Aleppo is not very far away — it is among us, buried deep in our consciences. We shudder with horror at images of killed civilians, but then we pretend not to know that the civilians who managed to escape from there are rotting in refugee camps on the doorstep of Europe. They are cannon fodder, the object of an exchange between civilised Europe and the regime of Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan: money and impunity in exchange for solving the Syrian problem. The refugees must stay far from our lives and our daily routines. That is what matters. It would be wonderful to be able to claim, as European citizens, that we do not want to be complicit, that we do not want to be perpetrators. Syrians — those who manage to escape — can be found in our railway stations, temporarily camped out on the journey taking them to northern Europe. Syrians would want to return to their land, were it not that for six years their homes have been the target of a war without end and without mercy.

This time we will not be able to say "we didn't know"

This morning Samuele, six years old, his eyes full of images from the news bulletin, said to me: "How wonderful it is, Mum, to have been born in a country without war." How wonderful, and how unjust. We ask Europe not to repeat the horrors of the past, when it did not help the Jews exiled from Hitler's Germany to reach safety. Today Aleppo is our new Auschwitz, but this time we will not be able to say "we didn't know." We ask Europe to receive Syrian refugees with humanity and dignity, we ask Russia to open a humanitarian corridor, and we ask all Italians not to look with suspicion at the migrant encountered in the street, not to say "let's help them in their own country," given that that very country is under bombs.