Liliana Segre

Liliana Segre (born 10 September 1930) is an Italian Holocaust survivor, named senator for life by President Sergio Mattarella in 2018 for outstanding patriotic merits in the social field.

Born in 1930 into a Milanese family of Jewish origins, in 1938 Segre was expelled from her primary school after the promulgation of the Italian Racial Laws.

Her family was secular, and the awareness of being Jewish came to Liliana only after the drama of the Italian Racial Laws of 1938, after which she was expelled from school.

After the intensification of the persecution of the Italian Jews, her father hid her at a friend's home, using false documents.

In 1943, she was arrested with her family and deported to the Auschwitz concentration camp.

On 10 December 1943, at the age of thirteen, together with her father, Segre tried to flee to Switzerland, but both were rejected by the Swiss authorities.

On 11 December 1943, she was arrested by fascists in the province of Varese at Selvetta di Viggiù.

After six days in prison in Varese, she was transferred to Como and finally to Milan, where she was detained for 40 days.

On 30 January 1944, Segre was deported from platform 21 of the Milan Central railway station to the Auschwitz concentration camp, where she arrived seven days later.

She was immediately separated from her father Alberto, whom she never saw again and who would be killed on 27 April 1944 (see the memorial plaque below).

On 18 May 1944 her paternal grandparents were arrested in Inverigo, in the Province of Como, and deported after a few weeks to Auschwitz, where they were also killed on their arrival on 30 June.

At the selection, Segre was tattooed with the serial number 75190.

She was employed in forced labour in the Union ammunition factory, which belonged to Siemens, for about one year.

During her imprisonment, she underwent three other selections.

The only survivor among her relatives, with the end of the World War II in 1945, she returned to Milan.

In January 1945, after the evacuation of the camp, she faced the death march towards Ravensbrück concentration camp in Germany.

After some weeks spent there in terrible conditions, she was marched on to its satellite Malchow concentration camp where she was liberated by the Red Army on 1 May 1945.

Out of the 776 Italian children aged 14 or younger who were deported to the Auschwitz concentration camp, only 35 survived.

After the Nazi Holocaust, Segre moved to the Marche region where she lived with her maternal grandparents, the only surviving members of her family.

In 1948, she met Alfredo Belli Paci, a Catholic political prisoner who had also survived the Nazi concentration camps.

The two married in 1951 and had three children.

For a long time, Segre never wanted to speak publicly about her experience in concentration camps.

Like many Holocaust children, returning home and to a normal life was far from easy.

She also remembers that she did not find in those years any ear willing to listen to her.

After decades of silence, in the 1990s she started to speak to the public, especially young students, about her experience.

Born in Milan into a family of Jewish origins, Segre lived with her father Alberto and her paternal grandparents, Giuseppe Segre and Olga Loevvy.

Her mother, Lucia Foligno, died when Liliana was not yet one year old.

It was only in the early 1990s that she decided to break her silence: since then she went to school assemblies and conferences to tell young people her story, also on behalf of the millions of others who shared it with her and who have never been able to communicate it.

In 1996, she recalled:

In 1997, she was among the witnesses of the documentary film Memoria, presented at the Berlin International Film Festival.

In 2004, Segre was interviewed, together with Goti Herskovits Bauer and Giuliana Fiorentino Tedeschi, by Daniela Padoan in Come una rana d'inverno.

Conversazioni con tre donne sopravvissute ad Auschwitz (Like a frog in winter. Conversations with three women who survived from Auschwitz).

In 2005 her story was retraced with more details in a book-interview by Emanuela Zuccalà, Sopravvissuta ad Auschwitz: Liliana Segre fra le ultime testimoni della Shoah (Survived in Auschwitz: Liliana Segre among the last witnesses of the Shoah. Also in 2005, she gave a video interview lasting more than five hours to Doris Felsen which is available in the Online Archive Forced Labor 1939–1945.

On 27 November 2008, the University of Trieste awarded Segre with an honorary degree in Law.

In 2009, Segre lent her voice Racconti di chi è sopravvissuto ('Tales of those who have survived'), a research project conducted by Marcello Pezzetti between 1995 and 2008 on behalf of the Center of Contemporary Jewish Documentation of Milan, which led to the collection of testimonies of almost all the Italian survivors from Nazi concentration camps who were still alive.

In the same year, she participated in Moni Ovadia's film-documentary Binario 21 (Platform 21) directed by Felice Cappa, which was inspired by the poem Dos lid funem oysgehargetn yidishn folk ("The Song of the Murdered Jewish People") written by Polish poet Itzhak Katzenelson.

On 15 December 2010, the University of Verona awarded her with an honorary degree in Pedagogy.

On 19 January 2018, the 80th anniversary of the Italian Racial Laws, the President of the Italian Republic, Sergio Mattarella, on the basis of article 59 subsection 2 of the Italian Constitution, appointed Segre as senator for life for outstanding patriotic merits in the social field.

Segre is the fourth woman to hold such position, after Camilla Ravera, Rita Levi-Montalcini, and Elena Cattaneo.

On 26 October 2020, LUMSA University awarded her with an honorary degree in International relations.