A hidden history
The arrival of the Allies in Milan and the liberation of Italy in April 1945 put an end to the convoys. Anyone who’d taken part in the deportations kept silent; most victims had been murdered. Survivors spoke of being forced into what seemed to be a “cavern” and loaded into carriages. They spoke, too, of a strange motion — a feeling of being lifted upward, before the train left.
Some of the most crucial testimony came from Liliana Segre, who was deported to Auschwitz on January 30, 1944, with her father. Aged 13 at the time, she was the only one of her immediate family to survive the holocaust.
Now aged 95, she was inducted into the Italian Senate as a “senator for life” in 2018.
In 1994, survivors’ testimony was combed through by researchers from CDEC, the Fondazione Centro Di Documentazione Ebraica Contemporanea, which documents modern Jewish history. They realized that the deportees must have been dispatched from a space underneath Milano Centrale, and went looking for it. Entering the former mail area, they saw the elevator and realized what they were dealing with.
The area was opened to the public in 2013. It is the only place of Nazi deportation that has remained intact.
Today, visitors enter the same way the convoys did. Where the deportees would have been forced out of trucks, visitors are met with the “Wall of Indifference,” an artwork highlighting the “indifferenza” that Segre says led to the persecution of Italy’s Jewish population.
The two original underground platforms remain. On one sit vintage carriages; the other lies empty. On the wall behind are projected the names of the 774 people on the passenger manifests of the first two convoys.
“It shows there were real people behind the numbers,” says Santerini.
Booths play wartime witness testimony, and visitors can take guided tours or walk around the space themselves. They can enter the carriages, or walk to the turning circle where the carriages were rotated to begin their journey. A spot overlooks the elevator which raised the deportees to their fate. All the while, those 320,000 daily travelers are passing overhead. Quiet moments of reflection are interrupted by trains screeching over the rails directly above.
Upstairs, amid the passenger platforms and beside the modern binario 21, is an invitation for people to visit what lies beneath.
Colacicco calls this an important place for Italians. “It represents the chance to think of our own past — that of the Italian people — that we have, after 80 years, partly forgotten and partly erased what happened,” he says.
“Italians haven’t taken full responsibility. But the fact that this happened in the economic capital of our country is significant. This was done by Italians and the responsibility is ours.
“It’s important to know that in the belly of the station you use every day to go to work or go on vacation, this space exists.”
The arrival of the Alli
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