FROM AUSCHWITZ TO THE SENATE
VWHEN ITALIAN Holocaust survivor Liliana Segre received the Covid-19 vaccine in Milan last month, the 90-year-old became the poster girl for the over-80s inoculation campaign. Unfortunately, Segre, who in 2018 was appointed Senator for Life for her work promoting Holocaust awareness, also became the target of the vilest antisemitic abuse.
A Facebook page featuring Segre baring her arm and inviting the rest of the population to do the same soon filled with insulting and threatening comments that profoundly shocked the country. Segre’s reaction to this? “I have nothing to say to the haters.” This episode is just the latest in a long hate campaign against Segre that in November 2019 saw her being given police protection after a barrage of death threats. The internet is awash with hate mail towards her, yet she dismisses it bluntly: “I feel sorry for these people. If they are not able to do anything else than send death threats to a 90-year-old… they should use their time better: watching TV, taking a walk.”
Segre’s back-story goes a long way to explain why cowards who lurk within the dark recesses of the web don’t faze her.
Born into a well-to-do Jewish family in Milan, she lost her mother when she was one. At eight the promulgation of the 1938 Racial Laws discriminating against the Jews saw her expelled from school. At 13 she
This episode is just the latest in a long hate campaign against her’
and her father were deported to Auschwitz where he was soon murdered.
Segre remained at Auschwitz until January 1945 when, following the camp’s evacuation, she and the surviving inmates embarked in what is known as the ‘death march’ to Germany.
She remained in the Malchow camp until it was liberated by the Red Army in May 1945. Of the 776 Italian under14s deported to Auschwitz only 25 survived. She was one of them – “a skeleton of a 14-year-old girl, hairless and nameless, alone in the world”.
Years later she would describe herself and the other young women from the camps with these words: “We were young, but we looked old. Without sex, without age, without breasts, without menstruation, without underpants. That’s how you take away a woman’s dignity.”
With her father’s family completely wiped out, Segre went to live with her maternal grandparents. A few years later, while on holiday, she met her husband, Alfredo. It was love at first sight and the beginning of a new, happy chapter in her life with a loving husband and three children.
Like many survivors Segre didn’t talk about her traumatic past for hatTamany years – 45 years, in fact. She has said that what finally enabled her to finally talk about it was the joy of becoming a grandmother.
From then on Segre made it her life’s mission to remind the world of the horror of the camps. In the early 1990s she started taking her testimony to schools and participating in events and documentaries on the Holocaust. She stopped giving public witness at the end of 2020.