On October 16, 1943, the Nazis parked their trucks in this Roman square. Hours later, they were filled with Jews destined to die in concentration camps. The house that witnessed this scene is now the location of an exhibition that shows how hatred and contempt for an entire race, in Hitler's Nazi Germany and Mussolini's Fascist Italy, were forged.
A nutcracker in the form of a Jew, or this target to shoot at during fairs, are just a few examples of how evil can blind the minds of entire societies.
MARCELLO PEZZETTI
Holocaust Museum
'What was the novelty of Nazism and Fascism? The means that they used to communicate and reinforce this hatred. The mass media. They were a novelty then; today, the media's even more elaborate - between Internet and virtual reality - this media could be used with devastating results.â?
However, Marcello Pezzetti points out that the anti-semitic propaganda was the result of two additional factors: a tradition already rooted in contempt against the Jews now joined by nationalist and racist ideologies.
Few remember that the discriminatory policies of the Nazis produced a serious migratory crisis as the Jews fled Germany. In 1938, the United States convened a summit in Evian, France, where the attending countries agreed to increase their quota of Jewish immigrants. However, there were no major agreements and the conference failed. And almost one year later, World War II broke out.
MARCELLO PEZZETTI
Holocaust Museum
'The worst consequences came with the failure of migration policies, and above all when political attempts to solve this problem failed. The disaster started with the unsuccessful Evian Conference. When a peace conference ends badly we do not realize the disaster it represents.â?
The passage of the Nazis in the Eternal City has left scars that Rome does not want to forget. This exhibition is another example that is intended to help remember the mistakes of the past to prevent them from occurring in the future.
The other important memory of the persecution of the Roman Jews is the 'pietre d'inciampoâ? - the small, golden sanpietrini â?? on which you can read the name of a Jewish person deported and killed during World War II.
