"Your mother is dead. if we shout we all die: the escape of a Holocaust survivor Image Caption In this interview with BBC News Brazil, Brazilian naturalized Italian Jew Ariella Pardo Segre recounts how she and her family fled the Nazi persecution.

Ariella Pardo Segre was only three years old when she was carried in the back by a cigarette smuggler, who had been paid with an engagement ring for the service rendered. It was in September 1943, the sun had gone down and it was very cold. At his side, in a group of Jewish refugees, walked with his mother, father and seven-year-old brother. The journey of the Italian Jewish family crossing the Alps and heading to Switzerland because of the Nazi persecution has begun.

The road was narrow and everyone was lined up in absolute silence. It was at this moment that his mother, Iris, suddenly slipped and disappeared in the dark. Ariella shouted. A sharp scream quickly choked by the hands of an unknown man who covered his mouth. Ariella lost her mind and fainted. The group decided to continue the course.

"It was very small, but that memory never went out of my memory." They revived me and, when I opened my eyes, I saw many people around me. cry, we are all dying, "said Ariella, aged 78, at BBC News Brazil.Naturalized in Brazil, she is a survivor of the Holocaust, as is the mbad murder of millions of Jews, as well as ethnic Polish, Soviet, homobadual, gypsy and prisoners of war of different nationalities, as well as Jehovah's Witnesses and other minorities during the Second World War, a systematic extermination program executed by the Nazi Party.

"For a long time, I had trouble talking about it."

The crossing ended when the family was reunited The mother of Ariella was found alive and taken by another group of refugees to the Swiss border, where the Pardo would establish housing until the end of the Second World War.

This escape triggered an ordeal that had started years ago, in 1938, when racial laws "had been promulgated in Italy. The fascist government, led by Benito Mussolini (1883-1945), instituted a regime of segregation. Jews were considered "dangerous" and many were forced to live under tight police control.

Nevertheless, whatever the difficult conditions, the majority of them did not risk life, because Mussolini did not submit to Hitler 's request to initiate deportations.

Ariella and her family had to cross the Alps on foot to flee Italy.
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But everything changed dramatically in September 1943, when l & # 39; Italy went to the Allies. Mussolini is deposed by the Great Fascist Council at the request of King Vitorio Emanuel III and is arrested. Nazi troops then invade the country, rapidly dominating much of the north and center. The former Italian leader is saved from prison in an operation designed by Adolf Hitler (1889-1945). The region becomes a neo-fascist republic, with a puppet government of Mussolini. In practice, it was the Nazis who were in power.

The nightmare began for the Jews living in the German-occupied areas, while the Nazis, with the help of the fascists, began to partition and deport them. Of the 40,000 Jews living in Italy in 1943, 8,000 were murdered by the Nazis.

The Pardo lived in Bologna, in northern Italy, the country's main railroad, where trains later headed to the Nazi concentration and extermination camps. Even though they had lost their jobs and were suffering privations, they were not afraid of having to give up everything they had built.

"One of our neighbors, Alfredo Giommi, warned us of the arrival of the Nazis, we fled with the body clothes and the money we had in our pockets," Ariella explains. ] Copyright of the author
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Refugees in Switzerland

After the trip through the Alps, the family convinced the Swiss authorities to allow them to enter. She arrived at a refugee camp and found herself divided. The children were separated from their parents: Ariella moved in with other girls. His brother, Lucio, in another camp.

"There were children of all nationalities and I could not communicate with anyone.Every time my mother came to visit me, I cried.It was as if she was silent. spoke only Italian and I did not understand what other girls, mainly French, spoke, "he says.

His parents, also separated, did manual labor to survive.

"My father worked as a carpenter and cut wood, while my mother was a cook, I remember the day I visited her and she was cutting potatoes."

The lives of the Browns in the refugee camp will last until the end of the war in 1945, by which time Italy will be liberated and the Allied trucks will bring the refugees back to their home country. # 39; origin.

Ariella was five years old when the family returned to Bologna. But the suffocation was not over yet.

"We arrived at our home and the new residents told us that they had received it from the Italian government and that we were no longer welcome." My father, a very educated man , had been completely destroyed, "he says.

The family then went to live in a refugee camp on a square in Bologna. A few days later, Giommi, the neighbor who had warned them of the arrival of the Nazis two years earlier, took them to live in his apartment. They lived in a room until they could return home by court order.

"For those who slept on the floor, sleeping in a room was a marvel."

"Giommi was a very important man in our lives, not only in ours, but in many people," says -he. Alfred Giommi was honored as "Just Among the Nations", a recognition to all non-Jews who, during the Second World War, saved the lives of Jews persecuted by the Nazi regime.

Change for Brazil

Ariella's parents returned to school and the family gradually returned to life interrupted by the war.

In 1958, on holiday in the Alps, she met Marco Segre, an Italian Jew who had fled to Brazil with his parents in 1938, at the time of the introduction of the racial law. , and who visited relatives in Italy. They both fell in love.

The couple has a correspondence for two years until Segre returns to Italy to marry Ariella. The two return together to Brazil and settle in São Paulo, where Ariella teaches Italian. They had four children, eight grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.

"I consider that I have a moral obligation to continue to tell this story so that the world can never speak to the world."

Celebrations

This Sunday, January 27 marks the International Day of Remembrance of Victims of the Holocaust, instituted by the UN in 2005. This date marks the liberation of the concentration camp of the United Nations. Auschwitz, one of the largest symbols Nazi tortures in 1945. It is estimated that more than a million people, mainly Jews, died there.

The Israeli Federation of the State of São Paulo (FISEP) and the Israeli Pauline Congregation (CIP) advocate a solemn act in the CIP Etz Chaim synagogue and in Rio de Janeiro, the Israeli Confederation of Brazil. and the Israeli Federation of the State of Rio de Janeiro (Fierj) held a solemn ceremony at the National War Memorial of the Second World War in Aterro do Flamengo.

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