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The University of Trieste, on the occasion of Holocaust Memorial Day celebrated on January 27, commemorates the victims of the Holocaust, renewing its commitment to transmit knowledge of racial and political persecutions and genocide to the younger generation, perpetrated by the Nazi regime of the Third Reich and their allies.

Knowing and remembering to fight forgetfulness and indifference.

"Indifference is more guilty than violence itself," said Liliana Segre, a survivor of deportation to the Auschwitz concentration camp and a witness to horror. "It is the moral apathy of those who turn the other way: it happens today towards racism and other horrors of the world. Memory is valuable as a vaccine against indifference," urges the life senator, to whom the University of Trieste conferred an honorary degree in 2008.

Among the initiatives planned by the university to celebrate Holocaust Memorial Day, on Monday, January 22, the Department of Humanities will organize a meeting titled "History and exile: the case of the series 'Transatlantic,'" which will take place at 5:30 pm at Androna Campo Marzio 10, in the "Arduino Agnelli" Hall. The event will discuss the transposition of the themes of rescuing Jews in cinema and historical television series, starting from the famous television series dedicated to the events of Jewish refugees in occupied France during World War II. The discussion will involve University of Trieste professors Tullia Catalan and Massimiliano Spanu, along with Leonardo Gandini, who teaches History of Cinema at the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia and has authored numerous publications on classical and contemporary cinema, with a particular focus on Hollywood production.

On Tuesday, January 23, at 5:30 pm, at the Museum of the Jewish Community of Trieste Carlo and Vera Wagner, Tullia Catalan, professor of Contemporary History, and Alessandro Carrieri, research fellow, will discuss with Giorgio Fabre, a scholar of twentieth-century political history and essayist, on the state of research on fascist anti-Semitism.

On Thursday, January 25, 2024, at the Teatro Miela in Trieste, the tenth edition of the multidisciplinary conference "Living with Auschwitz" will take place, held within the framework of the agreement between the University of Trieste and the cultural association Stazione Ernesto Nathan Rogers. At 3 pm, after the greetings from academic authorities, Miriam Spizzichino, the niece of Settimia Spizzichino, the only woman to survive the deportation to Auschwitz of 1023 civilians of Jewish origin, will open the proceedings. The event will include presentations by UniTS professors Mauro Barberis (IusLit), Sergia Adamo (DiSU), Giuseppe Ieraci (DiSPeS), Edoardo Milotti (DF), Sabina Passamonti (DSV), Francoise Ghislaine Favart (IusLit), Giovanni Fraziano, and Maurizio Prato, as well as the director of EUT Mauro Rossi. The event will be livestreamed.

The catalog of the exhibition "December 7, 1943: Destination Lager," in which the Department of Humanities participated, will be presented on January 31 at 5 pm at the Museo Revoltella Auditorium Marco Sofianopulo (via Diaz 27). The publication recounts the ongoing exhibition at the Risiera di San Sabba until June 9 and gathers all the texts and archival and photographic materials, integrating them with additional documentation, video interview transcriptions, names of deportees, and an essential bibliography. The catalog, produced in Italian, Slovenian, and English, will be available for free download from the web pages of the Museo della Risiera di San Sabba – Monumento Nazionale. Professor Tullia Catalan will participate in the presentation.

The collaboration between the University of Trieste and the association Deina APS continues within the Promemoria Auschwitz project, which will be offered again in 2024. Forty-eight UniTS students have been selected to participate in a "memory journey" at the end of a preparatory course on the themes of European history in the first half of the twentieth century, the persecution of Jews, and the Holocaust. The journey, scheduled for late February, will take them to Krakow, with visits to the Schindler Factory Museum and the remains of the Jewish ghetto, and to the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp.

The theme of Holocaust education is also the subject of a research grant activated by the Department of Humanities, which will continue in the coming years.

On Holocaust Memorial Day, January 27, the University of Trieste will illuminate the facade of the central building at Piazzale Europa in red.