(21 gen) “Siamo liberi!” are the last words of the book by the same name by Gustavo Meltzeid. The text will be featured at the Italian Cultural Institute of Budapest on occasion of the International Holocaust Remembrance Day, scheduled for January 27 (at 6pm in the Federico Fellini Hall). Guglielmo Meltzeid, son of the author, will be present. “Siamo Liberi!” (Genesi Editrice, 2014) is a real diary of Meltzeid’s captivity in the Fossoli and Bolzano camps first, and then in the Mauthausen camps. The sculptor, born in Hungary in 1895, moved to Italy after the end of World War I to pursue his artistic profession. The pages of the diary were written immediately after the Liberation in a garden in Vistrorio (Torino), during which time the author is slowly regaining his strength after ten months of imprisonment in the concentration camp of Mauthausen. The pages had been preserved by the family in a closed envelope, in a show of modesty and respect for so many sufferings and pains. Some of these pages were mimeographed for educational purposes forty years ago and reformatted for publication later, with a presentation by Bruno Vasari, then president of Aned Turin (the National Association of Former Political Prisoners in Nazi camps). Meltzeid drew the sketches inside the prison camp, risking his life to do si. Some, more detailed, are a reworking after the liberation. The diary is a unique document of life in Mauthausen, for those who spoke German, those who worked different fields and thus knew the compound, those who saw, those who drew, but most of all for those who survived and immediately after wanted to tell their torments and memories. Meltzeid would never speak again of his captivity. (Red)