The game of the goose

There are only a few days left until the end of the Second World War. A young fifteen-year-old Italian Jew, interned in one of the subcamps of the Ravensbrück concentration camp, serial number 75190, reduced to weighing 30 kg, finds herself in front of the head of the camp on the run. He has just thrown away his gun and uniform and is trying to escape the imminent arrival of the Soviets. That gun is a few steps away from her, she has all the human reasons to want revenge: she lost her family, she underwent three selections, in one of these she lost a friend, she has, despite her young age, a year on her shoulders of forced labor in a munitions factory (she later remembered that she was "lucky" to do that job because she was inside the factory which protected her a little from the cold, all the others who worked outdoors had died from cough and bad weather), survived a death march. Her first thought is to gather the little strength she has left to fire. But then the idea of ​​not pulling the trigger prevails, she doesn't want to continue in the chain of hatred. After returning home to Italy, she realized she was one of 25 Italian survivors deported to Auschwitz under the age of 14 out of 776 inmates. Her return reveals to her all the effort of a reintegration that cannot undo the tragedy experienced. An apparently incommunicable experience that often isolates those who have experienced those immense hardships. This seems to be the case for that girl too. At least until 1948, when she meets a man ten years her senior on the Pesaro coast. Then a gap opens in the wall of incommunicability, the past is welcomed, wrapped up and embraced by a gaze full of that love capable of saving. They fall in love, they get married. Her name is Liliana Segre, his name is Alberto Belli Paci.

It is worth listening to Liliana Segre's story again, not only to remember the tragedy of the Holocaust, but also to discover the saving value of love and the determining meaning of our individual and collective choices.

We have been saying it and writing it for some time, we are in a critical historical phase, unprecedented for our generations. We find ourselves as if we were inside a game of goose when, after having advanced about ten squares, we are forced to go back to the starting point. But in our case, the unpredictability of a roll of the dice has nothing to do with it. In recent years, with an impetuous acceleration due to Covid, the invasion of Ukraine and all the recent outbreaks of war, our society seems to have gone back many, too many, boxes regarding the culture of peace, dialogue of respect for human dignity.

Compared to a few years ago, the discussion on rearmament and violence as a solution to crises is no longer a taboo. Even the value of respect for diversity seems to retreat in the face of suspicion, distrust and sovereignism. Everyone is potentially an enemy: after all, as some eminent politicians say, how can we remain herbivores among so many carnivores?

Perhaps among the many reasons for these worrying deviations, there is a weakened historical awareness which, since the voice of the witnesses of the Second World War has faded, is facilitating the spread of revisionist theses that we seemed to have overcome forever, at least in Europe. For this reason it is necessary to preserve those voices that remind us that there are no obligatory paths, that there are always alternatives. That you can always choose peace, non-violence, that the chains of hatred can be broken.


Renato Bonomo
NP May 2024