Liliana and the prisoners

By Anna Foa*

A short passage on the prison of S. Vittore in Milan taken from the dialogue between Marta Cartabia and Liliana Segre after their visit to the Shoah Memorial. An extraordinary text that should be read in all schools to explain and teach what racism was, what the Constitution was, and how the battle for rights and against hatred and indifference must continue.
“…when that call came, that call telling us that we had to leave for an unknown destination, then our line of desperate people crossed another ray… and there were these brothers of ours from prison looking out from the balconies, they were having their free time, they saw this procession in which there were children and old people, and they were extraordinary because there moved in them that humanity that we had not felt for a long time in the general indifference. They were not indifferent. And there was such a difference between the indifferent and them that I have never forgotten them. There has never been a time when I have not spoken in schools without remembering these people, who could have been thieves, murderers, but who shouted at us: ‘You have done nothing wrong, God bless you’. And they would throw everything they had at us in that very quick passage. Some threw an orange, some an apple, some a scarf. Only some had the courage, in that atmosphere, to tell us that they loved us”.

*Historian

Translated by Gianluca Pace and revised by Alice Pugliese, students at the Advanced School for Interpreters and Translators of the University of Trieste, interns at the newspaper office of the Union of the Italian Jewish Communities.