For decades, Liliana Segre visited Italian classrooms to recount her expulsion from school under Benito Mussolini’s anti-Semitic racial laws, her doomed attempt to flee Nazi-controlled Italy, her deportation from Milan’s train station to the death camps of Auschwitz.
Her plain-spoken testimony about gas chambers, tattooed arms, casual atrocities and the murders of her father, grandparents and thousands of other Italian Jews made her the conscience and living memory of a country that often prefers not to remember.
Now she is wondering if it was all wasted breath.
“Why did I suffer for 30 years to share intimate things of my family, of my pain, of my desperation?
Why?” Ms. Segre, 93, with cotton-white hair, a steel-cage memory and an official status as a Senator for Life said last week in her handsome Milan apartment, where she sat next to a police escort.
Persons:
Liliana Segre, Benito Mussolini’s, Ms, Segre, “ I’ve, Vladimir V, Putin, Hitler, ”
Organizations:
Life, Hamas
Locations:
Nazi, Italy, Milan’s, Auschwitz, Milan, Israel, Gaza, Europe, Ukraine, Russia, France, Germany