Celebrated, debated, criticised and at times even mocked, International Holocaust Remembrance Day remains a profoundly important yet deeply uncomfortable commemoration within the national and international civic calendar. It represents a call to take responsibility, urging individuals and compelling institutions and national communities to confront the past and to rethink the present in the light of this confrontation.

Indeed, memory forges a distinctive and inseparable link between past and present, thereby shaping the future. This characteristic underpinned the establishment of International Holocaust Remembrance Day: first in Italy, with Law no. 211 of 20 July 2000, which instituted the commemoration “in memory of the extermination and persecution of the Jewish people and of Italian military and political deportees in Nazi camps”; and later with the 2005 United Nations resolution, which designated 27 January as the International Day of Commemoration in Memory of the Victims of the Holocaust, with the explicit aim of countering all forms of denial of the extermination of the Jews. In both cases, the decision was based on the belief that a consciously cultivated memory helps to develop a civic conscience, ensuring that such crimes are never repeated — “never again”.

In the decades that separate us from those founding texts, countless public and private initiatives have sought to respond to that call. Over time, the Shoah and the crimes committed in Nazi concentration camps — with the complicity of other nation-states — have become part of our cultural memory, shaping the collective imagination of generations born after that historical period. This shift from the historical to the symbolic and cultural plane is largely driven by a universalist impulse that is not tied to specific groups. At the same time, however, when detached from its historical context, memory can lead both to processes of removal and distortion of the questions that the past poses to individual and collective consciences, and to attempts to “domesticate” memory through ritualisation or by linking it to particular perspectives and aims at the expense of others that are equally legitimate and complementary — or even opposed. When not treated as taboo, these phenomena offer valuable material for reflection on the present and challenge us with a force comparable to that of historical study itself.

In fact, memory — especially of a past dominated by death and institutionalised violence — is not sufficient to foster historical and civic awareness. Without critical reflection and knowledge, memory can instead give rise to a sense of impotence, aphasia, fear, and new forms of trauma, encouraging rejection and denial of history. The drafters of the Italian law and the UN resolution appear to have been aware of this, as they entrusted the fulfilment of the spirit underlying the institution of International Holocaust Remembrance Day to educational programmes — albeit not clearly specified — to be implemented in schools and relevant institutions.

Once again this year, it is within this framework that the Interdepartmental Centre for Jewish Studies “Michele Luzzati” (CISE) of the University of Pisa — which brings together the Humanities Departments of the University (CFS and FILELI) — has welcomed proposals for collaboration from local schools and civic institutions, and has in turn promoted a number of initiatives specifically designed to accompany both the school and student population and the wider public along a path of reflection and knowledge. This approach aims to preserve the memory of the past without evading the questions posed by the present. In particular, the Centre is collaborating on a training programme for students and PhD candidates who will take part in the study trip to Kraków and Auschwitz, promoted by the University of Pisa through the CIDIC. The programme includes a series of seminars with a historical focus but also linked to contemporary issues, followed by meetings of a more cultural nature (literary and artistic).

Alongside these seminars, CISE — in collaboration with the Museum of Graphics (Municipality of Pisa and University of Pisa), the Domus Mazziniana and the CIDIC — has organised the exhibition Muselmann: Giorno della Memoria (Museum of Graphics, 17–31 January 2026). Curated by the artist and lecturer Barbara Nahmad of the Brera Academy of Fine Arts, the exhibition offers free guided tours for local school groups.

The exhibition, created by students of the Academy and inspired by Diario di Gusen. Lettere a Maria by the painter Aldo Carpi — a survivor of the concentration camps, to which he was deported as an antifascist and as the grandson of a Jewish man — was selected because it provides an extraordinary testimony to how young artists, belonging to the third generation after the Second World War and the Shoah, have engaged with this memory. Through graphic art, they have succeeded in making it a living matter, enabling viewers to measure their own gaze and interpretative frameworks, and to reflect on the relationship they maintain both with that past and with the present, 81 years after the liberation of Auschwitz by Soviet troops.

 

Serena Grazzini
Director of the Interdepartmental Centre for Jewish Studies “Michele Luzzati”,
University of Pisa