What is “Day of Remembrance“? January 27, 1945 marked the demolition of the gates of the Auschwitz concentration camp. This, as stated in Article 1 of the Law of July 20th 2000, n. 211, “The Italian Republic recognizes the 27th day of January, date of the gates of Auschwitz,”Day of Remembrance” in order to remember the Holocaust (extermination of the Jewish people), the racial laws, the persecution of Italian Jewish citizens , Italians who suffered deportation, imprisonment, death, and those who, even in different fields and camps, have opposed the project of extermination, and risked their lives to save more lives as well as protected the persecuted.”
On the occasion of the “Day of Remembrance 2018“, the Italian Cultural Institute is organizing a conference: Primo Levi and the memory of Auschwitz by Fabio Levi. For Primo Levi, Auschwitz has been object of reflection and dialogue with readers, and especially the younger readers, throughout his life. This from his first account written with Leonardo De Benedetti in early 1945 in Katowice, Poland. Then his analysis and description of the Lager expressed with extraordinary clarity with “If this is a man”, published in 1947, and his effort never ceased to grow in the following years. Until his last book “The Shipwrecked and the Survivors”, which offered an unprecedented representation of the extreme paradoxes of the exterminating practice of Nazism.
Thursday February 1st, 2018, 1pm
Université du Québec à Montréal
Local A-5020 (Pavillon Aquin, Department of sociology, UQAM).
The conference will be held in French
Fabio Levi is Professor of Contemporary History at the Department of Historical Studies of the University of Turin and has been Director of the International Center for Early Levi Studies since 2008. He studied for many years the story of Jewish persecution in Italy, publishing several books on the subject. Among others L’ebreo in oggetto. L’applicazione della normativa antiebraica a Torino 1938-1943 (1991); L’identità imposta. Un padre ebreo di fronte alle leggi razziali di Mussolini (1996); Le case e le cose. La persecuzione degli ebrei torinesi nella carte dell’EGELI. 1938-1945 (1998); Le risposte a un questionario proposto presso la Facoltà di Lettere di Torino (1999); Dodici lezioni sugli ebrei in Europa. Dall’emancipazione alle soglie dello sterminio (2003); Auschwitz, il presente e il possibile. Dialoghi sulla storia tra infanzia e adolescenza, (with Maria Bacchi) (2004); La persecuzione antiebraica dal fascismo al dopoguerra (2009). Among his publications relating in particular to the most recent Italian history, it is worth remembering Traveling with Alex. La vita e gli incontri di Alexander Langer (2007).
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