Amnon Weinstein, an Israeli luthier who restored violins belonging to Jews during the Holocaust so that musicians around the world could play them in hopeful, melodic tribute to those silenced in the Nazi death camps, died on March 4 in Tel Aviv. He was 84.

His death in a hospital was confirmed by his son Avshalom Weinstein.

Mr. Weinstein was the founder of Violins of hope, an organization that provides violins he has restored to orchestras for concerts and educational programs commemorating the Holocaust. The instruments have been played in dozens of cities around the world, including Berlin, at an event celebrating the liberation of the Auschwitz concentration camp.

“Violins of Hope, it’s like a huge forest of sounds,” he said in 2016 PBS documentary. “Each sound represents a boy, a girl and men and women who will never speak again. But the violins, when played, will speak for them.”

There are more than 60 Holocaust-era violins in his collection.

Some belonged to Jews who carried them in suitcases to concentration camps and then had to play them in orchestras as prisoners marched to the gas chambers. Others were played to pass the time in Jewish ghettos. One was thrown from a train to a railroad worker by a man who knew his fate.

“I don’t need a violin where I’m going now,” the man told the worker, using Mr. Weinstein’s phrase. “Here, take my violin, so it may live.”

The son of a violin repairman, Mr. Weinstein worked in a cramped and dusty workshop in the basement of an apartment building on King Solomon Street in Tel Aviv.

“Walking in there was like stepping back in time,” said James A. Grymes, a music professor at the University of North Carolina-Charlotte. wrote a book about Violins of Hope, said in an interview. “It really felt like you were in Stradivarius’ workshop: the smell of varnish, parts of violins everywhere. It’s like he was the Willy Wonka of the violin.”

One afternoon in the 1980s, a man with a tattoo identifying a prisoner on his arm arrived with a beaten-up violin who, like him, had survived Auschwitz.

“The top of the violin is damaged from being played in the rain and snow,” Mr. Grymes wrote in “Violins of Hope: Violins of the Holocaust – Instruments of Hope and Liberation in Mankind’s Darkest Hour” (2014). “When Amnon took the instrument apart, he discovered that it contained ash that he could only assume came from the crematoria of Auschwitz.”

Mr. Weinstein, who had lost hundreds of his extended family in the Holocaust, almost sent the man away; working on such an instrument seemed too emotionally charged. But eventually he repaired the violin, and the man gave it to his grandson to play.

Mr. Weinstein didn’t think much about working on Holocaust-era violins until the late 1990s, when he trained his son to be a luthier. The experience made him reflect on the role of violins in Jewish culture, from the shtetls of Eastern Europe to klezmer bands and the flying concerts of Itzhak Perlman.

“It was kind of a must for the young generation to learn to play the violin,” he said in the PBS documentary. “And if you have a violin, Friday or Saturday night, there was always someone who took it and played it.”

During a radio interview, he asked listeners to bring him instruments related to the Holocaust. Soon families began appearing in his workshop with violins stored in attics and cellars, each with its own haunting story.

Mr. Weinstein was particularly shocked by those recovered from concentration camps after the Allied invasion of Germany in 1945.

“This was the last human sound that all those people heard: the violin,” he said on the radio in 2016 interview at WKSU in Ohio. “You cannot use the name beauty. But this was the beauty of this time, these violins.”

Amnon Weinstein was born on July 21, 1939 in Mandatory Palestine and grew up in Tel Aviv. His father, Moshe Weinstein, was a musician and violin repairman. His mother, Golda (Yevirovitz) Weinstein, was a pianist and secretary in her husband’s workshop. They had emigrated from Lithuania in 1938, just as the persecution of Jews in Germany was escalating.

Mr. Weinstein grew up as a helper in his father’s violin shop. In his early twenties, he moved to Cremona, Italy – a city long known for its master luthiers – to study violin making. He continued his training in Paris under Étienne Vatelot, one of the world’s most renowned luthiers. In 1975, he married Assaela Bielski Gershoni, whose father was a Jewish resistance fighter during World War II, made famous in the 2008 film “Defiance.”

After his father’s death in 1986, Mr. Weinstein took over the family violin shop; ten years later he founded Violins of Hope. The first concerts with the violins from the collection took place in Turkey and Israel in 2008. Others followed in Switzerland, Spain and Mexico, as well as in Ohio, North Carolina and Virginia.

“Every concert is a victory,” he often said.

Musicians, especially Jewish ones, have described playing violins from the collection as a moving experience.

“It’s emotional for me because I’m not there to play this violin, I’m there to make it speak,” Niv Ashkenazia violinist who is a album with an instrument from the collection, said in an interview. “Our job as musicians is to just let these violins shine through.”

In addition to his son Avshalom, who plans to continue the Violins of Hope project, Mr. Weinstein is survived by his wife; two other children, Merav Vonshak and Yehonatan Weinstein; and seven grandchildren.

In 2016, Mr. Weinstein received the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germanyone of the country’s highest honors.

During the awards ceremony, then German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier spoke directly to Mr. Weinstein.

“Behind each of your priceless violins lies a human soul,” he said. “A human being persecuted, tormented and silenced by unimaginable violence and cruelty.”

Mr. Steinmeier told about the man who threw his violin out of the train. He described a prisoner who played the violin in Auschwitz.

“Each violin represents a person, Amnon,” he said. “And when you play violins, they represent six million people.”

Three faces stare blankly from sepia-toned passport photos, haphazardly pasted onto a card for an unknown recipient. It’s probably two parents and their son, but we’ll never know for sure. Below their photos are the handwritten words: “Don’t forget us!”

It is unclear when this card was sent. But his plea has helped shape the permanent collection of the National Holocaust Museum in Amsterdam, which will open to the public next week. The new institution has been in the works for almost twenty years, during which time the project overcame lingering skepticism, driven in part by reluctance to confront this part of Dutch history.

“I think it is a remnant of a long-felt discomfort in the Netherlands about taking ownership of what happened,” says Emile Schrijver, general director of the National Holocaust Museum.

While other museums in the Netherlands cover aspects of the history of the Holocaust – such as the Anne Frank House, or museums that focus more broadly on the Second World War – the National Holocaust Museum is the first institution dedicated to telling the full story of the Holocaust. story of the persecution. of Jews in the Netherlands.

“The collective embrace of the fact that the fate of the Jews in the Second World War differed substantially from the fate of the Netherlands took a very long time,” says Schrijver. The opening of the museum, says Schrijver, ‘is a kind of conclusion to a process of acceptance.’

In the Netherlands, the Nazis deported 75 percent of the country’s Jewish population to concentration camps, the highest percentage in Western Europe. The new museum aims to answer the question of how such a large group of people – 102,000 Jews, but also 220 Roma, also known as Roma and Sinti – could be removed from their daily lives, and what those lives looked like before and, if they survived, after the war.

Part of the answer lies in the ruthless bureaucracy that the Nazis installed and implemented by Dutch citizens and officials during their occupation. On the second floor of the museum, an overwhelming stream of words with laws against Dutch Jews is printed on the walls, inescapable and overwhelming.

Examples catch the eye of visitors, whether they plan to read them or not. November 11, 1941: Jews are no longer allowed to attend tennis, dance or bridge clubs. June 11, 1942: Jews can no longer shop at the fish markets. June 12, 1942: Jews must hand in their bicycles. September 15, 1942: Jewish students are excluded from universities.

When you walk past it, “you feel the oppression and the dismantling of the rule of law and freedom for every Jew,” says Annemiek Gringold, the museum’s chief curator. “That crime, no matter how neatly recorded in legal texts, is always present.”

In the museum’s halls, the lives of Dutch Jews are explored in displays including clothing, jewelry, suitcases and other objects. The intention, Gringold said, was to portray people as full individuals, rather than solely as victims.

“That’s the only way to do justice to someone’s memory,” Gringold said. “Otherwise a person is reduced to what the Nazis have made of him. We don’t want that.”

A reckoning with history has slowly become part of Dutch society, partly due to apologies from the government and the royal family for the Holocaust and the country’s role in the slave trade.

Gringold said she first proposed opening a national Holocaust museum in 2005, but at the time many questioned whether such a museum was necessary. Since 2015, the Jewish Cultural Quarter, the organization that manages the museum, has organized temporary exhibitions in the space that is now the museum. But pop-up exhibitions weren’t enough to tell the whole story, museum leaders said. The Jewish Cultural Quarter purchased the building in 2021 and began renovating it to turn it into a space for the permanent collection.

The building – a former school – stands across the street from a theater that was converted by the Nazis into a major deportation center, and next to a daycare center where Jewish children were held before being sent to concentration camps.

The museum interiors, which have been redeveloped by the Amsterdam architectural firm Winhov, are illuminated by natural light, filtered through soft gray blinds. This deliberately refers to how the Nazis committed their atrocities in broad daylight for all to see.

Architect and artist Daniel Libeskind, who was not involved in this project but has designed several major Holocaust memorials or museums, including in Berlin and Amsterdam, said he had also faced skepticism throughout his career. For a long time after the war, it was difficult for people to face the shadows of their past, Libeskind said, and the creation of memorial institutions was left to later generations.

Dutch Holocaust survivors called the opening of the museum an important milestone.

“I teach about the Second World War in schools, and I always hear how little time is spent on the Holocaust,” says Salo Muller, who survived the war by going into hiding as a six-year-old in 1942. from his parents after a Nazi raid, and was taken to the daycare center next to the museum, but resistance fighters helped him escape. He never saw his parents again.

After a recent private visit to the museum before its public opening, Muller said he felt very emotional. “When I walk around there, so many things go through my head,” he says. “My family was here and was deported. My parents, my grandparents, my uncles and cousins. It really affects me.”

At the very end of the collection, which also includes video testimonies from survivors and photos and videos from death camps, visitors finally encounter the passport photos of the three anonymous people who asked not to be forgotten, but whose names have been lost to history. carelessly.

The museum used that command: ‘think of us!’ – as part of his own message, said Gringold, the curator. By the time a visitor encounters these three individuals, it is almost impossible not to remember.

“You can no longer say you didn’t know,” Gringold said. “Now you know it.”

Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva on Sunday drew the ire of Israeli authorities after comparing Israel's actions in the war against Hamas to the Holocaust, in which Nazis murdered six million Jews in a systematic roundup of Europe during World War II.

“What is happening in the Gaza Strip to the Palestinian people has no parallel at other historical moments,” he said. Lula told reporters at the 37th African Union Summit in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. But, he added, “it did exist when Hitler decided to kill the Jews.”

In the summit's opening speech on Saturday, he said it was necessary to condemn both Hamas's attacks on Israeli civilians and Israel's “disproportionate response.” Gaza's Health Ministry says more than 28,000 Palestinians were killed in Israel's invasion of Gaza following the October 7 Hamas-led attack on Israel, which Israeli officials say killed more than 1,200 people.

Mr. Lula's statement angered Israeli officials. Israeli Foreign Minister Israel Katz said this in a statement statement on social media in Hebrew that the comments were “shameful and egregious.” He said Brazil's ambassador will be called to his office on Monday for a “reprimand,” adding that “no one will harm Israel's right to defend itself.”

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel echoed these sentiments in his own social media post. Mr. Netanyahu accused the Brazilian president of “trivializing the Holocaust and trying to harm the Jewish people and Israel's right to defend itself” and said that “comparing Israel to the Nazi Holocaust and Hitler crosses a red line .”

Mr. Netanyahu added in a separate statement that Mr. Lula “disgraced the memory of the six million Jews murdered by the Nazis and demonized the Jewish state as the most virulent anti-Semite.”

Hamas, in a statement on social media, welcomed the Brazilian president's comments and appreciated the comparison between the Holocaust and the current fighting in Gaza.

Brazil's president initially condemned the October 7 Hamas-led attack but has since criticized Israel's response. In November, welcoming a flight carrying about 30 people who had left Gaza via Egypt with the help of the Brazilian government, he condemned the impact of the war on civilians, saying: “I have never seen such brutal, inhumane violence against innocent citizens. people.”

Lawrence L. Langer, a literary scholar whose uncompromising assessment of the Holocaust as an event so great and evil that it defies the moral framework, helped deepen scholarly and popular understanding of the atrocity, died Monday at his home in Wellesley, MA. He was 94 years old. .

His son, Andrew Langowitz, said the cause was rectal cancer.

In some fifteen books and monographs, Dr. Longer a searing interpretation of the Holocaust as a moral black hole from which even meaning cannot escape. He rejected words like “survivor,” “hero,” “martyr” and “tragedy” when applied to the Holocaust because, he said, they alluded to the possibility of a redemptive silver lining.

“In the decades after the war, there was pressure to fit the Holocaust into a moral framework,” Ruth Franklin, a biographer and literary critic, said in a telephone interview. “What he emphasized was that there was no morality to be found.”

Dr. Langer agreed with writers, many of whom were victims of the Holocaust, including Primo Levi, Paul Celan and Tadeusz Borowski, who resist easy explanations for their experiences. For them, and for him, survival was not a matter of will, but of brute chance and a series of impossible choices that could not fit within conventional morality.

“Life in the Holocaust was an accident,” he said in the documentary 'Lawrence L. Langer: A Life in Testimony' (2022), by Joshua Greene.

Reason, humanism and the values ​​of the Enlightenment had no function in the concentration camps, he argued. Instead, he found himself coining new terms to help interpret it – the 'choiceless choice', 'after death', 'inappropriate guilt'.

“Traditional language will not be enough to confront this experience we call the Holocaust,” he said in the documentary.

Dr. Langer, in turn, was critical of anyone who tried to find a morality in the Holocaust: philosophers, Hollywood melodramas, even Anne Frank. She fell short, he argued, with her assertion at the end of her diary that “despite everything, I still believe that people are truly good at heart.”

All this, he said, obscured the terrible truth at the heart of the story.

“There is nothing dignified about watching 10 members of your family be murdered, and there is nothing triumphant about staying alive when you are powerless to help the people you love stay alive,” he told in 1995 The New York Times.

The early work of Dr. Langer focused on the literature of the Holocaust, but in the late 1970s he shifted his attention to oral testimonies of its victims.

In 1978, Geoffrey H. Hartman, a literary scholar at Yale, invited Dr. Out longer to work on the Fortunoff Video Archive, a new program in which Holocaust scholars spent hours interviewing victims. Dr. Langer would eventually interview more than a thousand, with some interviews lasting as long as 16 hours.

He drew on about 300 of those conversations to write “Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory” (1991), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism and which The Times named one of the ten best books of the year.

The influence of Dr. Langer was acutely felt in the 1980s and 1990s, when the Holocaust increasingly seeped into popular culture. Steven Spielberg's Oscar-winning film Schindler's List was released in 1993, the same year the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum opened on the National Mall.

At one point, the experts charged with designing the museum were trying to decide how to mark the end of the visitor experience. One board member suggested ending with something uplifting, like Anne Frank's famous quote.

“I said if we do that, Larry Langer will tear us apart,” Michael Berenbaum, project director for the museum's development, said in a telephone interview. “And worse, he would be right.”

Instead, the museum experience ends, inspired by Dr. Longer, with a film with testimonies from survivors.

Lawrence Lee Langer was born on June 20, 1929 in the Bronx, the son of Esther (Strauss) and Irving Langer, a clerk at Ellis Island.

He graduated from the City College of New York in 1951 with a degree in English, and received his doctorate in American literature from Harvard in 1961. He arrived at Simmons College in Boston as an assistant professor in 1958 and remained there until his retirement in 1992.

He married Sondra Weinstein in 1951. She and their son Andrew survive him, as do their daughter Ellen Lasri, five grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.

Dr. Langer originally worked on decidedly non-Holocaust-related subjects, such as the novels of Henry James. He did not encounter the subject of his life's work until 1964, when he visited the site of the Mauthausen concentration camp in the north of the country on a Fulbright grant to teach at the University of Graz in Austria.

He was the only visitor that day and wandered the grounds and buildings in terrified awe.

“I sat on the floor, covered my eyes and tried to reconstruct what it felt like to be in the gas chamber,” he said in the documentary. He quickly realized that imagining the experiences of those in the camps was an impossible task, but also one worth pursuing for the rest of his career.

Returning to Simmons, he created what is considered the nation's first academic course on literature and the Holocaust. He also began work on his first book, The Holocaust and the Literary Imagination, most of which he wrote in 1968 and '69 while on sabbatical in Germany.

It took him five years to get it published. He later said that the academic press did not seem to know what to do with a book that used fiction to understand a historical event. The Yale press eventually picked it up and it was published in 1976. It was a finalist for the National Book Award that year and is today considered a founding figure of Holocaust studies.

As he continued to delve into oral history, Dr. Also discusses the problem of art and the Holocaust. “How do you write a poem about Auschwitz?” he often wondered, and others around him.

He found one answer in the work of Samuel Bak, a painter and Holocaust survivor whose work draws on artists like Salvador Dalí and Hieronymus Bosch in an attempt to convey the evil emptiness of the atrocity. Dr. Langer wrote six monographs on Mr. Bak's work, including, most recently:An Unimaginable Partnership: The Art of Samuel Bak and the Writings of Lawrence L. Langer” (2022).

“All Holocaust art,” he wrote in his book “Preempting the Holocaust” (1998), “is built on a mountain of corpses, so that it can never be an act of celebration.”

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.”