On Monday, April 13 students and students of the Italian School Guglielmo Marconi in New York met Andrea Fiano, journalist and son of Nedo Fiano, one of the few Italian survivors at the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp. The meeting, organized by the Fondazione Occorsio, gave birth to a lively and intense debate that ended with the reflection that the duty of memory is not only to remember who suffered, it is to learn to recognize the steps of evil, before it becomes too late to stop it.
To understand the weight of Andrea Fiano’s intervention, we need to know the story of his father. Nedo Fiano was born in Florence in 1925, in a Jewish family. He was 18 years old when, in 1944, he was arrested with his family and deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Nedo remained at Auschwitz until the liberation of the camp in January 1945, surviving daily brutality and horror of one of the most terrifying pages of contemporary history. He returned to Italy as one of the rare Italian survivors of Auschwitz and dedicated the rest of his life to witness what he had lived: in schools, in the squares, in the institutions. For decades he traveled Italy by telling the Shoah with extraordinary clarity and generosity, convinced that the direct account was the most powerful antidote against the return of evil. Nedo Fiano died in 2020, at ninety-four years, leaving a moral legacy that his son Andrea chose to collect and carry on.
Andrea Fiano is a journalist and author, and he inherited from his father the mission of translating history into a living word, capable of reaching the new generations. In front of the students of the Italian School, girls and boys who grew up in a world where the Shoah is already history, far away in time, chose not to limit themselves to the story of the past; the heart of the meeting went beyond historical testimony.
The message Andrea Fiano wanted to leave the students is twofold. On the one hand, the moral imperative of memory: to remember not as a ritual exercise, but as an act of civil responsibility. The story of the Shoah is not only the story of the Jews exterminated by the Nazis: it is the story of what happens when a society stops recognizing the humanity of the other, when propaganda transforms the neighbors into enemies, when silence in front of the abuse becomes complicity. Nazism has not yet arrived, it has grown from small intolerances, from accepted jokes, from looks lowered in front of an injustice. That’s why we have to learn to see.
On the other hand, and this is perhaps the most urgent message for girls and boys today, the reflection on the daily signs of hatred. Nazism is not born from nothing: it is born from indifference, from tolerated derision, from normalized exclusion. Fiano asked the students to look at their everyday life: to the classmate targeted because different, to the racist joke that “was not serious”, to the bully that no one stops because it seems too complicated. These are not harmless episodes: they are the seeds from which, under conditions of political and social crisis, can sprout something much more dangerous.
It is necessary to understand that evil is exercised on a continuous scale, and that intervention at the first steps is enormously easier than waiting for the last. Being argine to evil does not require heroism: it requires daily courage not to lower the voice when you should raise it, not to turn your head when you should look.
The students listened silently, then asked real questions, not of circumstance: on how to say enough when you are in minority, on how you manage the fear of being excluded if you oppose the group, on what it means today to be responsible witnesses at a time when hate runs fast on social media and often leaves no traces easily recognizable. Fiano responded to all, without simplifying, without giving comfort answers that could not guarantee.
Andrea Fiano explained that telling serves, since we cannot be sure that evil will never turn again, but surely silence makes it easier.
The meeting was made possible thanks to the Fondazione Occorsio and the Kennedy Foundation, which for years have been engaged in the promotion of civil culture and historical memory among the new generations. The choice of bringing Andrea Fiano to the Italian School is part of a broader path of education to responsible citizenship: it is not enough to know what happened, it is necessary to develop the tools to recognize him if he should return, in any form.
In a historical moment in which the direct witnesses of the Shoah turn off one by one, the work of those, like Andrea Fiano, carries forward that second-hand memory assumes an even more valuable value. The chain of testimony is not interrupted: it is transformed. And Monday morning, in a New York classroom, that chain added a new ring.
L’articolo Andrea Fiano meets the students of the Italian School proviene da IlNewyorkese.
