“It seems to me that the issue is a bit too dramatized. There are good reasons for both the Yes and the No. In the end, I oriented myself to the No, above all in line with my general attitude towards Parliament. I entered the Senate on tiptoe, honored and surprised by the choice of President Mattarella who, as I have stressed several times, has a profound symbolic value and transcends my person. I entered as one enters a temple because Parliament is the highest expression of democracy. So hearing about this institution that is part of my civil religion as if everything were reduced to costs and seats, is something that just does not belong to me ”. With her proverbial serenity, Liliana Segre, senator for life, Holocaust survivor, announces her choice for the referendum in a long interview on Repubblica.
Among other things, he also reiterates that “I will continue to speak in public, if I have the strength, but I will never repeat my testimony. My life is characterized by phases and for some time I have felt that this phase, which lasted about 30 years, had to end “:
“No one who has not experienced what we have experienced can understand how much it cost the survivors – those few who did – to start telling and then recalling that past again and again – says Liliana Segre-. From the outside, perhaps you only feel the effort of repeating the same story over and over again, but that’s another, it’s a psychic wear that is difficult to explain, on the one hand there is in the witness the liberating necessity of the duty accomplished, but on the other hand there is the constant risk of splitting. There is a Liliana of today, who every time remembering the facts looks with infinite pain at the Liliana of that time, as a grandmother looks at a dear granddaughter, and forces her to fall back into that horror, repressing as she did then the scream that hatching inside. Having reached 90 years of age, I have to resign myself to respecting the limits of my fragility. Even if the moral debt that every Holocaust survivor feels towards those who have not returned to tell is inexhaustible ”.
The senator for life expresses solidarity with the Minister of Education, Lucia Azzolina:
“I don’t think anyone would want to be in the shoes of Minister Azzolina, who in this emergency had to exercise the art of squaring the circle. It reminded me of that movie, Apollo 13, in which astronauts engineer themselves by reusing materials they find on board to survive after equipment failure. It is very important for school to restart. I follow what happens in the school world with particular participation because I feel a very strong bond. Both for having been deprived as a child of training, human contact, emotional and cultural growth to share with my classmates and teachers, and for having found in the school fifty years later, as a witness of history, the place where I could exercise my mission “.
Finally, she reiterates her support for the government in office, when asked if she regretted having voted for him:
“Undoubtedly not everything went well, there have been delays and mistakes. But as I said we are faced with something unknown and that nobody knows exactly how to deal with it, so it is inevitable that both scientists and governments proceed by trial and error. It seems to me that, looking objectively at what has happened around the world, we can say that the Italian government has handled the situation better than others. So not only am I not repentant, but if anything I regret not having been able to renew my support in recent months: I had some health problems and the doctors put me to rest so I could no longer go to the Senate ”.
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