Anne Frank, far from school and inside the attic where she was hiding with her family, wrote, perhaps without being fully aware of it, what today is the deepest meaning of the Day of Remembrance: What happened cannot be cancelled, but we can prevent it from happening again.

This corresponds to what one survivor of the extermination, Primo Levi, wrote: If understanding is impossible, knowing is necessary, because what happened can return, consciences can again be seduced and obscured: ours too.

The date is that of January 27, in which the countless victims of Nazi-fascism are honoured: men, women, children. Nearly a third of the Jewish people and countless members of other minorities, Poles, Roma, Sinti, Soviet prisoners of war, Jehovah’s Witnesses and other enemies of Nazi-fascism.

The Holocaust Remembrance Day was first established in 1996 by Germany, in 2000 in Italy, 5 years earlier than the international remembrance proclaimed by the UN.

On January 27, 1945, the Soviet troops of the Red Army broke down the gates of Auschwitz: the reality of the genocide was shown to the world, although the camp had been evacuated and partially razed to the ground, destroyed by the SS before the arrival of the Allies, but it was enough for the soldiers to see the near to death bodies of the 7,000 survivors, together with actual corpses, clothes, shoes, hair and countless other traces of the victims.

Today, decades later, the meaning of this date is certainly to commemorate the victims, but also, and above all for the school, to encourage the knowledge of one of the darkest chapters of our history so that it does not repeat itself.

Also “The school on the screen”, in a section entitled “Remembering is an exercise in memory”, proposes on this date a choice of film sources to be able to talk in class about the Holocaust, about racial laws approved under fascism, about the Italian persecution of Jewish citizens; and also, to tell of all those who had the strength to oppose the extermination project, even at the risk of their own lives.

Thus, on the web page of the project you will find films, docufilms, animations and related educational cards available to be easily used in the classroom, edited by Betty L’Innocente (teacher and screenwriter) and Francesca Caprino (Indire Researcher).

Find Below, the interviews with the two curators of the web section: