There are some days where I just go away. Somewhere else entirely from my body. I close up in bed and I’m not there. For anybody.

I’m not there for my bike, for S. Marcus Weir, for the Study and the works I create there. I’m not there for my friends, for events. My beloved daughters and that sense of disarming tenderness I feel for my grandsons and grandaughters are just distant shapes. The time of total abandon is announced during some mornings, when the transition from horizontal to vertical position gets harder every passing day. I'm not there anymore because, for a moment, I cannot handle even the simplest form of emotion, whether positive or negative. My escape towards nothing, towards deepest emptiness, is necessary in order to be able to face again daily occurrences. That are many and tangled up. They start from my family and dilate in the intricacy of tremendous mournings that ceaselessly go trough earth. There is a wound on the body of the earth that devours everything. There are blows that hit the mind and cut the heart to the my point I can’t my find my way anymore. That’s the thing, I can’t coincide the world surrounding us with the reality of things.

From the Paris attack perpetrated by jihadist terrorists to the 200 thousand dead during the Lebanese war, the word has become way too complicated: it’s a powder keg. I need detachment for some kind of resurrection. Without this abandonment I would not be able to handle even the pain from a pinprick. This way, I collapse in bed and, in fetal position, I get back to the womb. I get back to a safe place and the memory of deep sea makes me turn into a water creature that sees everything through a curtain of sea.

The Great History, 1941

Yesterday, it was the SS. Today it’s Is. As long as men don’t see the horror of their actions and understand that in order to save humanity we must unite, understand, not divide, separate and mostly, as Marianne’s Grandmother says: “…nothing in this world in worse than bitterness and revenge. Always remain whole and true to yourself”. Or, one can follow the young slave who invites Penthesilea to go with her to the caves never the Scamander and tells her: “Between killing and dying there is a third way, living”. Today is International Holocaust Remembrance Day and yes, we remember while we are surrounded by more wars, more genocides, more massacres with old and new horrors, because that’s the cause of these events: to destroy everything that stands in their way, women, men, children, cities, countries reduced to ashes with particular fury against art works in the name of race or religion or wherever power leads. Conquering, winning, losing. How about peace for once?

In the name of race, 1941

“My dear wife, we killed 3771 of them this week. I’ll have so many things to tell you when I come back”. In the name of race, grey smoke comes out of the crematories of Auschwitz, Dachau, Bergher Benses and daily life placidly goes on in the houses nearby. Sometimes the wind carries a nauseating stench. But no one smells anything and when the SS are home, they are loving fathers; in the name of race, schizophrenia becomes a rule of life. In the name of race there are scientific experiments and sheds full of objects that belonged to the prisoners and sacks, hundreds of them, full of braided hair. In the name of race, when the Russian army arrives, and the English one later, they find prisoners roving among stacks of dead bodies piled up like dummies. And ashes, ashes, ashes. The survivors are not human anymore. Some soldiers are ordered to film these images. Because we must not forget, because sometimes someone claims that laghers never existed. They started by hunting down the different: kidnapping, humiliating, segregating. But expulsions are not enough anymore.

That’s how the Shoah of a people happens. The Jewish one. So many more died with them: gipsies, homosexuals, the handicapped, Jehovah’s Witnesses, the mentally ill and anti-Nazi from Germany and other European countries. In this scenario of death, the Jewish are the main recipients of an eternal and extreme hate. For the first time in “Great History”, a perfect administrative, bureaucratic and industrial system was used to exterminate a people in a planned, organized, scientific way. These are the reason that make the extermination of the Jewish not only the annihilation of a people but the annihilation of human kind. These are the events we all know about. Now, in order to understand, I must descend into the underworld. "My dear wife, we killed 3771 of them this week…". And in these days, I became so obsessed with that one that I became it.

In 1941 I’m a Jewish kid. My schoolteacher tells my parents that my sisters and I can’t go to school anymore: it’s the new racial law. Mine is a well-to-do family, we have many friends and an intense social life. Slowly, everything just fades away. Day after day, there are no more friends, my father loses his job. Mi see a dark desolation fall upon my family. Silence surrounds our life, there are no more landmarks. They come at dawn, I’m scared and I cry. They force my parents to pack, they bring us to the train station and make Dad buy tickets. “We’ll be living in the countryside for a while, but we’ll come back”. I blindly believe what he’s telling me, the only thing that matters is that we are together. I never saw him again. I never saw my two sisters again. I clung to my mother until the showers. She was the 3770th, I was the 3771st victim. All that I have left of my sisters are two braids: one wheat, the other bright like a moonlit night. Before dying, we knew the endless land of pain, like a black mountain that blocks out the light. Of all my wishes, my games, my affections what is left? Ashes.

What is the reason, then, that drives a men to write to his dear wife giving her the number of the week’s victims as the first news? He does not say “thousands”, he writes down the exact number. “Thousands of victims”, is impersonal in its horror, but if the number is exact, I can see and feel all the victims. All of them. There is no thought, no ability to see the pain, the annihilation of another human being. Why didn’t he see his own daughter in me, clinging to my mother? Why didn’t he see himself in my father, dying of grief for not being able to save his own family? How can I make him understand that children comprehend things better and more deeply than adults; especially if the adult is just like him. Especially if he follows orders without asking himself: Why?

Hanna Arendt

In her take of Eichmann’s process, which later became the book The banality of evil, Arendt claims that evil cannot be radical. On the contrary, it is in the absence of roots, of memory, in the inability to formulate an autonomous thought that people often commonplace become agents of absolute evil. It’s this banality that turns, just like it happened in Nazi Germany, a people into an accomplice of history’s most terrible crimes. This happens more frequently in totalitarian regimes that are inclined to turn men away from the responsibilities of reality, making them just a small gear in a machine that destroys everything and wants to conquer everything. The Nazis, during Nuremberg Trials, defended themselves saying that they were acting in accordance with higher orders. They were simply obeying the law. This defense was rejected because one must not obey to manifestly criminal actions. But in a regimen, the “prepared” human being is downgraded. he turns from a thinking being into a small gear that cannot discern crime anymore, because he daily lives surrounded by institutionalized crime.

Some say horsemen, some say warriors,
Some say a fleet of ships is the loveliest
Vision in this dark world,
but I say it’s What you love.

It’s easy to make this clear to everyone,
Since Helen, she who outshone
All others in beauty, left
A fine husband,

And headed for Troy
Without a thought for
Her daughter, her dear parents…
Led astray…

(Sappho)

Translation by Matilde Castagnoli