Holocaust Remembrance Day, 27 January 2023
Message by President of the Council of Ministers Giorgia Meloni
On 27 January 78 years ago, the gates of Auschwitz were torn down and the world saw with its own eyes the horror of the Shoah, the Nazis’ deliberate plan to persecute and exterminate the Jewish population. Today, Italy honours the victims, offers sympathy to their loved ones, pays homage to the courage of all the righteous people who risked or lost their lives to save others, and bows to the survivors for their tireless service in sharing their first-hand accounts. The Shoah represents the abyss of humanity. An evil that deeply affected our nation too, with the infamy of the 1938 racial laws. It is our duty to ensure that remembering those events and what happened does not become a merely formal exercise because, as the journalist Ferruccio De Bortoli recently wrote in the ‘Corriere della Sera’ newspaper, “remembrance is like a garden; it must be taken care of, otherwise it will become covered in weeds and the flowers of the righteous will disappear, devoured”.
This is precisely the challenge that lies before us all – institutions, civil society, educational establishments, information outlets and the mass media: to nurture our commitment to remembrance every day, to raise awareness among the younger generations and to step up efforts to combat all forms of anti-Semitism.
[Courtesy translation]