Consider that this was:
I command you these words.
Carve them in your heart
Staying at home while walking down the street,
going to bed, getting up.
Repeat them to your children.
Primo Levi
This journey into memory begins on Tuesday 25th January with the departure of the two Memory Trains (Yellow and Blue). Together with the friend Francesco Renda (of Gay and Lesbian Action Florence) I am included in the delegation of local administrators, regional deputies, regional officials, and student parliamentarians.
The journey, both there and back, will be very long. Almost twenty hours, alternating with stops at the borders of Austria, the Czech Republic, and Poland for technical problems and document checks.
Auschwitz welcomed us on the morning of the 26th with heavy snow and biting cold. Oswiecim (the Polish name for Auschwitz) comes into view and Camp No. 1 (with the SS headquarters and the building of camp commander Rudolf Hoss) opens with the cynical and chilling image of the iron gate surmounted by the writing “Arbei macht frei”, work makes you free, the proportion of Nazi sadism. In front of the "Wall of Death", where rebels, military prisoners and anyone who broke military rules were shot, the President speaks Claudio Martini. Next door is Block 11, infamous for its underground chambers where unspeakable tortures were carried out. There are nearly 1,400 people there, mostly students.
Many kids ask us curiously about the meaning of the big pink triangle that we carry, pinned to our coats. We speak with emotion about the deportations of homosexuals. The horror of Nazi barbarity is reiterated, as is the desire not to limit historical research and knowledge, however painful, of that period. So that what happened never happens again. At the end of the commemoration, Francesco and I give Martini a pink triangle, to thank him and urge him not to give up his resolve.
Auschwitz is the symbol of all Nazi-fascist persecution, including that of homosexuals, even though only a few hundred pink triangles were deported here (the most "specialized" camps were Sachsenhausen and Flossenburg). On the way back, with their heads down, with the silence (The group is in the distance.) The enormity of what happened is palpable, and amidst a gust of icy wind, we seem to hear the moans of the million people killed here (along with Birkenau). We look at the hair, shoes, and clothes of the men, women, and children who were killed. The photos of the children forced into adult labor just to have a chance of survival. Many didn't make it. A few had their lives indelibly marked. They explain to us the deadly mechanism used by the Nazis. Prussian gas. A painful way to die.
The 27th is dedicated to the meeting with the surviving Italian and Polish veterans to the extermination camps at the Krakow Sports Hall. The moving testimony of two sisters (Andra and Tatiana Bucci) from Rijeka, deported to Auschwitz at the ages of 4 and 6 along with their entire family, is shared. They miraculously escaped the gas chambers. We then hear the testimony of a Polish man who worked in the crematoria and gas chambers. In his voice, broken by emotion, we see the anguish and desperation of someone forced to trade his own life for the murder of hundreds of thousands of people. Francis speaks on behalf of the LGBT community about our persecution from the stage. His few moving words are heard in a shocking silence.
In the evening after dinner we go to check the condition of the local GLBT people in the city of Krakow where we're staying (since there are no hotels near the camps). The situation is disheartening, not in terms of numbers, but in terms of the lack of understanding of gay life in the city. The hangouts are all private clubs (bars with darkrooms and saunas). There's not even a hint of an association. It feels like Italy thirty years ago. We're told that the authorities' attitude toward them borders on harassment. Years pass, but gays and lesbians continue to be persecuted.
On the morning of the 28th we visit the largest extermination camp in history: Birkenau (Auschwitz II). Most of the barracks and crematoria are unusable, having been blown up by the retreating Nazis. Birkenau is less emotionally compelling, at least on the surface. However, it conveys a sense of the perfection of the extermination mechanism (the connection between the railway network, the deportees' barracks, and the gas chambers) and its immense scale. We break away from the group and attempt a separate reading of the camp. Braving the snow, we approach the block where Dr. Mengele conducted his infamous experiments. A stone slab... perhaps the operating table? We don't know, and we sadly head toward the exit.
In the evening, tired and sad, we watched the show, offered by the Region, of both sad and funny Jewish songs dedicated to the Shoah.
The following days (the 29th and 30th) are dedicated to visiting Krakow's historic sights and completing return procedures. References to the episcopal sites of Karol Wojtyla (the current Pope John Paul II) and Poland's deeply Catholic tradition, which also fostered a widespread culture of homophobia, are inevitable. Anyone who has visited these places of remembrance cannot help but return home speechless. Anyone preparing to visit them should remember Primo Levi's appeal. In a few years, we will no longer have the precious presence of those who directly experienced these horrors. This is where the importance of memory and historical research comes in. Why is it important to say? “Never again” But we must create the conditions so that these human aberrations can truly never happen again. Even after Auschwitz, humanity has relapsed into very similar episodes, from Burma to the former Yugoslavia. True knowledge of the past and conditions of justice among all peoples are essential to achieving this primary historical objective.
Andrea Panerini
