di Fabio De-Carli
It was quite odd, a blade of light, a word just whispered and suddenly reminiscences that I thought lost appears to my mind bringing me elsewhere, in long forgotten memories. Now everything seems to me so clear, and the thoughts are clear and painful. I remember now what the Holocaust has been.
When I was a child I used to go, hand in hand with my mum, to do the shopping under the arcades surrounding Piazza Grande in Locarno. I liked listening her speaking to the shopkeepers. There were two shop of fabrics and materials, since longtime disappeared, my mother used to buy there wool and cotton fabrics for a jacket or a shirt. The owners had long beard, long dark coats and wide hats, underneath them two long curls made me curious. They could impress a child. Not me. My mum stopped often for a chat, I recall to hearing them talking loud from the top to the bottom of the store in an unknown idiom. She explained me they were speaking Yiddish and they were jewish people.
Once, I already was at primary school, seating facing the lake, with a big vanilla ice-cream, my mother started to tell me their story. Our story, from the last century. Now some of her sentences resound in my head. I remember the shops, the men, I smell the scent of the fabrics, even that of a stale soup. I see their blinking eyes smiling and tender, but now I see behind them a sadness and a melancholy coming from far away. That horrible, incomprehensible tragedy made me start to read part of their gloomy past, and stare at photographs of dramatic atrocities, that nobody should never ever look at. Less then ever a child! Sometimes these images, more often then not, are coming to my mind, it’s a deep suffering, but I have to find a certain detachment for not to hate. Looking back to this war period, that didn’t affect us to much, I think that possibly we should have shared much more the painful life of these people. The odious campaign for the “final solution” is an horror that never left me. In the photographs the eyes of the victims, drawn in their unforgettable pain, I discover serious, decent eyes looking for mercy, compassion, for a glance of comprehension, of love, longing for a hand that takes theirs tenderly.
I never could visit a concentration camp, maybe it was just a sense of guilt, maybe just the cowardice being part of this inhuman humanity, and so, having absorbed like a sponge the cruelty of these acts, making mine theirs pains and sorrows, maybe, for the little that this count, I’m just part sincerely and profoundly of their tragic destinies. Or else I feel like a man, between many men, born to remember, to make others remember. Memory has to be fed continuously even, or particularly, if this causes an unbearable pain. The cruelty of that genocide, sadly enough to many more that even now occurs, makes one doubt that a sense of goodness lie in the “Mensch”. But exactly for this reason it is important that, that “Time” has to be dissect and thoroughly analyzed in order to makes us grow, that makes us think over it, so that it will touch our mind, our soul, our heart.
In Cape Town, casually one would say, but I don’t believe in casualty, I had the privilege to have a deep, long lasting friendship with a jewish family, I shared their functions, their food during the Shabbat dinner, we had important discussions till the first hours of the morning, I laughed and I cried. All of us together, part of a unique reality.
But there are still unanswered questions, that everyone has the duty to make them his own, and to search for sincere answers, to propose and ask others and, with a sense of responsibility to discuss them with the new generations, that of this tragedy they got unfortunately mainly shouted incomplete information. We have to think it over and over again, to reflect at why the Humanity hasn’t learned of our Past. We have to think what it means being part of this Earth.
In this moment a virus put us all under siege, it makes us understand the importance of helping each other, of sharing a smile. It is by far easier and positive that to tear us apart filling us with resentment. The past leaves us a duty to fulfil: we have to give explanations to the new generation, we have to make them understand what it means sharing our lives, only so we will grow together, respecting the Memory.
Fabio De-Carli is writer and author of “Anime di lago” e di “Vento” (fabiodecarli@bluewin.ch )
