Senator for life Liliana Segre: “A free and fearless life”

Freedom without fear. Addressing the audience of the first Forum of Jewish women in Italy last week, the Senator for life Liliana Segre underlines the lesson she learnt during an existence marked by the most unspeakable tragedy. “Life – the Auschwitz survivor explains to the participants – taught me to be free and fearless”. The menaces constraining her to be “the oldest woman in Europe with the security detail” do not intimidate her. It is rather the contrary. Segre takes a stand against those who think to be allowed to channel their hate on her without feeling ashamed, as the no-vax do. “Not later than yesterday I received a strong threat. And it was signed. So, for once, I will sue the person who sent it”. And then, with her usual irony, she adds: “It’s also in very poor taste to wish me death when I’m 92”.
As always, the audience in the room listens in complete silence to her witness of “the great oblivion” that accompanied her for part of her life. For a long time, Segre recalls, she remained silent about her own experience: from being expelled from school because of racist laws to being turned back at the Swiss border, from the arrest and the detention in San Vittore Prison to the deportation from platform 21 to Auschwitz. “It was very hard to face that world from which not only I had been rejected but banished, mocked”. A world that preferred to forget that “great oblivion” of which, however, Segre bore “the marks on her skin”.
Then the turning point that led her to break her silence came thanks to the meeting with another woman, another survivor of the horror of the Shoah: Goti Bauer. “A very sweet, extraordinary, and deeply cultured woman. She took me by the hand, led me to the Association of Italian Jewish Women (ADEI) and told me: “try, try to speak because you can do it. And because you have to tell the Italian history. Because this is what we talk about above all”. In front of other Jewish women, “I spoke, and that great nothingness dissolved”.
From then on, free and fearless, Segre has never stopped speaking, becoming a civil reference point for Italian society. A female voice committed to being heard, as well as all the other women who gave speeches at the Forum about their respective fields of expertise.
The forum, organised by ADEI WIZO, an Italian association part of the Women’s International Zionist Organization, was opened by Susanna Sciaky who welcomed the audience. Then, many Italian women spoke: the director of the cultural centre Circolo dei Lettori in Turin Elena Loewenthal, the president of the Union of the Italian Jewish Communities (UCEI) Noemi Di Segni, the historian Liliana Picciotto, the director of new technologies development department of ISTAT (Italian National Institute of Statistics) Linda Laura Sabbadini and the president of the Jewish Agency for Israel in Italy Claudia De Benedetti.
In each speech, personal journeys emerged, amidst difficulties and achievements, presenting a cross-section of female Jewish Italy and its contribution to the life of the country. “We live in a country which has never really invested in women – Sabbadini emphasized – and ADEI WIZO and this kind of meetings can play an important role in exerting pressure on this matter. We must keep in mind that only half of female population works, which means that the other half does not have its own financial independence. Half of Italian women are dependent on others and therefore they are more at risk, especially of domestic violence”. This thought was shared and developed in other speeches according to the experiences of the different women, and recalls the life senator’s message about being free and fearless.

Translated by Margherita Francese, revised by Valentina Megera, students at the Secondary School of Modern Languages for Interpreters and Translators of the University of Trieste, interns at the newspaper office of the Union of the Italian Jewish Communities – Pagine Ebraiche.