“Those who forget their past are doomed to repeat it.” Under this principle, the professors Anthony Verrecchio (Professor of Human Rights and Director of the RFK Human Rights Foundation, Spain) and Dr. Alex Feldman (Coordinator of the Department of Modern Languages and Literature), organized a guided visit to the Centro Sefarad-Israel in Madrid, on the occasion of the exhibition “Mauthausen: Shared Memories.”
The students from the Dean List and the Debate Club who attended the visit were instructed by the teachers on the different historical episodes that led to how the fascist regime that ruled Germany between 1933 and 1945 exterminated nearly ten million people, among them six million Jews, in a systematic slaughter known as “The Shoah,” or “Holocaust.”
Memory and remembrance, an obligation for subsequent generations
A large part of the exhibition, with its rich photographic and audiovisual archive, focuses on the horrific Mauthausen concentration camp, located in Austria, and genocidally converted into the final destination of most of the prisoners of Spanish origin and tens of thousands of Jews, Slavs and other persons.
As Professor Verrecchio pointed out:
“The visit has been carried out with the aim of publicizing and reflecting on the crisis of Western democracies in the 30s and 40s of the 20th century, as well as the trajectory for the struggle and recognition of Universal Human Rights, arising from the European war.”
After the visit, the students and teachers engaged in a brief debate on the duty of memory, the memory of deceased prisoners, and above all, the need for open reflection about how to avoid such disastrous situations in the future.
Because memory is fragile; and above all, because respect for the victims obliges us not to forget the past.
