Jan. 20 – January 27 is the “International Holocaust Remembrance Day”, a day in which the whole world remembers the extermination and persecution of the Jews and of the Italian military and political deportees to Nazi camps. On 27 January 1945, exactly seventy years ago, Soviet Red Army troops arrived in the Polish town of Oswiecim – known by its German name of Auschwitz – and revealed to the world the horror of the genocide. For this important commemoration, dedicated to the victims of religious and racial persecution conducted in Europe during the Second World War, the Italian Institute of Culture in Cologne is organizing a special appointment, scheduled for Tuesday at 7pm, with Colonel Gaspare Cilluffo and Professor Giorgio Sacerdoti. The two will discuss the tragic events that took place between 1943 and 1945 in northern Italy. Cilluffo is the author of a book on the history of the Guardia di Finanza in Milan (“La Guardia di Finanza a Milano: storia, tradizioni, personaggi e curiosità delle Fiamme gialle operanti nel capoluogo lombardo e nella sua provincia dal XVIII secolo” ed. Selecta, 2011). He will reconstruct the tragic deportation of many Italian Jews through the evocation of the action of the Guardia di Finanza, several of which were in turn deported. Sacerdoti, Professor of International Law at Bocconi University, lawyer and president of the CDEC, Center for Contemporary Jewish Documentation in Milan, will talk about the testimony of a family that lived firsthand those dramatic events and that has been narrated in the book “Nel caso non ci rivedessimo” (Archinto, 2013).
