From survivor to witness

Every January 27th, he appears at the Quirinale Palace for Holocaust Remembrance Day. He's thinner, his voice strained, his gaze weary. He once confessed: "I can't tell you everything my eyes saw!" What those eyes saw in Auschwitz-Birkenau can never be fully understood. "They tell me: you came out of Auschwitz alive. No, I'm still there, I'll never be able to get out of there. I try to be like you, but I can't. I'm still there."

Sami Modiano never left the concentration camp. He was swallowed up by it at the age of thirteen, and lost relatives and friends there. In that hell on earth, he faced the denial of humanity and compassion, absolute evil without redemption, irremediable horror, contempt, hatred, and the brutal violence of man against man.

Sami's captivity lasted from July 1944 until his liberation on January 27, 1945. A few months, after all. In reality, he remained there for the rest of his life, until now, when he is over 95 years old. Everything that came after bears the indelible mark of those days. He is marked on his body and soul, indelibly, like the number tattooed on his arm.

B7456. In the concentration camp, he lost his father, Giacobbe, and his sister, Lucia, who entered with him and never left. Having escaped death at least a couple of times and re-emerged into the world of the living, he soon realizes that he remained there. He is still, and will remain as long as he lives, number B7456, the Jewish boy destined to pass through the Auschwitz-Birkenau chimney, lost in the wind "with a hundred others."

He will survive his ghosts for decades, never speaking of them, never to see them again, letting them lie deep in his soul. Until one day they take him back there, along with the schoolchildren. And Sami Modiano, from survivor, becomes a witness. He will tell his wife: "I understand why I survived! To tell the story of that horror, to pass on a testimony to others, on behalf of all those who didn't make it."

Sami will no longer remain silent; he will rush wherever he is invited: "From then on, I began to speak and tell my story, touring associations and schools throughout Italy and regretting not having started earlier. That was the reason I was spared, and so I vowed never to stop." Thus the dead of Auschwitz will not be forgotten: "Today I speak for them."

Renzo Agasso
NP March 2026