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The Monument to the Deported
At the train station. Next to the silos there are cattle cars supposed to take us someplace, we don’t know where. The destination is a closely guarded secret.
Other trucks full of prisoners are coming: they’re the ones that until now were left at San Sabba’s Rice Mill, arrested only because they belong to the Jewish race.
Together with my five cellmates they make me board a wagon, where some women accused of aiding the partisans found a place. Those from the Rice Mill, about eighty men, women and children, are locked in two wagons behind ours. […]
It’s still dark. The engine is not connected to the train yet. I ask myself if someone from my family will come to bid me farewell, before we leave, maybe for the last time. I see Leone pushed in another car. The SS walk around with submachine guns in their hands. They’re loading baggage on a third class car: the parcels travel in third class, we are squeezed in cattle cars.
[Bruno Piazza, Perché gli altri dimenticano. Un italiano ad Auschwitz, Feltrinelli, Milano 1995 (ed. or. 1956), pp. 21-22]
Right after the end of the Second World War Trieste’s Jewish Community started planning the construction of a monument to commemorate its members killed during the Shoah. Placed inside the Jewish cemetery, it was inaugurated in September 1950 on the eve of Yom Kippur, Atonement Day, the most sacred day of the religious calendar.
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