Holocaust survivor and life Senator
Liliiana Segre on Thursday received the Hypatia-Female
Excellence Prize from a festival that has been recognising
women's achievements in Genoa since 2010.
"I'm extremely proud" said the 93-year-old who was deported to
Auschwitz as a girl, "especially to be compared to Hypatia," a
IV-V CE philosopher, astronomer and mathematician lynched by a
Christian mob in Alexandria in 415 CE and who is the first
female scientist whose life and achievements have been detailed.
Born in 1930 into a Milanese family of Jewish origins, in 1938
Segre was expelled from her primary school after the
promulgation of the Italian Racial Laws.
In 1943, she was arrested with her family and deported to the
Auschwitz concentration camp.
The only survivor among her relatives, with the end of the World
War II in 1945, she returned to Milan.
After decades of silence, in the 1990s she started to speak to
the public, especially young students, about her experience.
In 2018 President Sergio Mattarella named her Senator for life
for outstanding patriotic merits in the social field.
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