For decades, Liliana Segre visited Italian classrooms to recount her expulsion from school under Benito Mussolini’s anti-Semitic racial laws, her doomed attempt to flee Nazi-controlled Italy, her deportation from Milan’s train station to the death camps of Auschwitz. Her plain-spoken testimony about gas chambers, tattooed arms, casual atrocities and the murders of her father, grandparents and thousands of other Italian Jews made her the conscience and living memory of a country that often prefers not to remember.
Now she is wondering if it was all wasted breath.
“Why did I suffer for 30 years to share intimate things of my family, of my pain, of my desperation? For whom? Why?” Ms. Segre, 93, with cotton-white hair, a steel-cage memory and an official status as a Senator for Life said last week in her handsome Milan apartment, where she sat next to a police escort. She wondered, not for the first time these days, if “I’ve lived in vain.”
Even as Ms. Segre accepted another honorary degree on Saturday to mark Holocaust Remembrance Day, rising anti-Semitism and what she considers a general climate of hate have put her in a pessimistic mood.
The Hamas-led massacre of Jews in Israel on Oct. 7 revolted her, she said, and Israel’s reaction in Gaza left her with a “desperate” feeling, as did what she considered the exploitation of the conflict to spread anti-Semitism under the guise of a pro-Palestinian cause. In Europe, Moscow’s aggression in Ukraine led her to ask about President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, “What is this, another Hitler?” while the rise of the far right in France and Germany make her queasy.
In Italy, Ms. Segre is dismayed by a recent mass gathering of right-wing extremists giving the Fascist salute, by nasty language against migrants whose plight reminds her of her own and by a right-wing government led by Giorgia Meloni, who has condemned Italy’s racial laws and the horrors of the Holocaust, but who herself was reared in parties born from the ashes of Fascism.
Musing on a cyclical view of history, Ms. Segre wondered if she had lived so long as to see history repeat itself.
“It’s not new,” she said, tracing a circle with her hands.
And so Ms. Segre has left the comfort of her sitting room — with a “Reserved for Grandma” pillow on the armchair, family photographs (“that’s me and my father”), paintings, books and stacks of the opera CDs she adores — to remember anew. On television programs, at universities collecting honorary degrees, and at the Milan Holocaust memorial, she is again retelling a story she hoped not to have to tell anymore.
Born in 1930 into a secular Jewish Milanese family, she lost her mother to a tumor in her infancy. Her father, Alberto Segre, who worked in the family textile company, raised her with the help of his parents. He was so gentle, she said, that he quit driving after accidentally hitting a beautiful bird on a mountain road.
An only child, she cherished her friends in school, where she excelled in reading but abhorred arithmetic. At night, she went to sleep listening to her father, always home in the adjoining bedroom, turning the pages of his stamp collection.
When she was 8, Italy’s racial laws came into force and Ms. Segre’s public school expelled her. All but three of her classmates ignored her on the streets, listening to their mothers who told them “it was useless” to say hello. Her uncle, a committed Fascist himself, became an enemy of the fatherland.
Mr. Segre’s faith in Italy to protect the family wore out. In 1943, he prepared a binder of valuable stamps and rolled a few diamonds into his waistline to pay for a new life in Switzerland. They crossed the mountains, but that December, a Swiss border guard pushed them back.
Mr. Segre threw his stamps and the diamonds in the mud to avoid handing them over to his captors. The Italians arrested them in Varese, not far from the border, and handed them over to the Nazis. She realized all was lost when they handcuffed him. “My father had beautiful hands,” she said.
On Jan. 30, 1944, after weeks in Milan’s San Vittore prison, Ms. Segre, her father and more than 600 other Jews were transferred under the cover of darkness to the underground Track 21, meant for merchandise, in Milan’s central station. Loaded amid barking dogs onto freight trains scattered with hay and equipped with a single bucket, they rolled out of the city. They arrived at Auschwitz, in Poland, at the beginning of February.
Most of the Jews were sent to the gas chambers and burned in ovens. Ms. Segre’s father was put in one line, she in another. She never saw him again. The Nazis tattooed her with the number 75190.
During the day, she slaved in a munitions plant. At night, she fought for blankets.
As the Soviets approached in January 1945, the Nazis forced her and tens of thousands of inmates to march to Germany on a road paved with the dead. As the Germans shed their military uniforms and sought to melt away, she saw a pistol on the ground. Her decision not to murder a guard, she said, was her birth as a “free woman” who was better than her captors.
“I was strong in my absolute weakness,” she said. Though, she said with a chuckle, “I could have maybe shot him in the foot.”
After her liberation and return to Italy, she desperately sought news of her father. An uncle who had converted to Catholicism arranged for a private audience with Pope Pius XII, where she asked for help finding her father. “He was very disturbed by my presence,” she said, recalling that when she began to kneel, he stopped her and said, “I’m the one who should kneel before you.”
The inquiries about her father came up empty, and only years later, as she searched through Milan’s center of Jewish documentation, did she discover that he died two months after arriving at Auschwitz.
Her life went on. She re-enrolled in school, feeling awkward with now younger classmates, and went on vacation with her maternal grandparents, who spent the end of the war in hiding. In the summer of 1948, in Pesaro, on Italy’s east coast, she met Alfredo Belli Paci. He noticed the tattoo on her arm, and told her how he had spent years in a German prison camp for refusing to fight for Mussolini and his new Nazi-allied state after Italy switched sides in 1943.
He was 10 years older, a Catholic and a lawyer. Her grandparents disapproved, but she saw him behind their backs. The couple married in 1951 and settled in Milan, where they did well, he in his law practice, she with her family’s textile business. They had three children, but she rarely discussed her past. Her husband told them not to ask.
But in the late 1970s, her husband became active in the Italian Social Movement, the hard-right party created by former Fascists who sided with the Nazis. She hoped it was a passing flirtation, but when he ran for office, they fought bitterly.
“I fell into depression,” she said, and days would go by when she could not get out of bed. She finally gave him an ultimatum and a minute to make up his mind: “Me or this.”
He chose her, and over the next decade, she felt a notion building that she had an important story to tell. When her first grandchild was born, she said, she felt she had finally emerged from a long fog. “I was different,” she said. “I was 60, on the threshold of old age, and I felt I couldn’t wait.”
She started telling her story in schools and continued doing so for 30 years. In January 2018, on the 80th anniversary of the enactment of Mussolini’s racial laws, Ms. Segre was buying a battery for her Swatch watch when she received a phone call from the office of Italy’s president. He had made her one of Italy’s voting Senators for Life, the country’s highest honor.
Ms. Segre has used her platform. In 2018, when the hard-right League party leader Matteo Salvini brandished rosaries at political events, she said in Parliament that campaigning with Catholic icons struck her as a “dangerous revival” of the “God is with us” mottos on Nazi uniforms. And in 2019, the year Italian officials decided online threats against her warranted a full-time police escort, she proposed a Senate commission against incitement to hate.
After Ms. Meloni’s victory in the 2022 general election, Ms. Segre presided over the opening legislative session that would elect Ignazio La Russa — who long had a bust of Mussolini in his home— president of the Senate. Ms. Segre said her office made her practice her speech “because they didn’t know how I would behave.”
In her speech, she recalled that 100 years had passed since Fascists marched on Rome. “It is impossible for me not to feel a kind of vertigo,” she said, “remembering that that same little girl, who, on a day like this in 1938, disconsolate and lost, was forced by the racist laws to leave her elementary school bench empty. And that, by some strange fate, that same girl today finds herself on the most prestigious bench, in the Senate.”
Last week, she led Mr. La Russa, who has condemned the Holocaust as evil and is a supporter of Israel, officials and members of her commission to the Track 21 Holocaust memorial, usually filled with class trips learning about the spot from which Ms. Segre and so many others were deported, and from which so few returned.
“Will it help or not, I don’t know,” she said in her sitting room — opposite a painting of stamps that her father had commissioned, and that her family discovered, and was forced to repurchase, years after the war. “But it helped me because I felt the need to do it.”
