Remembrance Day, how the State Archives tell the story of the Shoah and racial persecution

Exhibitions, meetings, educational paths and dissemination activities aimed at citizens, students and scholars to reflect on the consequences of racial laws, on the lives broken by persecution and on the role of institutions in the construction - or denial - of rights. On the Day of Remembrance the State Archives promote throughout the country a wide-ranging programme of initiatives dedicated to the Shoah and racial persecution, with the aim of transforming documentary sources into instruments of knowledge, awareness and civic responsibility.

In Milan, the Archivio di Stato hosts a civic oration by Alessandro Milan, accompanied by live music by Raffaele Kohler. Starting with a chance encounter with a stumbling stone and unpublished documents from the Archives, a choral tale of intertwined lives in WWII Milan, between Resistance, memory and the fight for freedom takes shape. Among the planned initiatives, the State Archives of Avellino presents the documentary exhibition 'The Jewish counter-script... Stories of internees in Irpinia', which reconstructs, through personal files and administrative papers, the stories of the civilian internees in the province's camps and places of confinement, giving voice to stories that have long remained on the margins of collective memory.

In Naples, a meeting hosted by the State Archives takes as its starting point the discovery of a manuscript fragment of the Talmud to reflect on the dispersion and destruction of Jewish sacred texts during historical persecutions. Also at the centre is the theme of the reuse of parchment fragments in the bindings and covers of archive documents, as material traces of a surviving memory. In Bari, the State Archives are proposing "La Memoria scritta della Shoah" (The Written Memory of the Shoah), an articulated itinerary among documents, diaries and testimonies preserved in the Apulian archives, which focuses on the experience of the Jewish refugees who came to the city after World War II and the value of archival sources as a shared heritage, today the subject of renewed interest also from the world of research and culture.

In Turin, the initiatives focus on the relationship between images, biographies and persecution: from the meeting dedicated to the photographer Silvio Ottolenghi, affected by the racial laws, to the photographic exhibition Seeing Auschwitz, which through more than one hundred shots offers a plural look - of the executioners, the victims and the Allies - at the Nazi system, with a strong popularisation framework designed also for schools. The State Archives of Rome pays tribute to the figure of Ermanno Loevinson, historian and archivist victim of the Shoah, with an initiative aimed in particular at high school final-year students, which was preceded in recent days by the laying of stumbling stones in front of the family home, testifying to how memory can and must also inhabit urban space and everyday life.

"The Archives," emphasises the General Director of Archives Antonio Tarasco, "are not just places of preservation, but civil presidia. In their papers one finds the concrete traces of discrimination, institutional responsibilities and lives affected by persecution. Making these documents accessible means strengthening democratic awareness and reminding us that memory is a duty that concerns the present and the future'. Programme 2026 thus confirms the central role of the Archives in preserving and transmitting the memory of the 20th century, transforming historical sources into instruments of education, dialogue and civil growth.