Plague has died but infection lingers - Mattarella

(ANSA) - ROME, JAN 28 - Italian President Sergio Mattarella who joined international leaders at Auschwitz on International Holocaust Remembrance Day Monday for the ceremony to mark the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi death camp said on Tuesday that he experienced an historic event which connects past and future, memory and today's responsibility.
    The head of State was speaking at a ceremony to mark Holocaust Remembrance Day at the Quirinale palace in Rome.
    In his address, he quoted author Primo Levi who wrote that Auschwitz is "outside of us, but it is all around us, in the air - the plague has died away, but the infection still lingers".
    The commemoration at Auschwitz was an "event that also expressed the meaning of renewing a pact between nations and peoples which, during the difficult times we are experiencing in which violence, aggression, unfriendliness, war appear to seek to dominate, sparks hope". Auschwitz, he said, "always causes infinite horror, shakes our consciences, our convictions, generates anguish, anxiety, ripping questions" but, he warned, "it is not a parenthesis, no matter how terrible - it resides deep in the man's soul".
    "It is an insuperable warning and, together, a temptation that surfaces often", he noted.
    The head of State went on to note that "Auschwitz is the direct consequence of the racial laws, which were ignominiously issued also in Italy by the Fascist regime and of the Nazi anti-Jewish fury, of which the Fascist regime and the Republic of Salò were accomplices and collaborators, until the "final solution".
    "Auschwitz represents the deepest and most obscure abyss ever touched in the history of humanity", Mattarella said.
    The president went on to note that, "even with the final defeat of Nazi-Fascism in Europe, with the recovery of democracies, the wounds never completely healed".
    He quoted the Auschwitz survivor, chemist and author Primo Levi, discussing the "shadows, words and ghosts that continued - and continue - to generate disquiet" after World War II.
    "Auschwitz is outside of us, but it is all around us, in the air. The plague has died away, but the infection still lingers", wrote the author of If This Is a Man in The Black Hole of Auschwitz.
    He said the suffering endured during those times and the sacrifice of all those who died for freedom "shaped the spirit and form of our Constitution, which was born - and lives - to cancel the principles, actions, the code words of the dark Nazi-Fascist domain, of which the bloody world conflict and death camps were the cruel and inevitable outcome". In his address at the Quirinale palace, Mattarella also spoke about racial insults on social media directed at Italian Life Senator and Holocaust survivor Liliana Segre, slamming them as "painful and unacceptable", saying they needed to be stopped.
    "They are grave crimes that must be prosecuted to safeguard freedom and justice", he said.
    "Let's not give in to dejection", Mattarella went on to say, expressing "confidence in the future of humanity" as well as in the "determination of many women and many men who are able to prevent, with honesty and courage, obscure forces from prevailing over the natural desire for peace, justice and brotherhood of humankind".
    He urged to repeat "with even more determination these days", in schools, universities, workplaces, homes and squares that "strong and high cry which comes, each day and forever, from Auschwitz's fence: 'Never again!", concluded the president.
    (ANSA).