Italy’s President Sergio Mattarella and Premier Giorgia Meloni have both recalled the nation’s role in the Shoah (the mass murder of Jewish people under the German Nazi regime during World War II) as they marked International Holocaust Remembrance Day on Friday.
“The principles that shaped our Republican Constitution and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights are the radical rejection of the universe that led to Auschwitz,” Mattarella said.
“Unfortunately, today we see those principles threatened around the world by bloody wars of aggression, by obtuse repression and summary executions, by a worrying re-emergence – fed by the distorted use of social media – of anti-Semitism, intolerance, racism and denialism, which is the most sly and insidious form of racism.”
Mattarella recalled the Fascist regime’s 1938 racial laws and complicity of the Nazi puppet Italian Social Republic in deporting Jews to the death camps between 1943 and 1945.
“In 1938 the Fascist regime cruelly acted against a part of its people,” Mattarella said, adding that the Constitution says Italy must “never again” be a racist State.
Meloni said that “the Shoah represents the abyss of humanity” in her message for Holocaust Memorial Day.
She added that it was “an evil that touched in depth our nation too, with the abomination of the 1938 racial laws.
Read the article in Il Globo (ANSA).