The memorial wagon, which was used for deportations to concentration camps between 1943 and 1945, is already displayed at Piazza Bra. However, Verona’s efforts to remember one of history’s worst chapters have been ongoing throughout January and will continue into next month with events also on Holocaust Remembrance Day. On Saturday, January 27, and Sunday, January 28, the historic deportation camp of Montorio will be open to guided visits, commemorating the victims of the Holocaust. To participate, reservations are required for one of the two available times: 9:30 a.m. or 11 a.m. Also on Saturday, there will be a conference entitled “Protecting Memory Criminally?” where Paolo Caroli will discuss denialism, law, and democracy.
Lectures in Verona
Memorial Day, however, will not mark the end of commemorative initiatives. On Sunday, January 28, the “The Monument Lives” event will take place at Piazza Isolo, near sculptor Pino Castagna’s “Barbed Wire” monument. On the same day, at 5 p.m., Matteo Corradini, author of “We Were the Sound: The Women’s Orchestra of Auschwitz, Between History and Stories,” will hold a conference with Roberto Israel, counselor of the Sons of the Shoah Association and head of the Literary Society’s Verona Section. The event explores a little-known aspect of the Shoah: the presence of a women’s orchestra that operated for 19 months in the Auschwitz II-Birkenau camp between 1943 and 1944.
The University of Verona, in partnership with the Center for European Studies, Hannah Arendt Study Center, and the City of Verona, will hold two talks on January 29 and 30 at 5:30 p.m. in the Farinati Room of the Civic Library, via Cappello 43. The first is titled “Jewish resistance during the Holocaust: myth or reality?” and the second is “Antisemitism: a past that does not pass.” Then, on Wednesday, January 31, from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m., a round table discussion “Active Memories: the Shoah and other forgotten Nazi-Fascist exterminations” will take place in Polo Zanotto’s aula magna, Viale dell’Università 4, with several university professors from Verona and elsewhere participating.
Exhibitions for Holocaust Remembrance Day through February
The traveling exhibition “Destination Auschwitz” is also on display under the tent put up in Piazza Bra, where the wagon of remembering will stop until January 31. The exhibition depicts in detail the stages of anti-Jewish persecution during World War II, from the rise of National Socialism in Germany to the fascist racial laws in Italy.
The free-entry exhibition “Traces and Memories of the Ghetto,” which recounts the architectural and urban events of the former Veronese ghetto, is on display at the Verona Civic Library’s Protomoteca Hall until February 3. And in the Biblioteca Ragazzi there will be the historical-documentary exhibition “Jews and the City. The urbanistic vicissitudes of the Verona ghetto,” created in 2018 by the Verona Institute for the History of Resistance and Contemporary Age.
