Auschwitz was a crime for which there
can be no forgetting or forgiving, President Sergio Mattarella
said as he visited the former Nazi death camp Tuesday.
Mattarella arrived in Auschwitz from Warsaw on the second day of
his state visit to Poland. After visiting the Auschwitz museum,
the head of state took part in the traditional March of the
Living in memory of the victims of the Holocaust. On this
anniversary, thousands of students from all over the world are
present at the Nazi camp. There is also a delegation from three
Italian high schools. Mattarella was accompanied on his visit by
the Italian Bucci sisters, among the few surviving witnesses of
the horror of the Holocaust.
"We are here today to pay homage and bear witness to the
millions of citizens assassinated by a bloody regime like the
Nazis who, with the complicity of the European fascist regimes
which handed over their citizens to the assassins, stained
themselves with an atrocious crime against humanity.
"A crime that cannot know forgetting or forgiving".
Mattarella also said "today is the day of Yom HaShoah, the day
of Remembrance of the Holocaust. Remembering is a dimension of
commitment. It is a demonstration that, against the heralds of
forgetting, memory wins. To affirm the pride of wanting to be
human persons. To reiterate 'never again'."
Mattarella went on to say "hate, prejudice, racism, extremism
and indifference, raving and the will to power are waiting in
ambush, they permanently challenge the conscience of persons and
peoples".
He said "in four years, from 1941 to 1945, in this facility more
than a million people were murdered, as a result of their
belonging to a faith, a culture, as a result of their
convictions or their condition. In the Nazi camps, as well as
millions of Jews, also political opponents, Sinti, Roma,
disabled, and homosexuals found death in the gas chambers, from
the cold, fatigue, hunger and disease or, yet again, because
they were the victims of criminal experiments.
"Innocent citizens of every country in Europe were taken as
beasts to this place of death. An immense cemetery without
graves".
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