria Fedeli and UCEI President Noemi Di Segni left Rome together with a hundred students coming from various high schools from all over the country, to travel towards Krakow for a guided visit to the Jewish Ghetto, before the trip to the Death Camp.

The visit to the Jewish ghetto – established by the Nazis – was concluded with the signature of an agreement that is a confirmation and a renewal of the existing cooperation on the issues of Memory and Holocaust Remembrance.

A second agreement was signed in the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp, involving not only MIUR and UCEI, but also the Italian Superior Council of the Judiciary (CSM). The agreement establishes that Italian judges will receive a specific education on the topics of Memory and the Shoah and than go and teach in schools.

Attending the whole trip, always ready to answer questions and totally open with the students, were the sisters Andra e Tatiana Bucci who shared their memories about when, still little girls, they were imprisoned in the camp at the age of four and six.