There are places that belong us even if we don't know them and we have never been there yet. These are the places of the soul that belong to everyone because they are part of our common history. We are those places too and we will pass them on to future generations together with the acquired values and awareness of history.
Every year on 27 January is the "Day of Remembrance" in order not to forget the extermination of millions of Jews by the Nazis. We have a duty to remember the horror of the Shoah, one of the darkest moments in history that has produced so many victims. We have the duty to remember because what is forgotten can return: “Reflect that this was”, Primo Levi writes in a poem, what has been does not repeat itself, and that we do not resign ourselves to the horror it once was; death, suffering, cruelty, psychological annihilation of human dignity.
The International Museum of Ferramonti di Tarsia, in continuity and development with the cultural ductus "Ferramonti, the Lager, the Hope, the Salvation", specified in the programmatic lines of 2019-2020, underlines the importance of the connection between the need for a better knowledge of the reality of Ferramonti-Campo del Duce, in the light of the recent interpretative dynamics of the new historiographical outcomes, and the aim of projecting and promoting Ferramonti, a historically and anthropologically interesting place, as a European and international cultural space.
A space where is possible to do research, discuss, train, meet first and second generation witnesses.
A place where reflection on the respect and protection of human rights is the fulcrum of all activities, because the European relevance is an intrinsic connotation of the reality of the Ferramonti camp itself: from June 1940 to September 1943 they were interned as prisoners of war about 3000 people, mostly from the heart of Europe: Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland.
It is important to consider that precisely these people, innocent victims of dispossession and vilification of human rights, were able, in Ferramonti, to govern themselves (establishing a Parliament, democratic, regulating life inside the camp) and knew, as the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union will later say, “take on the burden of keeping otherness together”. This is the mission agreed and shared by the Municipality of Tarsia, the Ernst Bernhard Park and the Natural Reserves of Lake Tarsia and the mouth of the Crati river.
In this issue of Parktime we have collected many witnesses that tell us about the life of the inmates here in Ferramonti reminding us that "any human language is too poor to describe the torture and suffering" experienced as the words of Dina Neumann Smadar remind us.
Malaria, hunger, the black market, psychological distress coexisted in this Duce's concentration camp with art, culture and interreligious dialogue which managed to give rise to glimmers of solidarity and tolerance. The Ferramonti di Tarsia Internment Camp, now also Ernst Bernhard Literary Park, is among the six Italian sites admitted to the pre-selection of the Mibact for the candidacies for the European Heritage Label, the recognition given to sites that "promote the sense of belonging to 'European Union through the richness of diversity and the importance of intercultural dialogue”.
A place that has been a symbol of repression today immersed in the protected nature reserve of Lake Tarsia and the mouth of the Crati River (Cs) of the Calabria Region.
"The power of life is extraordinary, this is what we must transmit to today's young people" remind us of the words of the senator for life, Auschwitz-Birkenau survivor and tireless witness of the Shoah, Liliana Segre, who held at the European Parliament in Brussels. “We didn't want to die, we were madly attached to life whatever it was. We were only young, but we looked old, sexless, ageless, breastless. We must not be afraid of these words because this is how dignity is taken away from a woman." At the conclusion of her speech, she launches the most beautiful wish for future generations that we share with you: "Be like butterflies flying over barbed wires".
Teresina Ciliberti, Stanislao de Marsanich
Cover by Carlotta Patrizi
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C/O Società Dante Alighieri 
