“Fascist regimes aided the extermination”

I address a warm greeting and thanks to the March of the Living, to its organizers, to all the participants, to the authorities present.

A special greeting to the survivors, precious witnesses of the truth.

We are here today to pay homage and remember the millions of citizens murdered by a bloody regime like the Nazis who, with the complicity of European fascist regimes, who handed over their fellow citizens to their executioners, committed a horrendous crime against humanity.

An atrocious crime that can know neither oblivion nor forgiveness.

In four years, from 1941 to 1945, hundreds of thousands of people, well over a million, were murdered in this complex because of their belonging to a faith, a culture, their beliefs or their condition.

In the Nazi camps, in addition to millions of Jews, the target of that inhuman horror machine, political opponents, Sinti, Roma, the disabled, homosexuals also died in the gas chambers, or from cold, fatigue, hunger and disease or, again, because they are victims of criminal experiments.

Innocent citizens from all parts of Europe were beastly translated to this place of death.

An immense cemetery without graves.

We can go to the Wall of Death but, if we think of the victims, we have to look up much further.

«You will go through the chimney» threatened the kapos and the guards of the lagers.

Poland found itself paying a very high price in terms of human lives during the Nazi occupation.

Between the autumn of 1943 and the last months of 1944, thousands of Italians were also deported here from Italy.

For almost all of them it was a journey of no return.

It is no coincidence that Poland and Italy are among the European nations most committed to preserving the memory of the Holocaust and promoting awareness of it among young people.

It is heartening to see that thousands of girls and boys give life to this march every year.

This year we are accompanied on this unforgettable experience by two Italian sisters who survived the horrors of Birkenau: Tatiana and Andra Bucci. With them, young students from my country.

Our thanks go to Tatiana and Andra.

Today more than ever, in the recurrence of themes and topics that poisoned the season of the 1930s with the raging Russian aggression against Ukraine, the Holocaust Remembrance remains a perennial warning that cannot be escaped.

Hatred, prejudice, racism, extremism, anti-Semitism, indifference, delirium, the will to power are lurking, they constantly challenge the conscience of individuals and peoples.

No yielding to manifestations of intolerance and violence, no retreat in the protection of fundamental rights and freedoms, the basis of our peaceful coexistence, can be admitted.

Anyone who attacks the international order founded on these principles must know that free peoples are and will be united and determined to defend them.

Dear survivors, dear girls and boys, authorities, today is Yom HaShoah day, Holocaust Remembrance Day.

Remembering is a dimension of commitment. It is proof that, against the heralds of oblivion, memory wins.

To affirm the pride of wanting to be “human persons”.

To repeat – and reiterate – “never again”.