An Italian Holocaust survivor asks if she 'lived in vain'

For decades, Liliana Segre visited Italian classrooms to tell of her expulsion from school under Benito Mussolini's anti-Semitic racial laws, her doomed attempt to flee Nazi-controlled Italy, her deportation from Milan's train station to the death camps of Auschwitz . Her candid testimonies about gas chambers, tattooed arms, accidental atrocities and the murders of her father, grandparents and thousands of other Italian Jews made her the conscience and living memory of a country that often prefers not to be remembered.

Now she wonders if it was all wasted breath.

“Why did I have to suffer for thirty years of sharing the intimate things of my family, of my pain, of my despair? For whom? Why?” Ms. Segre, 93, with cotton-white hair, a memory of a steel cage and official status as a senator for life, said last week in her handsome Milan apartment, where she sat next to a police escort. She wondered not for the first time nowadays, whether 'I have lived in vain.'

Even as Ms Segre accepted an honorary doctorate on Holocaust Remembrance Day on Saturday, rising anti-Semitism and what she sees as a general climate of hatred have left her in a pessimistic mood.

The Hamas-led mass murder of Jews in Israel on October 7 revolted her, she said, and Israel's response in Gaza left her feeling “desperate,” as did what she saw as the exploitation of the conflict to spread anti-Semitism under the guise of a pro-Palestinian cause. In Europe, Moscow's aggression in Ukraine prompted her to ask about President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia: “What is this, another Hitler?” while the rise of the far right in France and Germany makes her feel sick.

In Italy, Ms Segre is dismayed by a recent mass meeting of right-wing extremists giving the fascist salute, by vile language against migrants whose fate reminds her of her own and by a right-wing government led by Giorgia Meloni, who convicted Italy's racial laws and the horrors of the Holocaust, but it itself grew up in parties born from the ashes of fascism.

As she mused on a cyclical view of history, Ms. Segre wondered if she had lived so long that history was repeating itself.

“It's not new,” she said, drawing a circle with her hands.

And so Mrs Segre has left the comfort of her sitting room – with a 'Reserved for Grandma' cushion on the armchair, family photos ('that's me and my dad'), paintings, books and stacks of opera CDs that she loves – to remember again. In television programs, at universities that receive honorary doctorates and at the Holocaust memorial in Milan, she once again tells a story she hoped she would never have to tell.

She was born in 1930 into a secular Jewish Milanese family and lost her mother to a tumor at a young age. Her father, Alberto Segre, who worked in the family's textile business, raised her with the help of his parents. He was so gentle, she said, that he stopped driving after accidentally hitting a beautiful bird on a mountain road.

An only child, she cherished her friends at school, where she excelled at reading but hated math. At night she went to sleep and listened to her father, who was always at home in the adjoining bedroom, turning the pages of his stamp collection.

When she was eight, Italy's racial laws came into effect and she was expelled from Mrs. Segre's public school. All but three of her classmates ignored her on the street as they listened to their mothers tell them it was “useless” to say hello. Her uncle, himself a committed fascist, became an enemy of the homeland.

Mr. Segre's faith in Italy to protect the family was exhausted. In 1943, he prepared a folder of valuable stamps and rolled a few diamonds into his waist to pay for a new life in Switzerland. They crossed the mountains, but in December a Swiss border guard pushed them back.

Mr. Segre threw his stamps and the diamonds in the mud to avoid handing them over to his captors. The Italians arrested them in Varese, not far from the border, and handed them over to the Nazis. She realized all was lost when they handcuffed him. “My father had beautiful hands,” she said.

On January 30, 1944, after weeks in San Vittore prison in Milan, Mrs. Segre, her father and more than 600 other Jews were transferred under cover of darkness to the underground track 21, intended for merchandise, in Milan's central station . Amid barking dogs loaded onto freight trains strewn with hay and equipped with a single bucket, they rolled out of town. They arrived in Auschwitz, Poland, in early February.

Most Jews were sent to the gas chambers and burned in ovens. Ms. Segre's father was placed in one row, she in the other. She never saw him again. The Nazis tattooed her with the number 75190.

During the day she worked in a munitions factory. At night she fought for blankets.

As the Soviets approached in January 1945, the Nazis forced her and tens of thousands of prisoners to march to Germany along a road paved with the dead. As the Germans took off their military uniforms and tried to melt away, she saw a gun on the ground. Her decision not to kill a guard, she said, was her birth as a “free woman” who was better than her captors.

“I was strong in my absolute weakness,” she said. But, she said, chuckling, “I might have shot him in the foot.”

After her liberation and return to Italy, she desperately searched for news about her father. An uncle who had converted to Catholicism arranged a private audience with him Pope Pius XII, where she asked for help finding her father. “He was very disturbed by my presence,” she said, recalling that when she began to kneel, he stopped her and said, “I am the one who should kneel before you.”

The questions about her father turned up nothing, and it was only years later, when she searched the Jewish documentation center in Milan, that she discovered that he died two months after arriving in Auschwitz.

Her life went on. She re-enrolled in school, feeling uncomfortable with her now younger classmates, and went on vacation with her maternal grandparents, who spent the end of the war in hiding. In the summer of 1948 she met Alfredo Belli Paci in Pesaro, on the east coast of Italy. He saw the tattoo on her arm and told her how he had spent years in a German prison camp because he refused to fight for Mussolini and his new Nazi-allied state after Italy switched sides in 1943.

He was 10 years older, Catholic and a lawyer. Her grandparents disapproved, but she saw him behind their backs. The couple married in 1951 and settled in Milan, where they prospered: he in his law practice, she in her family's textile business. They had three children, but she rarely discussed her past. Her husband told them not to ask.

But in the late 1970s, her husband became active in the Italian Social Movement, the far-right party founded by former fascists who sided with the Nazis. She hoped it was a passing flirtation, but when he ran for office they had a bitter fight.

“I fell into a depression,” she said, and days went by when she couldn't get out of bed. She finally gave him an ultimatum and one minute to make a decision: “Me or this.”

He chose her, and over the next decade she came to feel like she had an important story to tell. When her first grandchild was born, she said, she felt like she had finally emerged from a long fog. “I was different,” she said. “I was sixty, on the threshold of old age, and I felt I couldn't wait.”

She started telling her story in schools and continued to do so for thirty years. In January 2018, on the 80th anniversary of the enactment of Mussolini's racial laws, Ms Segre was buying a battery for her Swatch watch when she received a call from the Italian president's office. He had made her one of Italy's senators for life, the country's highest honor.

Ms. Segre has used her platform. When far-right party leader Matteo Salvini waved rosaries at political events in 2018, she said in parliament that campaigning with Catholic icons struck her as a “dangerous revival” of the “God is with us” mottos on Nazi uniforms. And in 2019, the year Italian officials decided online threats against her warranted a full-time police escort, she proposed a Senate committee against incitement to hatred.

Following Ms. Meloni's victory in the 2022 general election, Ms. Segre presided over the opening session that would elect Ignazio La Russa — who long had a bust of Mussolini in his home — president of the Senate. Ms. Segre said her office made her practice her speech “because they didn't know how I would behave.”

In her speech, she recalled that a hundred years had passed since the fascists marched on Rome. “It is impossible for me not to feel a kind of giddiness,” she said, “when I remember that same little girl, who on a day like this in 1938, desolate and lost, was forced by the racist laws to leave her primary school . school desk empty. And that that same girl, by some strange fate, ends up on the most prestigious bench in the Senate today.”

Last week, Mr. La Russa, who has condemned the Holocaust as evil and is a supporter of Israel, led officials and members of her committee to the Holocaust memorial Track 21, usually filled with school field trips to learn more about the site where Ms. S. Segre and so many others were deported, and so few of whom returned.

“Whether it helps or not, I don't know,” she said in her sitting room, opposite a painting of stamps that her father had commissioned and that her family had discovered and forced to buy back years after the war. “But it helped me because I felt the need to do it.”