Many of the commemorative initiatives were held online this year, due to the coronavirus pandemic, and new Stolpersteine memorials – or “stumbling stones” – were unveiled in Rome and Milan.
The bronze-capped cobblestones are installed outside the last known freely chosen place of residence of victims of the Holocaust, detailing their first and last names, date of birth, date and place of deportation, and date of death in a Nazi extermination camp.
A woman enters a building where stumbling stones, engraved with names of Jews killed by the Nazis, are seen in front of the entrance, in Rome’s Ghetto Jewish neighbourhood, on January 27, 2021. (Photo: AAP)
This year, 31 new Stolpersteine were installed in Milan and 21 in Rome, including one dedicated to the Emma Di Veroli, a two-year-old girl who was deported from the city’s Jewish Ghetto area in October 1943 and killed on her arrival in Auschwitz.
Among the online events from Rome was a live-streamed conversation with Holocaust survivor Sami Modiano, who was deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1944.
Italian President Sergio Mattarella presided over a ceremony at the Quirinal Palace in Rome, saying in his speech that Auschwitz was a “tragic paradox”.
“It was the most inhuman construction ever conceived by man, men against humanity, a fearful factory of death,” he added.
Established in 2005 by the United Nations to commemorate the day in 1945 that the survivors of Auschwitz were liberated by the Russian army, Holocaust Remembrance Day honours the memory of the millions of Jews – but also homosexuals, Romany people and others – who suffered persecution, deportation, imprisonment and genocide.
