Liliana Segre

Looking back on the Holocaust, what seems very hard to understand, for both survivors and later generations, is how integrated many Jewish communities across Europe were, and how these normal lives could be so completely destroyed in a matter of years.

Liliana Segre, for example, lived happily in Milan with her father Alberto and his parents. She went to a public Italian school where she liked to hang out with her friends, enjoyed reading, and didn’t like maths.

And, quite simply, it wasn’t long before she was expelled from her school, ignored by most of her friends and taunted by former classmates. She was eight when Mussolini passed the anti-Jewish Racial Laws in 1938, and, in turn, discovered – like many other children from secular families – that she was Jewish. Until then, it had meant nothing to her, other than that her and a few others played in the corridor while the rest had religion class. Now it meant she could no longer attend school. It was incomprehensible to a child her age, and made her worry she herself had done something wrong.

In response to the expulsion of Jewish children from schools, private Jewish schools were set up around Italy. Liliana’s father, Alberto, wasn’t interested. With the exception of their heritage, nothing in their day-to-day lives had much to do with Judaism. Her Catholic aunt’s suggestion that she get baptised was taken up: Liliana was taken into the school of nuns at the Institute of St Marcellina convent. As Liliana was being baptised, she turned to look at her father. He was crying behind a pillar in the church.

Two years later, when Mussolini announced Italy’s entry into the war, other Jews in Milan began to emigrate. The Segre family, however, stayed.

In 1943, the Nazis occupied northern Italy. Liliana and her father tried to escape, but, by then, it was too late.

Arrest and deportation

On 7 December 1943, Liliana and her father tried to seek asylum in Switzerland. Almost as soon as they crossed the border, they were stopped by the Swiss guards and sent back to Italy, where they were immediately arrested.

Liliana spent the next two months in several prisons around Milan: Varese, Como and San Vittore, where she was reunited with her father for forty days, in the section of the prison reserved for Jewish prisoners. She was glad to be with her father, to be able to hold his hand again and not be alone in the prison. On 30 January 1944, they were driven to Milan central railway station. They were forced onto crowded cattle cars and deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Seven days after arriving, Liliana was separated from Alberto. She never saw him again.

Liliana, who was tall for a thirteen-year-old, passed the selection. She was soon forced to undress and given a striped uniform. A prison guard tattooed an identification number on her arm. Her hair was not shaved at first – just covered with a red headscarf someone gave to her. She still has that scarf today. ‘We became Stücke, pieces,’ she said.

'...I had a very individual German vocabulary that accompanied me throughout my imprisonment.

It consisted of just a few words, but they may say more than many speeches:

crying
fear
punch
snow
hunger
bread
pain
move!
alone
seven-five-one-nine-zero.'

For a year, Liliana was forced to work in an ammunition factory in Auschwitz.

She was not present in Auschwitz when the camp was liberated on 27 January. A few days earlier, Liliana, along with 60 000 other people, had been hastily evacuated by SS troops who led prisoners on a long march back to Germany in an effort to cover up their crimes. Forced to travel through the snow at a brutal pace, many perished from exhaustion or were shot in what are now known as the death marches. During the march, she met a woman who had met her grandparents in the concentration camp. They had thought Liliana was safe in Switzerland. Liliana had thought they were at home. They had, in fact, been deported after her, and gassed on arrival.

Liliana spent two weeks in the Ravensbrück camp in Germany before being moved to smaller camps, first to the neighbouring Jugendlager (youth camp), and then to Malchow.

When defeat was obvious, Nazi forces evacuated the camp. Liliana saw the Nazi commandant of the Malchow camp throw his gun aside, take off his uniform, and change into civilian clothes. For a moment, she thought about picking up the gun and killing him, in revenge. In the end, she told herself to choose and honour life.

After the war

To hell and back again.

When the war ended, Liliana was a shadow of her former self. Fourteen years old and just 32 kilos, she narrowly avoided succumbing to an infection with some penicillin administered to her by American soldiers.

She returned to Milan. Her possessions were all gone and she couldn’t go home – another family now lived there. When the doorman realised who the skeletal girl he mistook for a beggar was, he screamed.

She moved in with her maternal grandparents.

I was a child who became invisible. And this happened to me even after the war. When I, by chance, survived and returned to Milan, where the ruins were still smouldering, I met old schoolmates who had not seen me in years. They asked me, “Segre, where did you go? I haven’t seen you at school."

I was a wounded girl, a wild girl, a girl who no longer knew how to eat with a fork and knife because I had been accustomed to fressen, not essen — eating like an animal, not like a person... I was even criticised by those who loved me and wanted me to be the well-mannered bourgeois girl I had once been.

Speech at the European Parliament, 29 January 2020

In 1948, she met Alfredo Belli Paci at the Pesaro seaside. He had spent the war in several German prison camps for refusing to swear allegiance to Mussolini. When he saw her Auschwitz tattoo, he recognised it for what it was. They were married three years later.

For many years, Liliana did not speak to anyone, including her children, about what had happened to her, except for her husband and a friend she had met in Auschwitz. ‘It was better’, she said, ‘not to talk, than to talk and not be understood.’

After forty years of silence, and a period of severe depression, Liliana felt that she had to tell people what had happened to her. She went back to the beginning: to the St Marcellina convent. There, she told her story to a small group of nuns.

She hasn't stopped talking about what happened to her and her family since. Over the years, the size of the groups has grown, and she now mainly addresses schools and universities.

For this, President Sergio Mattarella honoured her as Senator for Life in 2018. It was a great honour for Liliana. This recognition has, however, come with its corresponding threats. The 94-year-old Holocaust survivor is under constant protection owing to threats against her life. She won’t let this stop her. ‘I cannot experience again being expelled from school. I am free. If someone wants to kill me so be it, but I won’t run away anymore.’

Liliana’s message to Europe

It is hard to remember these things. I have to say that I have been speaking in schools for thirty years and now I feel a very strong psychological difficulty to continue, even though it is my duty to do so, and it would be until I die, because I have seen those colours, I have smelled those smells, I have heard those cries, I have met people in that Babel of languages that today I can only remember here, where so many languages meet in peace, because it was only by finding common words that it was possible to communicate with the comrades who came from all over Europe occupied by the Nazis.