Yad Vashem Memorial

6.806 men, women and children were murdered by the Nazis and the fascists only because they became to a culture and a religion. "For racial reasons", wrote the police on the files when they arrested the Jews and took them to a journey without return into the lager. Then 322 other people were killed or committed suicide out of fear on Italian soil. In the end, 2,000 were deported from the island of Rhodes which was occupied by Italy. 


Liliana Picciotto, a historian at CDEC, the Italian Jewish Documentation Center, since 25 years, patiently reconstructed all their events and presented them to Yad Vashem's President Yisrael Meir Lau, former chief ashkenazite Rabbi of Israel. In Picciotto's opinion, collecting those data besides a job uniting scientific research and human pity, also represents "an ethical commitment carried out determinedly to restitute an identity to each individual and build a sort of a nominal call to our conscience". 


"The cerimony at Yad Vashem - explains journalist Jesurum in the Corriere della Sera - is made even more puzzling by the recent death in Rome of Schlomo Venezia, one of the few Auschwitz survivors and one of the extremely few witnesses to the Sonderkommandos, the groups of deportees compelled to remove corpses from gas chambers and take them into the ovens. As well as one of the very few men able to stop the violence of denial with the sole force of his testimony.