Brescia Ex-Deportee Shares Mauthausen Testimony with Fermi Students
At the Sala del Caminetto of Palazzo Fantoni in Salò, an emotional history lesson took place for some students of the Fermi high school.
Carlo Todros, the Brescia-based coordinator for the Associazione nazionale ex deportati (National Association of Former Deportees) and member of the secretariat of the Associazione nazionale partigiani italiani (National Association of Italian Partisans), shared his experience in the Mauthausen extermination camp with the young high school students.
The event was organized by the school principal, Professor Liliana Aimo, daughter of a decorated partisan awarded the gold medal, to whom Todros delivered a CD-ROM on the Resistance.
The initiative is part of the project «Destinazione Auschwitz» (Destination Auschwitz), coordinated by Professor Massimo Sgarbi, which aims to take two classes from the «Fermi» high school on a pilgrimage trip to the Polish extermination camp in March.
Memory and Testimony
Todros recounted the pain he personally endured and symbolically passed the torch of respect for others—regardless of ethnicity, political belief, or religious faith—to the younger generations.
A living memory of those who experienced the humiliation of racial laws: expulsion from public school, imprisonment, deportation, nullification of their personal identity; of those who saw their names transformed into numbers—now kept as relics of a past that no revisionism will ever erase; of those who, detained at the Fossoli concentration and collection camp, experienced the humanity of the people of Emilia, and of those who, in the struggle for survival at Mauthausen, had to strip away their humanity, denying any form of solidarity in favor of unrestrained individualism.
Women stripped, shaved, and depilated by barbers forced to perform the unpleasant task, assaulted by dogs; children thrown in the air and used as targets for shooting; people scavenging through their feces for undigested food to ease the terrible hunger; camps fertilized with the ashes of fathers and mothers, friends and strangers—people who, unable to work, could do nothing even like slaves.
The students of «Fermi» high school listened to Todros’s words in deep silence and with emotion.
They asked him where he found the strength to resist: he, a 19-year-old young man, tall and strong, Italy’s champion in the 100-meter backstroke, survived thanks to the moral strength he drew from sleeping next to his brother, who was also interned.
Reduced to a human larva weighing 35 kilograms (from 90), he managed to rebuild his life and recover forgotten values.
Today, although unable to forgive, Todros bears no hatred. He meets with people, especially young people, aware of his mission.
He quotes a phrase engraved on a plank of a barrack by an anonymous deportee: «If God exists, as I believe, he must apologize to me».
Those who listen are fully aware that when he retells what he has heard, he will face a more distracted audience; the emotional tension created by the presence of those who experienced the horrors firsthand will be absent.
For this reason, even more effort will be needed to disprove Vico and to challenge the theory of history as a cycle of repeated events. se.za.
