In Italy, the 89-year-old Senate for Life and Holocaust Survivor Liliana Segre has now been given police protection. It had, inadvertently, provoked one of the most intense conflicts with anti-Semitism in Italy since the end of fascism.
200 hate mailings daily
The 89-year-old survivor of the Nazi concentration and extermination camp Auschwitz recently announced that she receives about 200 daily anti-Semitic and racist posts via social networks. In response, Segre called for the establishment of a parliamentary committee to combat hatred, racism and anti-Semitism.
The decision on police protection now came after a poster by the right-wing party Forza Nuova was last shown at a public meeting in which Segre took part.
Right-wing parties broke with consensus
Her proposal was accepted – but without the votes of the right-wing parties, especially Matteo Salvini’s Lega. They broke with a principle that influenced Italian politics after 1945, namely that all parties fight actively against all forms of racism and fascism.
The vote last week and the nearly simultaneous racist incidents in a first division football game sparked heated debate. Many observers say that the audacity to express themselves publicly in an anti-Semitic and racist way increases.
Caught trying to escape and deported to concentration camp
Segre was born in 1930 in a Jewish family in Milan. After a failed escape with her father to Switzerland, she was arrested at the end of 1943 and deported to the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp in January 1944. She survived there as a worker in an armaments factory.
