For decades, Liliana Segre visited Italian classrooms to recount her expulsion from school under Benito Mussolini\u2019s anti-Semitic racial laws, her doomed attempt to flee Nazi-controlled Italy, her deportation from Milan\u2019s train station to the death camps of Auschwitz. Her plain-spoken testimony about gas chambers, tattooed arms, casual 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 remember.<\/p>\n
Now she is wondering if it was all wasted breath.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhy did I suffer for 30 years to share intimate things of my family, of my pain, of my desperation? For whom? Why?\u201d Ms. Segre, 93, with cotton-white hair, a steel-cage memory and an 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 these days, if \u201cI\u2019ve lived in vain.\u201d<\/p>\n
Even as Ms. Segre accepted another honorary degree on Saturday to mark Holocaust Remembrance Day, rising anti-Semitism and what she considers a general climate of hate have put her in a pessimistic mood.<\/p>\n
Read it all<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201cWhy did I suffer for 30 years to share intimate things of my family, of my pain, of my desperation?\u201d Liliana Segre, 93, an Italian Holocaust survivor, says the rise in antisemitism has made her wonder these days if \u201cI\u2019ve lived in vain.\u201d https:\/\/t.co\/u9hfj0292B<\/a><\/p>\n — New York Times World (@nytimesworld) January 31, 2024<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n \n