One man’s harrowing pilgrimage to the Auschwitz extermination camp, a place symbolic of the Shoah, liberated by the Red Army on 27 January 1945. But it is also the story of a profound inner turmoil, by a person whose conviction of his moral integrity and sense of justice leads him to abjure all his ethical principles in order to survive. This is the plot of “Journey to Auschwitz A/R”, a play that will be staged at the Teatro del Popolo in Castelfiorentino on Monday 27 January (9:00 p.m.) on the occasion of the “‘Day of “Remembrance Day”.
The show, which is proposed by the Compagnia Melarancio, draws inspiration from the long journey made in 2011 by Gimmi Basilotta together with other “pilgrims”, from Piedmont to Poland, to retrace on foot the deportation journey that in 1944 took twenty-six Jews from Cuneo from Borgo San Dalmazio to Auschwitz. That pilgrimage, carried out by Basilotta as part of the “Passodopopasso” project, also proved to be an opportunity to reflect deeply and discuss the dynamics of that tragedy, which unfortunately affected millions of innocent people, and to acquire a greater awareness that remembrance is not only a necessity, but also a duty, out of respect for those who lived and suffered history.
Promoted by the Fondazione Teatro del Popolo in collaboration with ANPI, the Municipality of Castelfiorentino and Giallo Mare Minimal Teatro, Monday evening’s performance is open to all citizens (tickets can be purchased at the Teatro del Popolo ticket office or on the website www.teatrocastelfiorentino.it) and will be repeated on Tuesday morning (28 January, 10:00 a.m.) with entrance reserved for the students of the “F. Enriques” Institute and the Castelfiorentino Comprehensive Institute.
The initiatives for the “Remembrance Day” do not end here. On Sunday 26 January in Castelnuovo d’Elsa (9:30 p.m.), the Gat theatre company proposes “Unknown Recipient”, which recounts the tragic end of the friendship between two people (the Jew Max Eisenstein, and the German Martin Schulse, of the Christian religion), severed by Nazi ideology.
“The “Remembrance Day”, which coincides with the anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz extermination camp”, emphasises the Mayor Francesca Giannì, “is a date that reminds us above all of the genocide perpetrated against the Jewish people, but it must also represent a warning against all the tragic events that led to the death of thousands or millions of innocent people because of their religion, skin colour, ethnicity, or more simply because they were considered different in homage to a dehumanising idelogy. And that is why every year we try to involve all citizens, starting with school students and young people, so that they understand the lessons of history for their present and their future, founded on sound principles. I would like to thank in particular Marco Cappellini, President of the ANPI who, together with Maria Cristina Giglioli, President of the Fondazione Teatro del Popolo, have collaborated on this project in close cooperation with the headmistress of the Enriques school, Barbara Degl’Innocenti, and of the Istituto Comprensivo, Salvatore Picerno”.
“Memory, as the very etymology of the word says”, observes the Councillor for Schools, Marta Longaresi, “is the ability to reproduce a past experience in the mind, the ability to remember what has been in the past in order to write the future. This is an important day not to forget the tragic events of the past and the Shoah, but also a moment to reflect, in an increasingly fast-paced world, on how fundamental it is to develop this skill in order to translate it into everyday life, for the rights won against injustice and for peace”.
