Milan, 06 February 2023
Track 21, the Memory Track. A multimedia information totem was inaugurated today at the Milano Centrale station to remember the victims of the Shoah and the thousands of people who, between 1943 and 1945, were deported to the concentration camps starting from Milan station platform 21.
The totem is a project sponsored by the Ministry of Culture, the FS Italiane Group and the Milan Shoah Memorial and is placed at the head of track 21, as a warning not to forget and not to give in to the indifference and banality of evil.
Inaugurated as part of the initiatives related to the Day of Remembrance, it was presented in the Royal Hall of the Milano Centrale Station by the senator for life of the Italian Republic Liliana Segre, by the Minister of Culture Gennaro Sangiuliano, by the FS Italiane Group CEO Luigi Ferraris, by the president of the Milan Shoah Memorial Foundation Roberto Jarach, and by the mayor of Milan Giuseppe Sala.
The totem contains the directions to the Shoah Memorial 200 metres from the Central Station, in piazza Edmond Jacob Safra 1, and a video, made by the Ministry of Culture also with the contribution of the Istituto Luce - Cinecittà, with the testimony of the deportation to Auschwitz of the then 13-year-old Liliana Segre, which took place on January 30, 1944 from track 21.
The aim is to encourage travellers to remember and reflect and invite them to visit the Shoah Memorial. The area where the Memorial stands today was originally used for postal wagons and, between 1943 and 1945, was the place where thousands of Jews and political opponents were loaded on freight wagons that, after being transported to the upper floor of the tracks, were attached to the convoys to Auschwitz-Birkenau, Mauthausen and other concentration and extermination camps or to Italian collection camps such as those of Fossoli and Bolzano.