Shoah, Prime Minister Meloni’s message: “Let’s cultivate our commitment to memory every day”

«78 years ago on January 27, with the demolition of the gates of Auschwitz, the world saw with its own eyes the horror of the Shoah, the deliberate Nazi plan for the persecution and extermination of the Jewish people. Today Italy pays homage to the victims, clings to their loved ones, honors the courage of all the just who risked or lost their lives to save others and bows down to the survivors for the tireless service of witness they carry forward”. Thus begins the message written by the Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni dedicated to the day of remembrance.

“The Shoah represents the abyss of humanity. An evil that has also deeply touched our nation with the infamy of the racial laws of 1938. It is our duty to ensure that the memory of those events and what happened is not reduced to a mere exercise in style because, as Ferruccio De Bortoli recently recalled from the columns of the “Corriere della Sera”, “memory is like a garden. It needs to be taken care of. Otherwise it will become overgrown with weeds. And the flowers of the righteous will disappear. Devoured”.

This is exactly the challenge that all of us – institutions, civil society, educational agencies, information bodies and mass media – face: to cultivate our commitment to memory every day, to raise awareness of it in the younger generations and to intensify the effort to fight anti-Semitism in any form in which it manifests itself”.