Mattarella visits Auschwitz: “Fascist regimes handed over their fellow citizens to the executioners”

The President of the Republic Sergio Mattarella arrived in Auschwitz from Warsaw on the second day of his visit to Poland. The head of state, after visiting the Auschwitz museum, takes part in the traditional March of the Living in remembrance of the victims of the Holocaust.

In the Nazi camp thousands of students from all over the world and a delegation from three Italian high schools. Sergio Mattarella is accompanied on his visit by the Bucci sisters, among the few witnesses still alive of the horror of the Holocaust.

“We saw hair, shoes, suitcases, crockery. Each of these things was a person taken away from life for no reason, only out of hatred, racism, anti-Semitism, prejudice. It is a horror so great that it is unimaginable. Coming here and transmitting the feelings that derive from it is important for a future of peace» said President Mattarella speaking in Auschwitz with some Italian students. “The thing you have to do is pass on the memory in your turn. You too must pass it on to those who will come later».

“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 an atrocious crime against humanity” he said the head of state again.
«In four years, from 1941 to 1945, over a million people were murdered in this complex, because of their belonging to a faith, a culture, because of their beliefs or their condition. In the Nazi camps, in addition to millions of Jews, political opponents, Sinti, Roma, the disabled, homosexuals also died in the gas chambers, from cold, fatigue, hunger and disease or, again, because they were victims of criminal experiments . Innocent citizens of every country in Europe were beastly translated to this place of death. An immense cemetery without graves.’