«Fascist regimes accomplices of horror»- Corriere.it

Auschwitz (Poland) – There was complicity. And those complicities are called fascism. Where Absolute Evil was unleashed, where ambiguities have no place, in Auschwitz, Sergio Mattarella speak of yesterday so that they also understand it today. European and therefore Italian fascism was an accomplice to the Horror, not an accident in history: «We are here today to pay homage and remember the millions of citizens murdered by a bloody regime like the Nazi one which, with the complicity of the European fascist regimes, who handed over their fellow citizens to the executioners, he was guilty of an atrocious crime against humanity”.

The sound of a siren in memory. The tears of boys who knew nothing. The flags that reflect the colors of the striped pajamas. The honor a 42 survivors “precious witnesses of the truth” who stand up, proud and tired, without talk applause but only in the eyes of those who wanted to come here. «The Sound of Silence» sung in the wind of the woods surrounding Auschwitz and Birkenau.

Block 4, block 5, block 21. The horror parades before the eyes of Sergio Mattarella, while walking through the puddled paths of the Lager of lagers. The president, traditionally silent, listens to the notes of Simon & Garfunkel and is speechless. Reality dominates him, his daughter Laura has a few moments of teary eyes: «Simply studying it, and I’ve done it for a long time, is impressive. But seeing it is another thing.’

It’s the day of field memoryin the field of memories. Mattarella spends three hours there, walks with the kids who have come from all over the world for the March of the Living which wants to remember the dead. Accompanying the head of state are two sisters who survived as children, Tatiana and Andra Bucci, who until the 1990s couldn’t talk about what they saw, let alone go back to see it again. There are also three school groups, from Latina, Pordenone and Ancona, students who follow him on this pilgrimage and ask him questions: how to keep his memory alive? What to do so that all this does not happen again? Mattarella takes a breath, between a display case that holds millions of hairs and another containing thousands of shoes, glasses, dentures, suitcases. “The thing you have to do, in turn, is transmit the memory. You too must pass it on to those who will come later».

The president stops at Wall of Death, where the deportees were shot, and then in front of the gallows of the hanged, in the children’s pavilion. «Today more than ever – says Mattarella – in the re-proposition of themes and topics that poisoned the season of the 1930s with the raging of the inhuman Russian aggression against Ukraine, the memory of the Holocaust remains a perennial warning that can be escaped.”

Put like this, his “never again” becomes even clearer: “Whoever attacks the international order founded on these principles must know that free peoples are and will be united and determined to defend them”. Ukraine is just a few hours away by carvery close.

THE major topical issues – Ukraine, migrants, international cooperation – were at the center of the meeting between Mattarella and the Polish prime minister Morawiecki. The head of government in Warsaw reiterated the importance of facing together the challenges posed by the ongoing conflict, including the strengthening transatlantic unity to avoid fragmentary thrusts. The President of the Republic reiterated that stop Russia it means avoiding the widening of the conflict.

On the matter migrantsMorawiecki said Belarus continues to attract migrants from the Middle East and then bring them in by land. Mattarella, on the other hand, renewed his appeal to the European Union because “the facts on migrants do not wait”.