A life for peace

«The country is watching us and our responsibilities are great, but also the opportunities to set an example. Setting an example doesn't just mean doing our duty well, but carrying out our service with discipline and honour, serving the institutions and not using them". Thursday 13 October, 10:30 am, Palazzo Madama, Rome. These are some of the profound and thoughtful words with which life senator Liliana Segre opened the first session of the Senate of the 19th legislature.

A speech to politics on the meaning of doing politics, by someone who has spent his life witnessing the horrors that man can commit, just like someone who feels sewn onto a gifted life that he can't help but give to his time, so that man no longer learns the art of war.

A discourse of great moral depth and of great sense of institutions: democracy itself is the antidote, institutions are the vaccine against the most ruthless forms of violence; for this reason they must be defended: "The imperative to preserve the institutions of the republic must be common to all, which belong to everyone and are nobody's property and must work for the good of all".

The themes are many: the brutality of the current war, the memory of the past, the possible unity of a people around its history, the Constitution as a "testament of thousands of dead" and the awakening of a profound social and political conscience, which eliminates the language of hate. "We could leave the loud politics out of this room [...], interpreting instead a high and noble politics, which is open to listening and expresses itself with kindness and even meekness", she continues.

However, the strength and at the same time the fragility of that more than 90-year-old woman is striking, who makes her heart speak of her as a discriminated child, expelled from school and deported, who ended up occupying one of the most prestigious seats in the state. From the bench left empty following the racial laws to the highest bench in the Senate.
In between, a life spent for peace. Her life speaks more than anything.

Roberto Lerda
NP November 2022