The “Casa della Memoria di Brescia“, which has always been committed to safeguarding memory to bear witness to the Shoah, has set up an exhibition with the stories of Jewish children who were victims of Nazi persecution, entitled “Stars without a sky“.
The exhibition will be open from 10 to 18 January 2023 at the Palazzo della Loggia in Brescia from Monday to Friday at 9-2.30 and 14-19 and on Saturday at 9-12.30.
The exhibition is curated by Yad Vashem, the national institution for the memory of the Shoah in Jerusalem, and is presented by the Sons of the Shoah Association of Milan.
The exhibition traces the Holocaust with sadly touching images and stories that make us reflect so as not to forget and so that that tragedy does not repeat itself. And it is completed by a very useful in-depth multimedia kit.
Between 1933 and 1941, Jewish communities suffered brutal upheavals and persecutions that caused anthropological and social fractures of the most inhuman cruelty. Children torn away from their childhood, forced to work to survive, hidden under false names, had to grow up with fragile identities. It is a childhood deprived of games and light-heartedness, deprived of the right to a normal life, dignity, health and education. Especially the children, after being kicked out of public school, had to quickly adapt to the new conditions, which forced them to become adults too soon.
The exhibition takes us into the hell experienced by over a million children, we cross their defenseless gazes which insistently remind us to assume responsibility, forcing us not to look away. Transferred to the ghettos, undernourished, forced to beg, to work to survive, hidden under false identities, they had to face hunger and disease before being deported, after untold suffering, to extermination camps, where they were among the first to be selected for crematory ovens or were used for unspeakable medical experiments.
The exhibition tells, also through poignant letters, the ability of children to resist in dramatic circumstances. From the bright colors of the drawings, an unconscious positivity shines through which allowed some of them to return to life after going through hell.
From the stories of the children whose childhood was stolen, unexpected flashes of hope emerge, so that memory can generate new life. In fact, between 1945 and 1948, a blade of light emerged from the deepest darkness of Nazi-fascism: the “Children’s Home” of Selvino (Bergamo) where over 700 orphaned children, veterans of extermination camps from all over Europe, were hosted in the Pre-Alps Bergamo area of Val Seriana.
It is a beautiful page of history that tells of the resistance and rebirth of the Jews after the Shoah, supported by Italian and international Jewish organizations and by the partisans who worked to give hospitality, care and education to spiritually and physically devastated children. The generous people of Selvino joined them. Many of these boys left for Israel. The “MuMeSE”, the memorial museum of Sciesopoli set up in the Municipality of Selvino with the contribution of the “Children of Selvino” association, is dedicated to them.
On the opening night of the exhibition, after the reading of the greeting by Liliana Segre, the journalist Gad Lerner, the director friend Enrico Grisanti for the Sons of the Shoah Association and Virginia Magoni for the Municipality of Selvino took part.
