One of the most respected voices of the Italian memory of the Shoah, Liliana Segre – one of the founders of the Shoah Memorial of Milan – relates with exceptional lucidity her experience as a young Jewish girl who was deported to Auschwitz when she was thirteen years old.
Liliana was liberated on 1 May 1945 from the Malchow camp, a sub-camp of the Ravensbrück camp. Of the 776 Italian children who were less than 14 years old when they were deported to Auschwitz, Liliana is one of the twenty-five who survived.
Together with her father and grandparents, Liliana attempted to hide and then to escape to Switzerland on 8 September 1943, the day that Italy surrendered to the Allies. They were captured at the border and suffered the humiliation of prison before being deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau, where she found herself alone to face the horrors of the death camp and forced labour. Surviving Auschwitz and the ensuing death march, she was the only member of her family to return to Milan.
After the Nazi horror, she lived with her maternal grandparents, originally from Marche, the only survivors from her family. In 1948 she met Alfredo Belli Paci, a Catholic, he too having been imprisoned in the Nazi concentration camps for having refused allegiance to the Italian Social Republic. They were married in 1951 and have three children.For many years, Liliana did not want to talk about her experiences publicly. She decided to break her silence in the early 1990s and since then has taken part in dozens of school assemblies and conferences of all types to tell her story to young people, in honour of the millions of others who shared much of it but did not live to tell their stories.
You can also read the full text of his interview here.