“Europe for citizens: Promotion of Active European Citizenship” The Righteous and the Resistance to Totalitarianism International Seminar Warsaw 9 -12 February 2009

The Resista nce to Totalitarianism: the Righteous among nations and the Righteous within the experience of Communist Totalitarianism ? by Anna Maria Samuelli

Premise When dealing with the righteous find ourselves within a reality of genocide, within a situation in which a State intentionally commits a crime against humanity. Generally, the genocidal State is also a totalitarian State, the latter notion being a modern historical realization and a source of debate, both on a conceptual level and following the analytical examination of the distinct historical experiences. To these experiences one can, in a fairly productive manner, apply the instrument of comparison. The analysis of both the similarities and the differences between the modalities and structures of dictatorships, of coercion, of terror, of consensus, but also of dissent and moral resistance, both enriches the historical picture and offers us the possibility to better understand the nature of the totalitarian phenomenon. Concentration camps and Gulag are the extreme manifestations of the totalitarian regimes of the XX century. That these manifestations carried within them a feeling of innovation is observable within the very nature of the unnamed crimes they perpetrated. The juridical elaboration of the term “genocide”, followed by a tortuous recognition of the same by those nations, is “posthumous”; and from this reality and scenario without precedent germinates a necessity among historians, researchers and educators to recognize that mere historical reconstruction of those events is not sufficient. One enters the realm of ethical questions, of values, of choices we make today, since we live in that modernity which produced Auschwitz and the Kolyma. Historiography wove together with the paths of remembrance, journeys of anguish and of extreme suffering: the accounts of the survivors and of those who witnessed, the literary and lyrical production, all became sources and documents which ask civil society crucial questions.1 We cannot be negligent when faced with the facts of what happened in the past, but also of what is happening now, where there appears to be a resurgence, at various levels, of the temptation to render the world safer and more beautiful within the framework of power and fundamentalism. How does one educate after Auschwitz and the Kolyma? How does one labor towards preserving the memory of these events beyond the institutionalized rituals? How does one foster within our youth the concept of ethical protest when faced with examples of violations of human rights and episodes of racism? One gives voice to those who witnessed the truth, one fights falsehoods, one analyses one’s personal indifferences and passivity. “An education which requires no courage, no imagination, no empathy, no individual responsibility, can do nothing but turn against the new generations, and against democracy itself”2 . The labor of remembrance focused on the subject of the Righteous has been found to be a very effective tool to foster all of the above.

Heroic Virtues and Ordinary Virtues The analysis of totalitarian experiences can be nothing but global. Tzvetan Todorov, two years after the fall of the Berlin Wall asked himself: “What ethic for the century of Gulags and extermination camps?”3. His answer consisted of casting doubt upon the fact that totalitarian reality was characterized solely by a dimension of darkness, of negativity, and of

1 E.Traverso, (edited by) Insegnare Auschwitz, IRSAE Piemonte, Bollati Boringhieri, Torino 1995 2 Ernst Tuggendhat, cit. by Enzo Traverso, ibid. pag. 18 3 T. Todorov, Face a l’Extreme, Edition du Seul, 1991, cit. It. transl. Di fronte all’estremo. Quale etica per il secolo del gulag e dei campi di sterminio? Garzanti, Milano 1992 1 promoting the idea of goodness, of the behavior of men, and the concept of responsibility, distinguishing between heroic and ordinary virtues. Our work, both as the “Gardens of the Righteous Committee”4 and as educators in schools, was based upon that assumption of goodness, and it honed itself into researching, collecting, and exposing the stories of those who resisted totalitarianism within the framework of ordinary life. Stories of those who were righteous, those who provided care, or witness, those who embodied dissent and opposition towards their totalitarian governments, those who, overcoming fear, denounced the promises of absolute good which bred extreme evil, those who forwent the defense of abstract principles and remembered what it was to be human beings. There existed, and still exists, an ordinary goodness which one needs to pay attention to. Personal autonomy and the freedom of choice, both unacceptable within a totalitarian regime, allow us to foster a communal core of humanity. Freedom, for good and for evil, renders human behavior unpredictable. The righteous are not heroes because of some premeditated decision, because of some life plan. They can be ordinary people, they can find themselves on the wrong side. At a certain point, though, they will listen to the voices of the victims and find within themselves the ability to oppose evil, the ability to render justice, the ability to act. If one remains inert, if one does not intervene when faced with evil, one is then forced to reevaluate one’s mental picture of oneself. If in the moment of choice one does not wish to risk anything and opts for physical safety, the very reasons for living are lost.5 If one accepts the dimension of responsibility and effort that link us together, one discovers the reasons for living. We enter the virtuous cycle of the banality of goodness. We once again find the capacity for judging and the capacity for thought. 6

The Concept of the Righteous The figure of the righteous, of he who renders aid and witness, is always a product of recognition. As Gabriele Nissim writes, “the actions of the righteous reach completeness when one finds the strength and wisdom to recognized them”7. If it is true that the definition of righteous collects within itself concepts dialectically connected such as good/evil, truth/falsehood, life/death, freedom/necessity, salvation/perdition, selflessness/selfishness, and consequently there is no admissible confusion, as Primo Levi noted, between victim and perpetrator, as we are all responsible for our actions, it is also true that it is necessary to fully embrace the concept of a “gray area” as presented in the The Drowned and the Saved and that it is not admissible to think of the perpetrator or the righteous as the embodiment of absolute evil or absolute good. “When faced with the extreme,” notes Tzvetan Todorov8, “Primo Levi knows how to remain human, simply human. And when he speaks of evil, as source of offence, it is not to accusingly point it out in others, but to more scrupulously, more mercilessly observe himself.” The contemplation of the memory of good which renders more real the memory of evil, requires the abandonment of all forms of manichaeism. It is necessary to underline that we are not operating within a realm composed of acts of heroism, but rather of a realm filled with the virtues of ordinary life, of the conscious choices each of us can make, in certain situations, to not remain indifferent, to recognize our original “relational existence” and the need we have for each other. It is true that within concentration camps or the Gulag the threshold for suffering and “useless” violence was so heightened to create irreversible corruption. “Constraint and repression,” writes Vasilij Grossman,

4 Founded in Milan, 2001, by Gabriele Nissim, Pietro Kuciukian, Anna Maria Samuelli, Ulianova Rdice 5 P. Kuciukian, Voci nel deserto. Giusti e testimoni per gli armeni, Guerini, Milano 2000, pag. 241 6 S. Maletta, “Memoria dei giusti e costruzione della città a partire da Hanna Arendt” , in I giusti e la memoria del bene, (edited by) A.Grasselli e S.Maletta, Ufficio Scolastico Regionale per l’Emilia e Romagna, CUSL, Milano 2006 7 G.Nissim, Storie di uomini giusti nel Gulag, Bruno Mondadori, Milano 2004, pag. 3 8 T. Todorov, Mémoire du male. Tentation du bien , Editions Robert Laffort, Paris 2000, It. transl. Memoria del male, tentazione del bene. Inchiesta su un secolo tragico, Garzanti, Milano 2000, pag. 217 2 “inevitably transform within the heart of man good into evil”9. But alongside the recounting of evil which is witness to the disappearance of all mercy, we find the recounting of goodness. The testimonies which bring together the experiences of those who survived the hell of the concentration camp or the Gulag reveal the fact that survival without aid and without preserving the core of humanity we carry within us, would have been impossible. Here is where the dimension of hope appears. The saviors, the righteous, but also those who rendered aid, those who testified the truth, those who opposed the system, break the silence of the world. The fact that there were “good people in evil times”10 has for us a moral value. Those who tried to resist totalitarian logic (and this is true especially of communist totalitarianism), contributed in the long run to the crisis of the regimes, even when their actions did not directly affect the course of events: they fostered the positive energy which paves the way for a new era. In a time of resurgent denialism on the part of both governments and individuals11 these stories have particular merit. Robert Satloff’s essay Among the Righteous: Lost Stories from the Holocaust's Long Reach into Arab Lands12 highlighted a dual type of denialism. Those who deny the Shoah deny even the memory of goodness. His research on the righteous within the Arab communities was of difficult acceptance and recognition: even today, the Imam of the mosque in Paris is not ready to confirm the numerical data concerning the aid offered to many Jews by his predecessors during the German occupation of France. Yet, someone must have signed the 1732 certificates attesting the adherence to the Islamic faith of Jews of North African descent. Figures of the Righteous: Shoah and Metz Yeghérn The definition of righteous embodies different characteristics depending on the different historical contexts surrounding the genocides or genocidal crimes. The Righteous among Nations are the saviors, those who, while not Jewish, rescued the Jews, and who saw their actions recognized by the Committee for the Righteous in the Yad Vashem . That definition, as is known, contains a Talmudic reference and is pertinent to the Jewish religious tradition: “He who saves a single life, saves the entire world”. However, we also know that even in this context there has been a conceptual evolution. Under the direction of judge Landau, one recognized the title of Righteous to a person with exemplary conduct, incorruptible, and coherent with his or her principles, who had saved others at the risk of his or her life. Under the direction of Moshe Bejski 13, though, the Righteous is recognized because of what he or she accomplishes while retaining the human fallibilities and fragilities proper of those who do not aspire to the title of saint or hero. The smallest gesture of aid and resistance, the smallest sign of a capacity to distance oneself from one’s own experience to rescue those who were victimized, had to be recognized even if personal risk and liability were absent. It was a tough battle for Bejski. The energy to fight that battle came from the debt of gratitude he felt towards his own rescuer. Exemplary cases of this change in conception of the very figure of Righteous among Nations, are the recognitions granted to the German Oskar Schindler and Kurt Gerstein, both members of the Nazi party, to the Bulgarian Dimităr Peshĕv, figure of a Nazi-sympathizing regime who nonetheless

9 V. Grossman, Bcë τeчëτ…World Possev-Verlag, V.Gorachek KG 1970 Tutto scorre… Adelphi, Milano 1987, pag. 110 10 S. Broz, Good people in a evil time, Grafičar Promet d.o.o., Sarajevo 2002 11 It was recently announced that Moscow will not further investigate the Katyn massacre. The Russian military Public Minister declared that one could neither describe the massacre in juridical terms, nor speak of war crimes or crimes against humanity, negating what had been requested by Warsaw, thus destroying whatever spirit of mutual collaboration had been generated by Michail Gorbačëv in 1990. (“La Stampa”, 30th January 2009, pag 17) A glaring example of government sanctioned genocide denialism is that perpetrated by Turkey concerning the Armenian genocide of 1915. 12 R. Satloff, Among the Righteous: Lost Stories from the Holocaust's Long Reach into Arab Lands, Publishd in the United States by Public Affairs, 2006, Tra i giusti. Storie perdute dell’Olocausto nei paesi arabi, Marsilio, Venezia 2008, pp. 170-171 13 G. Nissim, Il tribunale del bene. La storia di Moshe Bejski, l’uomo che creò il Giardino dei giusti, Mondadori, Milano 2003 3 stopped the trains leaving for Auschwitz, or the Polish author Zofia Kossak, who unlike many anti- Semitic intellectuals, reacted to the tragedy of the Warsaw ghetto. No rhetoric and no heroic aura accompany the figure of the Italian Girogio Perlasca14, a Righteous who expresses the majority of the human virtues necessary to recognize the suffering in other people and to act accordingly. Perlasca, who ideologically was far removed from the victims and closer to the perpetrators, was nonetheless able to react to evil with a courageous and decisive act, one which was dangerous and a product of his inventiveness. He saved around 5000 people. Ignored for years, it was only in his old age that he was recognized as a Righteous among Nations. A very interesting Righteous figure is that of the German official Armin T. Wegner15. All his life was dedicated to the remembrance of past crimes and the resistance against new crimes. Within his person, a concurrence was created between the Armenian tragedy and the Jewish tragedy, between the Metz Yeghèrn (the Great Calamity) and the Shoah, as shown by the open letters Wegner sent Wilson in 1919, asking for a homeland for the Armenian victims of the first genocide of the twentieth century, and those he sent Hitler in April of 1933, hoping for an end to the anti-Semitic behavior of the regime. He was the only German intellectual to publicly expose himself and his views, something which confined him first to a concentration camp, and then to exile. He fought all his life to break the silence of the world. Recognizing the historical truth of tragic events in the face of those who attempt to erase the traces of crimes committed or those who would twist the real parameters of what happened, is a form of resistance against all possible crimes against humanity. Wegner is “one who resisted”, he was able to say no: “we can always say yes, or no,” wrote Hannah Arendt. And Wegner said no, first to the Armenian genocide, then to the Jewish genocide. For this reason, there is a tree with his name in the Gardenof the Righteous of the Yad Vashem, and Armenia honors him, and recognizes him as Righteous16. In this specific case, the search for the righteous who said no to evil, highlighted a relationship between the memories of persecuted peoples and eased a dialogue between them.

The Righteous within Communist Totalitarianism? “Blaming everything on villains is too easy”, writes Izrail Metter17 when trying to answer the questions regarding society outside the Gulag. “We were probably already afraid of each other […] this vile mistrust which renders your very self despicable was absorbed through our blood, swallowed with air. Soaked with this poison which would have maddened any animal, men continued to live normally… It was no longer necessary to engage them. Pushing their way through the crowds, they ran towards the podiums”18. Suspicion and fear were the measures of existence, both collective and individual. Denouncement was a constant practice. “Who are we—those of my generation? Dreamers in the 20s, decimated

14 A businessman, during the war he inadvertently finds himself in Hungary and in possession of a Spanish passport he had received as a francist combatant during the civil war. Faced with the violence of the Nazi persecution against the Jews, Perlasca takes the place of the fleeing Spanish Consul, and structures his work around three directives: protect the Jews hiding within the homes property of the Spanish legation; tour the city under the consulate’s insignia to prevent, whenever possible, people from being deported; provide papers attesting Spanish nationality to aid those who attempted to flee. 15 A.T. Wegner (Wuppertal 1876-Rome 1978). In 1915, Wegner is a volunteer for health services, first in Poland and the in the Middle East. In the Anatolian desert, he is an eyewitness to the deportation and extermination of the Armenians at the hands of the government of the Young Turks. He took photographs, collected letters and appeals from those being deported, he wrote a diary which has been a precious testimony for the Armenian people. When he returned to Germany, he organized conferences, debates and appeals to those in power, to demand mercy for those victimized. The letter he sent the Führer, has been recognized by the court of Yad Vashem as a courageous act of opposition, at the risk of his own life. 16 Cit. P. Kuciukian, Voci nel deserto 17 Izrail Metter (1909-1996), Russian author of Jewish origin, non-consenting intellectual, forced to survive on infrequent jobs because he had refused to write in celebration of Stalin and denounce his friends, he never surrendered to the system. His choices turned him into a social outcast. He dedicated his vocation as a writer to remembrance, bringing us a critical and lucid view of the soviet regime, free of hypocrisy and fear. 18 I. Metter, Ritratto di un secolo, Einaudi, Torino 1998, pp. 203-204 4 and tortured in the 30s, scattered in the 40s, weakened by blind faith and unable to regain our strength and vision, we wander alone. It is difficult to find each other. When we observe each other, as with a mirror, we are stricken by our ugliness. But we wanted the best”19. Is it possible to speak of the Righteous within the atomized society of communist totalitarianism and within its offspring of crime and genocidal massacres? The very concept needs to be redefined in a way which accounts for the specificity of the experience of communist totalitarianism, both grander in scope and longer in duration, characterized by various evolutionary phases. One must also consider that any work done to preserve the memories of the ex USSR and in the countries affected by the so-called real socialism is very recent, as denialism and the falsification of reality were practiced for a long time, with the exception of some revisionist revelations which aided the interests of the regime. A slow and internal erosion took place thanks to the dissent, to the work of demystification and of moral resistance of men and women who preserved, even in the darkest moments of Stalinist terror, their autonomy of mind and who were not afraid to act. Adapting to survive empties one’s soul. But there are those who did not adapt, who retained the ability to understand and to strive against falsehoods. “Falsehoods,” writes Martin Buber20, “are the peculiar evil which man introduced in nature… our specific invention […] In falsehoods our spirit commits treason against itself”. Falsehoods contaminate the life of a community, and corrode its very foundations which are constituted of mutual trust and of “good intentions”. Falsehoods as a way of life “alter even the relationship between the other and the world and places both one and the other in a state of mere appearance”21. The battle for truth is one of the tenets of moral resistance within communist totalitarianism. Both inside and outside the Gulag, where the historical conscience of entire generations was manipulated and dignity systematically denied, speaking of the Righteous refers to those who abstained from harming others, those who tried to find through their writings, their poetry, their art, their work, and in various others forms, a way to disclose their extraneousness to totalitarian ideology, of those who maintained and protected their dignity and preserved within themselves, at high cost, human virtues. While it was difficult to, within communist totalitarianism, act to help another, it was not impossible to abstain from harming another. Witnesses to the truth, some refused to let themselves become corrupted, refused to become the accusers out of fear or for personal gain of their own family members, their friends, their superiors, their employees. They resisted the ideological conditioning and the extortion of the powerful and managed to not become accomplices within the system. Figures of the Righteous within communist totalitarianism The broadening of the term Righteous to include those who opposed communist totalitarianism on the part of our Committee raised some doubts and negative reactions from both some historians and some fellow professors. We encountered a strong resistance when, in 2003, we organized and International Conference in Milan titled “The Righteous within the Gulag: the value of moral resistance to soviet totalitarianism”. That wall of resistance collapsed, though, before the testimonies of the lecturers, who explored the lives and works of great men and women such as Pavel Florenskij, Anna Achmatova, Osip and Nadezda Mandel’štam, Alexander Solženicyn, Vasilij Grossman, Lev Razgon, Varlam Šalamov, Andrei Sacharov, Julij Daniel’, Gustav Herling and others, exemplary figures of scientists, poets, writers, journalists, military heroes such as Pietro Grigorenko, but also factory workers such as Anatolij Marcenko, religious figures, political members of staunch communist belief (as is the case of the Italian victims of the Stalinist regime22), all of them united because of a common denominator: dissent, the denouncement of falsehoods, of

19Ibid. pp. 175 -176 20 M. Buber, Recht und Unrecht 1952, It. transl. Il cammino del giusto, Gribaudi, Milano 1999, pag. 22 21 Ibid. pag. 24 22 Cfr. Elena Dundovich, “ I giusti che in occidente e in Italia hanno denunciato il Gulag. Alcune storie esemplari”, in AA.VV. Storie di uomini giusti nel Gulag, Bruno Mondadori, Milano 2004 5 terror, and of crimes. A moral resistance perpetrated through various mediums: poetry, which Mandel’štam refers to “stolen air”, air that allows you to breathe23 and that is the first to enter the samizdat. But also prose, art, history, philosophy, theology, articles, newspapers, diaries, letters, using irony, metaphor, and symbols. All within clandestine circles, oftentimes discovered, with the consequent arrests, imprisonment in Gulags, forced exiles, commitment in psychiatric hospitals; the few survivors, once released, were mostly marginalized in their own country, and those exiled experienced, even abroad, the shameful close-mindedness of civil society. A representative case is that of Gustav Herling24 , censored by his Italian editor in 1999, possibly concerned about the lucid analysis of evil contained within the pages of Herling’s essay To Remember, To Recount which should have been the preface the Einaudi edition of Varlam Šalamov’s book The Kolyma Tales: “it is unjust to demand of people who live in inhuman conditions,” wrote Hrling, “to remain human”. According to Francesco Cataluccio25, only a superficial reading of Herling’s analysis and his pessimism contrast with the possibility of finding stories of the Righteous within the Gulag, since Herling himself “asked too much of himself, and demanded too much of others”. Since he did not accept any kind of compromise in order to safeguard his dignity and ideological consistency, Herling can be fully recognized as an example of moral resistance against evil and falsehoods. It is known that a significant part of Italian culture resisted the very use of comparisons while analyzing the totalitarianisms of the 20th century, and it is also know that, in the West, the process of remembrance and the construction of interpretative frameworks capable of recognizing the “intrinsic and structural ”nature and extension, as noted by Marcello Flores26, of the repression and terror within the USSR and the other ex-communist countries was greatly hindered. If the phenomenology of evil was, as opposed to what happened with the Shoah, so long overdue and if those who fight for remembrance find within the ex USSR such difficulties in operating, what space can we dedicate to the memory of goodness? Today, when it comes to the Italian reality and experience, one begins to see the signs of a renewed interest in these matters even outside the historical circuit. In schools, we are constructing what had been auspicated by Gabriele Nissim in the preface for our convention: “It is possible that one day, in schools, professors will speak of the Kolyma as they speak of Auschwitz, that we will compare the members of the Cheka to the Nazi persecutors, that we will study Šalamov along Primo Levi?”27 We organize meetings with witnesses who tell of men and women who had the courage to challenge the system, to defend truth; doing so, we recreate the fabric of a civil society who in the darkest days of Stalinism saw the defiance of common people, people capable of acts of mutual solidarity, of helping the families of prisoners, of giving up the privileges that could be obtained through denouncements. Outside the Gulag, within the experience of communist totalitarianism and in the countries of the so-called real socialism, there were those who reacted, who tried to break this chain of evil; within the Gulag there were men and women capable of preserving their own dignity and capable of not devouring the space around them at the expense of someone else. In our work regarding moral resistance to totalitarian communism we gave a voice to those who did not become accomplices, who did not bend, who preserved their own self worth and did not betray the bonds of family, such as Pavel Florenskij or Anna Achmatova. Some were able to not sell their souls and that is of great value for the new generations. Even within the instability of relationship forged in the Gulag, Florenskij maintains himself in a constant relationship of aid, which is sustained not only by his faith but by his feeling privileged because of his station as “intellectual and scientist” which he believed carried with it a greater responsibility 23 Ibid. pag. 80 24 G. Herling, Un mondo a parte, Feltrinelli, Milano 1994 25 F. Cataluccio, “Contro la rimozione del Gulag. Il caso di Gustav Herling”, in Storie di uomini giusti nel Gulag, cit. pag. 90 26 Cfr. Marcello Flores, “Cosa sappiamo del Gulag, in XX Secolo, n.° 2, ottobre 1977, pag. 7 27 Cit. Storie di uomini giusti nel Gulag, pag. 14 6 towards others. The recognition of another does not happen in a generic or indifferent fashion. Florenskij writes: “[…] in regards to many, I tend to think that a loved one could find him or herself in the same condition as this person whom I met along the path of life, so I try to do something for them. Naturally, this goes unobserved and the others do not think of the possible motivation for my actions; just as good, since we do not act in order to be understood. I hate philanthropy and the condescension which humiliate both he who grants it and he who receives it, in the name of some abstract concept of duty. But this is a spontaneous action, in a given moment, towards a specific person”28. This could be the supreme form of freedom, that freedom which brings about a transcendence of the self, freedom as the greatest idea within relationships29. Rehashing the initial distinction between heroic virtues and common virtues, we must now ask ourselves if it is possible to speak of common virtues within the framework of soviet concentration camps keeping in mind the pessimism of those who were thus persecuted. One of the most incisive testimonies coming from the literature of the Gulag is that of Varlam Šalamov30, found within his Tales of the Kolyma: “All human emotions – love, friendship, jealousy, altruism, charity, the thirst for glory, honesty – had abandoned us along with the flesh lost to the prolonged starvation. Within that insignificant layer of muscle tissue which still cling to our bones and still granted us the strength to eat, move, breathe and even chop wood, load with the spade wheelbarrows of sand and rocks and push them, those wheelbarrows, along the never ending tunnel of a gold mine – along the narrow wooden walkway which brought us to the washing machines – in that layer of muscle there was nothing but anger, the most persistent of human emotions”. But later, thinking of his experience within the concentration camps, he adds: “I am proud to have decided from the start, from 1937, that I would never have become a squad leader if that meant having the power of life or death over another and to place my will at the service of the bosses, persecuting other people who were otherwise prisoners like me […] my physical and spiritual resources, in this great trial, proved stronger than I imagined and I am proud to never have caused the death of someone, or to have prolonged their sentence, and to never have denounced anyone”31. Two hundred and twenty seven people entrusted their experiences to Alexandr Solženicyn, and thus The Gulag Archipelago was born, a collective work which presents itself as a monument to memory: “I dedicate this book to all those whose life was not long enough to tell their tale. May they forgive me if I did not see everything, remember everything, sense everything”. But in the 70s a mild thaw allowed people to act in solidarity. A part of his Nobel prize was devolved by Solženicyn to the families of political prisoners. It must be said, though, that Šalamov and Solženicyn agree on one point: the denouncement of the totalitarian lie, alone, is not enough; there needs to also be a sentence from the courts and a comprehension of an entire people. “God doesn’t need the Righteous, who will nevertheless be fine. God needs repentant sinners,” wrote Šalamov. “We must publicly condemn the very idea of the destruction operated by man against his fellow man. If we remain silent in the face of our faults, burying them in our body so they will not resurface, we are planting, and in the future it will germinate a thousand fold. If we do not punish, if we do not hold even the villains accountable, we do not merely protect their sterile old age, we also

28 P. Florenskij, Non dimenticatemi, Mondadori, Milano 2000, pp. 285-286 29 Florenskij, who was nicknamed the “Russian Leonardo” (he was a chemist, mathematician, physicist, botanic, philosopher, historian, theologian, musicologist), was arrested and condemned both because he was an orthodox priest and due to his intellectual effort. Transferred to the Solovki in 1934, he continued his scientific research despite the prohibitive conditions he lived in, but, most importantly, he maintained a heavy correspondence with his family and he never neglects the education of his five sons and to support his wife. He was shot in Leningrad in 1937. 30 V. Šalamov , I racconti della Kolyma, Einaudi, Torino 1999, pag. 42 Author and journalist, was arrested in 1929 for the clandestine publication of the letter known as “The Testament of Lenin”, in which the father of the revolution recommends that Stalin be kept away from any positions of power. After 17 years of imprisonment in the mines of the Kolyma, Šalamov writes his main opus The Kolyma Tales between 1953 and 1973, but never manages to see it published. 31 V. Šalamov, “Ciò che ho visto e capito nel Lager”, cit. by Irina Sirotinskaja, in Storie di uomini giusti nel Gulag, cit. pag. 96 7 rip away from the new generations any fundament of justice. This is why they grow up to be indifferent, insufficient education is not to blame.Young people learn that a shameful action is never punished on this earth, but rather brings wealth and comfort. That will not be a welcoming country, rather one will be afraid of living there”32. Then and now, it is men who need the Righteous. In concluding the analysis of certain exemplary figures who through their writings fostered dissent, we would like to remind you of the figure of Joseph Czapski33, who has been recognized even by Italian publishers. Born in Prague, member of an aristocratic Polish family, survivor of the Katyn massacre, conscientious objector and, after the end of the war, key member of the exiled Polish dissent, he was sentence to the Griazowietz Gulag in 1940. Painter, writer, critic, he manages to organize within the Gulag a clandestine university of sorts. With the aid of nothing but his memory, he lectures on Proust’s Recherche which stems into a refined critical and philosophical work, of prophetic and tragic relevance to the subjects of life and death. This activity of the mind and the spirit, an exercise for thought and judgment within the reality of the concentration camp, proves itself to be an antidote to evil. Upon returning to Poland, he witnessed the tragic end to the insurrection in the Warsaw ghetto. We have just celebrated the sixtieth anniversary of the UN’s Declaration of Human Rights. We would like to offer the memory of some people who consciously fought to uphold those rights and whose profiles are taken from the only Gulag museum that exists in Russia. The Memorial Museum for the History of Political Repressions “Perm-36” turned a Gulag conceived for correctional labor of political dissenters into a museum, and turned the museum into an travelling exposition which was brought to Milan by the curator, Victor Šmyrov, in 2003 in the occasion of our convention on the Righteous within the Gulag. This museum is a precious document which reconstructs the history of this Gulag, built in 1943 as a forestry colony for correctional labor and thus used until the end of the 80s. The transformation into a memorial began in 1994. In particular, we would like to note the Ukrainians Ivan Gel’, Levko Luk’janenko and Vasil Stus, the Lithuanian Balis Gajauskas and the Russian Sergej Kovalëv. They all distinguished themselves for their ability to preserve their dignity as men and to nourish their ideals, so much that after their release they occupied important political positions. Ivan Gel’, son of a deported man also imprisoned in Perm – 36, was arrested for his fight in support of human rights. The turning point in his story happened in 1988, when he received a personal invitation from the US Department of State for a meeting with president Ronald Reagan. Once released, he became deputy mayor to the city of Leopolis and the author of several books on philosophy and politics, as well as the president of the Committee for the Defense of the Ukrainian Greek-Orthodox Church. Levko Luk’janenko worked, as a jurist, to support the fight for Ukrainian independence, based on the respect for human rights, and founded the . Arrested and sentenced for these activities, once released he became president of the Ukrainian Republican Party, member of the Parliament, and Ambassador to Canada. He is the author of the Ukrainian Declaration of Indipendence. The Lithuanian Balis Gajauskas declare: “I was imprisoned from Stalin to Gorbačëv”. He also fought for the freedom of his people and for human rights. In particular, he was challenged for his translation of Solženicyn’s The Gulag Archipelago. Inside Perm-36 he joins the Lithuanian Helsinki Group and is awarded, while imprisoned, the Peace and Liberty Committee of Huston’s prize. He is released in 1988 and becomes a member of the Lithuanian Parliament, continuing his battle for human rights. In his letter in response to the prize awarded him, Gajauskas wrote: “The path of my life passed through various concentration camps, where I met many wonderful people, devoted to 32 A. Solženicyn, Arcipelago Gulag, Oscar Mondadori, Milano 1995, pag. 189 33 J Czapski, La morte indifferente: Proust nel Gulag, L’Ancora del Mediterraneo, Napoli 2005. Born in Prague in 1896, he died in Paris in 1993. Czapski was one of the more prominent exponents of the exiled Polish intellighenzia. His literary production, though very prolific, is almost unknown in Italy, with the exception of the above mentioned book. 8 the ideals of freedom. Unfortunately, the majority of those people did not live long enough to witness freedom, and those who did survive live bundled under a blanket of silence which keeps them removed from society. I have no doubt that in my people’s fight for freedom there were many people more worthy than I. God gave me the strength to survive the harsh conditions of the camp and I now have the possibility to represent, so to speak, the Lithuanian fighters for freedom and those unlucky ones who did not survive to see the present […]. This award is an award to all those who fight for freedom, dead and alive”. The most renowned figure who passed through Perm-36 was surely the Russian Sergej Kovalëv, biologist, organizer with other Muscovite intellectuals of a”Group for the defense of Human Rights in URSS”, which collected information on the human rights’ violations and transmitted them to UN organizations. He was also the author of the most famous samizdat, “Account of current events”, published after the arrest of Natalija Gorbanevskaja. He was found guilty of these activities. After his release he kept fighting for human rights, participating to first all Soviet then Russian political institutions. He collaborated with the Russian Declaration of Human and Citizen Rights, and with the writing of the second chapter of the Russian Constitution. Member of the Russian Federation Duma, he was a candidate for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1995 and 1996. One who did not make it was Vasil Stus, who died in a punishment cell in 1985, guilty of loving poetry and his country – Ukraine – in spite of Soviet internationalism. Not long before his death, Heinrich Böll had nominated him for a Nobel Prize for Literature. He is now considered one of Ukraine’s greatest poets. The message he left us is this: “The most important thing is to keep your head high. Even when it barely stands atop your neck”. In the Valsesia Park in Milan, on the 10th of November 2005, and in the cemetery of Levašovo, the 29th of June 2007, tombstones were placed in remembrance of the Italian victims of the Gulag, in the presence of their families, of local authorities, of some members of the cultural elite, but especially many touched and involved young people. Luciana de Marchi, daughter of an Italian victim of the Gulag, was present at both ceremonies. Gabriele Nissim titled the retelling of her story A Girl Against Stalin. With stubbornness and bravery, Luciana de Marchi, did not accept the verdict of her father’s death, and fought all her life to unearth his fate and to renew that unbreakable link of affection for her father she had preserved within herself as a precious memento 34. The narration and retelling of this story and many others constitutes, for the families of the victims, the first step towards a self-reconciliation. Through the letters, diaries, the transcriptions of the interrogations, Elena Dundovich35 reconstructed many other stories of torture and of breaking points, but also of exemplary moral and physical resistance, “with the bitterness of the knowledge that many will remain hidden in the anonymity of history”. Our hope is that many “books of remembrance” will be born of this and that, as Anatolij Rumazov writes, cemeteries will be filled with light. “From the darkness of time emerge faces… We only have the time to follow one road. From the dead to the living”36.

34 G. Nissim, Una bambina contro Stalin, A. Mondadori, Milano 2007 35 E. Dundovich, “I giusti che in occidente e in Italia hanno denunciato il Gulag. Alcune storie esemplari” in Storie di uomini giusti nel Gulag, cit. pag. 249 36 A. Razumov, “Il martirologio di Leningrado: La memoria popolare delle vittime del grande terrore” in Storie di uomini giusti nel Gulag, cit. pag. 329 9