Day of Remembrance: Alberto Mieli, “I tell today’s youths that “life is a beautiful thing”

“They held 3-4 month-old babies by their feet, like when they come out of their mother’s womb. They kept them swinging in that position five or six times, then they violently pulled them up and shot them. They laughed, they made bets on who would hit the targets.” Although many years have gone by, Alberto Mieli has very clear memories of that horror. He is one of Rome’s last living victims of the deportation to Nazi extermination camps. He is one of the few; fewer still are those who can still share those memories, who can still give a face and describe the tragedy of the Shoah. The Day of Remembrance is commemorated on January 27. Alberto has a very busy agenda of meetings; it’s hard to fix an appointment. But he never says “no”. His recollections are conveyed at a slow pace, while speaking, he looks straight in the other person’s eyes to make sure that that the proportions of the horrors he experienced have actually sunk in. Every word carries a heavy load.

He showed me the number 180060 tattooed on his forearm. “When they inflicted it upon me I cried. I thought: now I am marked like an animal.”

Alberto was only 17 when he saw those babies being thrown in the air. But “they had already knocked me off”, he said. Retracing Alberto’s memories is like reliving a black-and-white film of Nazi-Fascist Rome, the Racial laws, the sound of the sirens, the air raid shelters. Three post stamps given to him by members of the Resistance plunged Alberto in the infernal spiral of the Shoah. “The Gestapo took me, they broke the bones of my feet, questioning me on who had given me those stamps. I was firm in my reply; I said I had found them. And they went on beating me. They hit my feet with a truncheon until it bled. The pain was unbearable. Then they summoned two prison wardens to bring me to jail, but as we were going out of the room, they said: bring him back! They put a clamp in my mouth and they pulled out a tooth. I fainted; I woke up in a cell in a pool of blood.” After then, the story of Alberto took a horrible course.

“In Auschwitz – he said – everything changed. In Auschwitz the whole world had changed. I saw pregnant women, old people, sick people, mercilessly beaten up for no reason.”

Alberto’s eyes didn’t loose their glimmer, but a dark shadow crosses his face when asked to speak about the life in concentration camps. “I can still feel the smell of when I first arrived there. We thought it was the smell of the chemical compounds used in the war factories, but after 4-5 days we learned that it came from the cremation furnaces that burned corpses 24 hours a day.”

Women suffered the most. “They were humiliated. They cut their hair and stripped off their clothes in front of everyone. Young women would instinctively try to cover themselves with their hands, but they immediately whipped them hard, until they stood at attention.

Then they would send them upstairs, in the barracks they used as brothels. We heard cries and screams. I can say that in groups of 10-15 girls, 9 of them had no knowledge of sex.”

One day, John Paul II – “a great man who knew who the Nazis really were” – asked him how he had managed to survive that inferno. “I don’t know”, Alberto said. “I still have no answer to that question. I was beat up many times. The pain was atrocious. But life is stronger; you never stop hoping that you will emerge unscathed.”

That dim, yet ever-shining light has kept him alive inside. It’s the same light he tries to show to the youths whom he goes to meet in schools. “I tell them to do good deeds and to never displease their parents. I tell them to ignore those schoolmates who try to lead them astray, because they could regret it their entire lives. Then I tell them that God has given us the sacred gift of freedom, for freedom people give their lives.

A man is nothing if he can’t express his ideas, especially if he doesn’t respect those of others. I tell the youths that life is a beautiful thing.”

Before saying good-bye, he adds: “I was fortunate – or unfortunate – enough to witness the apex of human cruelty, brutality, and evil, to see the full extent of cruelty exerted by man against another man.” How do you relate to the ongoing violence perpetrated across the world? “The children…. – he replies – I pray every morning for them and I ask the Lord to bless the children, to protect the children.”