Where are we. The Shoah Memorial is located below the railway tracks of the Central Station of Milan, in a space originally used for commercial operations – loading and unloading of goods and mail for the Royal Post Office, which is conveniently located across the street from us. In 1912, Italian architect Ulisse Stacchini won the competition of the Italian railway with a project for the new central station. It was structured on two deliberately separate floors, to allow parallel but distinct management of the two activities – passenger transport upstairs and commercial transport below. The construction began in 1926 and took five years. With great pride, the Milan Central Station was inaugurated in 1931, along with the lower floor where we are standing right now: it was an area never consciously hidden, but unknown to the general public as it was industrial and only visited by employees. Between the end of 1943 and the beginning of 1945, this maneuvering area was taken by Nazi occupiers and fascist allies, becoming a starting point for the route to extermination for thousands of deportees. Following the strong anti-Jewish press campaign between 1937 and 1938, Jews had to first be identified in order to be persecuted. The census was one of the primary tools of the regime and discrimination: mandatory identification allowed the police to reconstruct Jewish family trees and map their places of residence. So on August 22, 1938, the general census of the Jews began and the identification process continued for the whole following month. In the autumn of the same year, 1938, the first Law Orders were issued, signed by Mussolini and King Vittorio Emanuele III, voted for unanimously by the Parliament, implementing the transition from social discrimination to legal discrimination of Italian Jews. Within a few months, Italian Jews saw themselves excluded from public schools, public employment, the Army, cultural activities, etc. With the Congress of Verona, held on November 14, 1943, the Jews who lived in the occupied areas became enemies of the state, and were ordered to be captured (including arrest, internment, confiscation of assets) and sent to death. Thanks to all the lists of identified Jews, obtained from Italian police stations, the SS, otherwise known as the Nazi forces, proceeded to quickly arrest the Jews living in Italian occupied territories, and later deported them from Italy.
The project. The idea of creating a Memorial, and not a museum, arises from the need to interpret the place of deportation primarily as a historical document. The Memorial is such because it is a place where a historical event took place, and it’s a witness of its own story. It is an authentic place of deportation from WWII, the only one left intact in Europe. The Morpurgo de Curtis architecture studio, that created the project of the Memorial, attempted to restore the place to its original appearance. The project is non-invasive: the installations do not damage the original structure, but establish a continuous dialogue with the spaces in which they are placed. The installations speak the same language of the place, but also interpret it, allowing us to pass from the enormity of the event to a subjective point of view. Even the materials used here anchor us to the place: the iron, the concrete and the stones. The only exception is the glass of the entrance doors: it symbolically reconnects us with the city and with the world. It invites people to look at the most uncomfortable parts of our past. The library, a vast frame of iron and glass, is right in the middle of the Memorial. On one side of it, there’s the past and memory with all its emotion, and on the other, there’s the present, modern life, study and dissemination of memory. We can not reflect on the present without being aware of the past.
