Remembrance Day

[gothikmaus]

Picture source http://commons.wikimedia.org

The 27th January: "Remembrance Day", a day to remember the victims of Holocaust. On the 27th January 1945 the Allies opened the gates of the Auschwitz lager and the atrocities of the war seemed to disappear if compared to what was hidden behind those gates. It was like Pandora's box was opened and the whole world was suddenly aware of what level of sickness and perversion mankind was capable of.

Pretty much every national channel has a couple of programmes about it today. But very few people point out that in Italy, from 1938, we had racial laws like in Germany, that Jewish people were stripped of their civil rights, couldn't go to school, have a job, marry Italian citizens.

I went on and read the laws. All of them. The "race manifesto" was just plain grotesque:

[...] IV: The current population of Italy is, for the most part, of arian origin and arian culture.

If this hadn't caused the death of so many people, I would laugh. "Arian" isn't quite the first term that comes to mind if you're looking for adjectives to describe Italians.

But people don't talk about it. No, it's easier to forget and blame everything on the big bad Nazis. Italians, after all, are good people.


My Italian blog entry on the subject: Ricordare sì, ma ricordare tutto

Comments

[dienacht.livejournal.com]

I was pretty shocked by "Life is Beautiful" because no one does talk about what happened in Italy back then, like it never happened. Likewise with the atrocities the Japanese did in WWII. On a forum recently, someone posted info about the experiments the Japanese did on Chinese peasants and said "some of it actually made the nazi's look like pussies". But no one ever talks about that.

As awful as the Nazi's were, I feel bad for Germans having to live with the regret and shame of the Nazi's when there were many other nations doing the same things, while other atrocities go on today.

[gothikmaus.livejournal.com]

As much as I think "Life is beautiful" is one of the most overrated films ever, it had the merit of talking about a part of Italian history that is too often forgotten. Italians do have a tendency to put the blame on others and even in school many teachers say that Mussolini was sort of forced to apply racial laws because Hitler wanted it. WTF?