Identity, true identity and memory. The shaping of dignity and humanity
TORONTO – Identity, true identity and memory. Those are not my words; rather, they flowed from the lips of the leader of Italy’s diplomatic corps in Canada, Ambassador Alessandro Cattaneo, as he introduced the info documentary Liliana to a brave crowd in Toronto, on Tuesday, January 27. I say brave because of the unforgiving winter weather and the political climate of division and anti-Semitism that has, in recent years, manifested itself in this city in forms of hatred not seen in decades.
Liliana is a real, live, person and personality, an Italian Holocaust survivor, now Senator for life in Italy’s Parliament. In my previous “career”, representing Canadians from a constituency that had one of the largest concentrations of Italians and Jews in the country, I learned to pay attention to the choice of words selected by people of substance, especially when they were bringing others under one-fold. It was intriguing that a foreign diplomat to this country would venture a lesson on human dignity, acceptance of difference and of building on those transformations.
As with all things done well, Ambassador Cattaneo, allowed the subject, Senatrice Liliana Segre, to tell her own story, rather reluctantly, without animosity or any moralizing warnings associated with victimization – both would have been justifiable. She offered only deferential, matter of fact, calm responses to the camera guided by filmmaker, Ruggero Gabbai.
“My [crime] was being born”, she said about her identity. Orphaned at a very early age, her father enrolled her in a school run by Catholic nuns, even though the family were avowed agnostics religiously, but known as [non-observant] Jewish. The promulgation of racial laws staring in 1938 upset the balance that had theretofore mandated de facto equality and imposed another, “real identity” which would determine how people might deal with her.
At age thirteen, along with her father she was imprisoned, then sent off to Auschwitz. Her real identity was the number tattoo-ed, on her arm. That branding effaced her past, her heritage, the aspirations her parents had for her or those she had started to develop herself. That number identified her as mere chattel to be used, degraded, abused and discarded/killed.
Were she to survive, her memories, the experiences in her future, would be of abuse in hellish, psychological degradation. One day, her father, who she could see in the distance beyond the fence in another section of the enclosure, like millions of others entered the slaughterhouse never to emerge again. Just for having been born.
She, on the other hand, “survived” and was able to fashion out a life to which her adult children and grandchildren bore testimony; but, for fifty years she muted her memories until she took up the mission to help others in a therapeutic camp with on-going by sharing her memories and her life. She did so for close to twenty years, when the President of Italy Sergio Mattarella bestowed upon her a different identity: Senator in the republic that emerged from the ruins of a failed society some eighty years ago.
The radiant image of an elegant, elderly woman with outstretched arms to meet the unknown on a windswept beach is both encouraging and triumphant – a symbolism certainly different from the often-staple formulaic reflections of people who attend remembrance ceremonies.
Ambassador Cattaneo was right, only in Italy could one imagine the importance of three phases of human dignity coming together through identity, real identity and [nurturing] memory – and give it life and substance.
In Canada, it is to the credit of Italian officials like him, his colleagues Consul General Luca Zelioli and his team that brought the Italian community together with their Jewish neighbors like Minister Michael Kestner and Israeli Consul Yair Castel in a celebration of resilience, togetherness and recognition of common bonds.
Here below is the photogallery from the event (pics: Corriere Canadese and Embassy of Italy in Canada)
