“These acts not only injure art, but undermine the value of Memory [of the Holocaust], which is essential for building a conscious and just society,” Italy’s Holocaust memorial museum, the Fondazione Museo della Shoah, said in a released statement on Tuesday about the defacement.
Mural of Italian Holocaust Survivors Defaced in Milan
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by Shiryn Ghermezian
A partial view of the mural in Milan, Italy, before (left) and after it was vandalized. Photo: Piero Fassino via X/Twitter screenshot
A mural in Milan dedicated to two Italian Holocaust survivors has been defaced by vandals who scratched off the two faces and yellow stars in the artwork.
The mural depicts Italian senate member Liliana Segre, who was named senator for life in 2018, and author Sami Modiano, both of whom survived the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp during World War II. In the mural, the Holocaust survivors are wearing striped uniforms, worn by inmates in Nazi concentration camps, underneath bulletproof vests that feature the yellow star of David with the word “Jude” in the center, which were badges that Jews were forced to wear by the Nazis. The mural was painted by Italian artist and activist aleXsandro Palombo in Piazzale Loreto, a major city square in Milan, in late September. It is titled “Anti-Semitism, History Repeating.”
“Vandalism against the mural dedicated to Liliana Segre and Sami Modiano in Milan, scratched by unknown people, is a vile and insane act,” added Mario Venezia, president of the museum. “These thugs tried to distort the sense of memory, but they failed. A scratch doesn’t erase people, or what was. They can damage the walls, but the history and its teachings remain intact.”
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Democratic Party politician Piero Fassino also commented on the vandalism in a post on X. “The outrage against the mural dedicated in Milan to Senator Liliana #Segre and Sami #Modiano demonstrates the level of cowardice and cowardice that anti-Semitic impulses that are manifesting themselves with ever greater aggressiveness reach,” he wrote on Monday. “Impulses that must be rejected and opposed in the most firm and uncompromising way.”
Last month, Palombo unveiled a mural on the anniversary of the Oct. 7 Hamas-led terrorist attack in Israel and it depicted Vlada Patapov, who survived the Nova music festival massacre. That mural was defaced by vandals who painted over Patapov’s face and half of her left leg.
In November 2023, a month after the deadly massacre in southern Israel and the start of the Israel-Hamas war, Palombo painted a mural that featured Holocaust victim and teenage diarist Anne Frank alongside a girl from Gaza. He simultaneously revealed another mural of a Gazan boy dressed up as a Hamas terrorist who is standing next to an adult terrorist as they both point their guns at a young Jewish boy from the Warsaw Ghetto during the Holocaust.
“The antisemitic fury unleashed by Hamas is overwhelming Jews in every part of the world, this horror that re-emerges from the past must make us all reflect because it undermines freedom, security, and the future of us all,” Palombo said at the time. “Terrorism is the very denial of humanity and has nothing to do with resistance, it uses people with aim to divide and drag them into the abyss of its evil, into an infernal vortex that has no end. There can be no peace until terrorism is eradicated; legitimize it means condemning to death the whole humanity.”
Palombo’s latest mural, outside Iran’s consulate in Milan, shows Iranian student Ahoo Daryaei, who was arrested by the regime’s morality police after walking outside in her underwear in Tehran as an act of defiance against the country’s mandatory hijab laws. That mural has also been defaced.
