Primo Levi wrote about two kinds of shame after surviving Auschwitz—the guilt of those who committed atrocities, and the shame of those who looked away.
“Most Germans did (the second) during the twelve Hitler years. They believed that not seeing meant not knowing, and that not knowing absolved them.”
Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved.
Today is the International Remembrance Day. And we may be watching history repeat itself—not only through violence, but through language.
The Missing Word
Italy’s Ministry of Education sent a circular to every school in the country about today’s commemoration. The letter is long and formal, describing the liberation of Auschwitz on January 27, 1945. It mentions the six million Jews murdered, and calls for reflection and civic commitment.
But there’s a calculated absence. “Nazifascism”—the word that names the perpetrators—appears exactly zero times.
The Holocaust is presented like a natural disaster—an earthquake, a flood, a meteorite strike. As if it simply happened rather than being deliberately orchestrated by Nazi Germany under Adolf Hitler and actively supported by Fascist Italy under Benito Mussolini.
Suddenly, the architects of genocide are gone. No ideology, no one to hold accountable.
What We Must Remember
These aren’t abstract tragedies but choices made by specific regimes we can name.
On this Remembrance Day, we must remember:
- The ideologies that enabled genocide: Fascism and Nazism—nationalist, conservative, authoritarian movements that made xenophobia state policy and turned difference into a death sentence.
- The dehumanization that preceded murder: How governments labeled entire populations as “the other,” as enemies to be fought, persecuted, and ultimately eliminated.
- The machinery of extermination: Racial laws enacted by Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany that stripped citizens of rights, deported them to death camps, and murdered six million Jews along with millions of others.
- The resisters who said no: The anti-fascists who risked and often gave their lives to save others and defend democracy against totalitarian evil.
What We Cannot Allow
When a government erases those names from official memory, Levi’s warning echoes louder: turning away is complicity. Not naming evil is forgetting it existed.
Note: I first learned about this troubling omission from Massimo Giannini’s sharp analysis on Circo Massimo, his daily podcast for La Repubblica.
Update: One day after this piece went live, Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni released a circular explicitly acknowledging Fascist Italy’s collaboration with Hitler’s Nazi regime. This represents a significant shift for a leader who built her early political career in the youth movement of the MSI, Italy’s neo-fascist party. Her motivation—whether public pressure, political pragmatism, or personal reckoning—is less important than the act itself: what was erased has now been named.
