While passengers enter the train station Milan Central, happy to come to the city of fashion, music and football, few of them know that under the tracks, on the secret "Platform 21", there is a memorial dedicated to the tragic events of more than 80 years ago.
In 2013, a museum dedicated to the 1200 Jews from the San Vittore prison, who were taken to Auschwitz in 20 trains between the end of 1943 and the beginning of 1945, was opened in the basement of Milano Centrale station. Only 27 of them survived. The Milano Centrale station building itself is an impressive building from 1931, or "the ninth year of the Fascist Era". In Mussolini's Italy, the years started counting from the March on Rome in 1922.
The Memorialle della Shoah is located next to the side entrance of Milano Centrale, near where the buses that bring passengers from Bergamo Airport stop. Security measures are usually high, as with all Jewish museums, memorials to the victims The Holocaust or a synagogue in Western Europe. There is also an armored police vehicle parked there with two special forces in full combat readiness.
After Mussolini's Italy capitulated on September 8, 1943, the troops of Nazi Germany occupied the north of the country, and Milan became the center for the internment of Jews. Namely, similar to Horthy's Hungary, Jews in Mussolini's Italy were disenfranchised, but they did not end up in cattle cars and sent to concentration camps. There are well-known stories of how Jews from the part of the NDH that was under German administration saved their lives by fleeing to the part of Pavelić's state under the occupation of Italy. Ante Tomić once told me in the City Cafe in Split how in the summer of 1943, weddings were still held in the local synagogue. And then in September 1943, the Germans came (as in April 1944 to Bačka, until then under Horti's administration) and started sending Jews to Auschwitz and other camps.
The persecution of Jews and their sending to Auschwitz was carried out by SS-Sturmbannführer Teodor Savecke. At the end of the war, he started working for the Americans, from 1947 officially for the CIA, and was even returned to the regular police force in West Germany. In 1999, a court in Turin sentenced him in absentia to life imprisonment, but Germany never extradited him. He died a year later a free man.
Jews from Genoa and Turin, as well as those from the Aosta Valley, were deported to Milan. The first train from the secret underground Platform 21 left on December 6, 1943, carrying 169 Jews to Auschwitz. Only five of them survived. The second train with 600 Jews left on January 30, 1944. As soon as they arrived in Auschwitz, 500 of them were suffocated in gas chambers and burned in the crematorium within a few hours. Among them were 40 children. One of the few who survived was the then fourteen-year-old girl Liliana Segre, today one of the few who are still alive. Her father Alberto was killed in Auschwitz.
Platform 21 was forgotten for decades, and it was only in 1995 that the local Catholic organization Sant'Egidio revealed to the public what happened there. Work began in 2002 to open a memorial in the basement of the Milano Centrale station. The idea was given by the then archbishop of Milan, Carl Maria Martini. The initial part of the 15,6 million dollars, which was the total cost of the entire project, was provided by local authorities and sponsors. In the end, Lili Safra, a Brazilian millionaire of Jewish origin, appeared, who provided additional money to complete the Shoa Memorial in Milan. It was opened on January 27, 2013, on Holocaust Remembrance Day, in the presence of Mario Monti, then Prime Minister of Italy, and a large number of state and religious officials. In the past 10 years, the memorial has also offered its space for the accommodation of migrants from Syria and Eritrea.
...…livestock wagons
In the very museum, on Platform 21 there are plaques with the dates of the deportation of Jews from this place, and on the wall across from it - all 1.200 names of people who went to Auschwitz from here. Confessions of passengers from Platform 21 who survived the Holocaust are broadcast in small cinema halls. As you walk around the memorial, you can hear the rumble of trains overhead and you can imagine how the Jews heard the same sound as they waited to board the cattle cars.
In April 2023, someone vandalized a mural on the wall of the Memorial depicting characters from The Simpsons dressed as Auschwitz inmates.
