On January 27, 1945, the Red Army entered the Auschwitz concentration camp. And on January 27, 2021, as every year, the Day of Remembrance is celebrated. An anniversary established on November 1, 2005 by the United Nations General Assembly to commemorate the victims of the Shoah. With Resolution 60/7, the UN wanted to commemorate the victims of the Holocaust and condemn all manifestations of intolerance, incitement, harassment or violence against people or communities, whether on an ethnic or religious basis.
“Millions of people around the world continue to suffer from discrimination and violence, including those fleeing war and persecution,” the UN Refugee Agency reiterates. Last year, 70 million people were fleeing their homes, the highest figure since World War II. At the same time, extremisms are growing and episodes of intolerance and xenophobia are multiplying, fueling isolation and social exclusion.
Avv. Giordani, what is the relationship between memory and justice?
“There is a very close relationship between memory and justice. Suffice it to say that we call the measure of clemency with which the crime is extinguished an “amnesty”. In the word “amnesty” the root mne- “remember” is preceded by a “privative alpha” which denies its meaning: removing the character of a crime from some past behavior is “not remembering”, “forgetting”. In politics, the “amnesty” can sometimes prove to be useful and justified, even beneficial, for a variety of reasons. But when we talk about history, the erasing of memory always generates injustice: it obviously does not affect the objectivity of past events and above all prevents us from knowing them for what they are “.
Do you mean that we must not forget when the facts are so serious?
“Remembering is a duty, all the more so when we have to remember the evil and when the evil we have to remember has the dimensions of the Absolute, as in the case of the Holocaust. Today’s date, January 27, was rightly chosen by the Italian Republic first (2000) and then by the United Nations (2005) to help us remember. That day, in 1945, Soviet soldiers entered Auschwitz and opened to the world the doors of such great horror as to cast doubt among the believers themselves, as the philosopher Hans Jonas wrote, even the concept of God. The memory of this event , inconceivable but historical, it is not only an indispensable instrument of knowledge. It is also our only hope that something like this will never happen again “.
President Avv. Paolo Giordani
