The Place

GROUND FLOOR AND MEZZANINE

After passing through the main entrance on Piazza Edmond J. Safra 1, the visitors find themselves in a hall dominated by a long wall bearing the word “Indifferenza” 1 , in huge letters followed by a gash, the quintessence – according to Liliana Segre, who was deported from this place – of why the Shoah was possible. This initial admonition stays with the visitor for the entire duration of the visit to the Memorial. A long ramp leads from the entrance level up to the mezzanine, taking visitors around the end of the Wall of Indifference and out of sight, into the heart of the Memorial. A reception area and information desk is located at the end of the ramp, with a coatroom and restrooms at the rear. The tour of the Memorial itself begins in the third bay.

The first permanent installation encountered by visitors – the first stop on the guided tour – is the Observatory 3 and a video by Istituto Luce illustrating the original purpose of the area and why, hidden away from public view, it was so ideally suited to the plans of the Nazi occupiers. They requisitioned the area in September 1943 and used it until Italy was finally liberated in 1945 to create the “special trains” bound for deportation camps, concentration camps, or death camps. Below the walkway there is a symbolic plot of stones 3 that evokes both the bed of the train tracks and the Jewish tradition of placing a stone in memory of the deceased. In the second bay, behind the Rooms of Testimony where video interviews with survivors are shown, there is a space for temporary exhibitions dedicated to Bernardo Caprotti. The partition walls built after the War between the third bay and the track area have been removed to allow access to the platform where the deportees were loaded onto trains 2 and the track area.

Here the visitors will find the original livestock cars 4 into which the prisoners were forced amidst shouts, screams and snarling dogs. Some 60 to 80 people were packed into each car – women, men, children, the elderly – who would travel for days under inhuman conditions. Loaded with their human cargo and bolted shut, the cars were then rolled onto a transfer table and moved sideways to a railcar elevator 5 . Each car was then lifted out of the bowels of the station into the open air on a siding between Tracks 18 and 19, just outside the enormous canopy of the Central Station. Once all the cars were assembled on this siding, the train departed “for an unspecified destination”.

Below, on another track near the railcar elevator, visitors come to the Wall of Names 6 , with stones  6 recording the dates and destinations of the trains set into the floor before it. At the other end of the platform, a spiral staircase leads to the Place of Reflection 7 , a space in the form of a truncated cone where visitors can stop, think, share, pray. The project also envisages a dedicated library with a capacity of some 45,000 volumes, a space for temporary exhibitions, a bookshop, Fondazione offices and service facilities, giving onto Piazza Safra: this part of the Memorial is still under construction.

UNDERGROUND LEVEL 

This level features a 200-seat auditorium for encounters and discussions, or generally for conferences, conventions or historical, cultural or social presentations. In the future, it will also contain the archives and book depository – the “Room of Memorials” – for the library on the upper floor.