Senator for life Liliana Segre, who survived deportation to Auschwitz as a child, receives 200 hate messages and threats every day because of her accounts of the Shoah: from today, by decision of the Milan prefecture, she will go about accompanied by two bodyguards.
Liliana Segre, senator for life, survivor of the Auschwitz extermination camp, and primary signatory of the motion to establish a parliamentary commission against hatred, racism and antisemitism, will from today onwards be accompanied on her every movement by two carabinieri. The decision was taken by the Milan prefecture, which deemed that Segre may be in danger owing to the repeated, daily threats she has received online and to a recent banner displayed against her by the far-right group Forza Nuova.
On Thursday morning Liliana Segre appeared for the first time at a public engagement — an exhibition set up in the museum of the Teatro La Scala in Milan — accompanied by two uniformed officers, and she prudently refrained from commenting on the development. Her son, the lawyer Luciano Belli Paci, did however admit in an interview that "we now feel safer."
It is the kind of news destined to leave public opinion feeling bitter rather than reassured: on the threshold of the third decade of the twenty-first century, more than 70 years after the horrors of the Second World War came to an end, the wind of antisemitism is blowing once again. "It is sad that a person of this age, a survivor of the Nazi-Fascist horror, should in these years and in this country be threatened. It is, however, a necessary protective measure, because she must be able to continue her work in every square and venue," comments the president of the Union of Italian Jewish Communities, Noemi Di Segni.
That very same day, at the Chamber of Deputies, President Roberto Fico had a scheduled meeting with Israel's ambassador to Italy, Dror Eydar: both commented on what had happened in deeply concerned tones. The diplomat, speaking on behalf of his country, expressed "dismay at the news of the police protection. Our solidarity goes to her, along with our gratitude for her commitment against racial hatred. An 89-year-old survivor under police protection symbolises the danger that Jewish communities still face in Europe today." For Fico, it represents "a defeat for all of us."
Liliana Segre was born in Milan in 1930 into a secular Jewish family. At the age of 8 she was forced to leave school following the entry into force of the racial laws in 1938. In 1944, in the midst of the war, she was deported to Auschwitz together with her father, who was killed there. She was instead transferred to two other concentration camps in Germany before being liberated, along with a very small number of other survivors, by the Soviet army in 1945. Her accounts and experiences are gathered in several books of which she was co-author, all published from the 1990s onwards following a very lengthy personal process of coming to terms with the past, and also in the theatrical production Come un ermellino nel fango.
Recently, citing data from the Observatory on Antisemitism based at the Fondazione centro di documentazione ebraica contemporanea (Cdec), Segre revealed that she receives approximately 200 hate messages and threats a day via social networks. She herself promoted a motion in the Senate to establish a parliamentary commission on hatred, racism and antisemitism, which last week was passed but without the votes of all the centre-right parties: notable in particular was the decision not even to join in the applause given by the chamber of Palazzo Madama to Senator Segre at the end of the vote. The most recent episode dates to 5 November, when Forza Nuova had protested with a banner ("Sala ordina, l'antifà agisce, il popolo subisce") against the decision by Milan's mayor Beppe Sala to take part in a meeting with students about the Shoah.
