For This I Survived: The Story of an Italian Witness to the Holocaust

A piercing story of the most famous Italian Holocaust prisoner—about the horrors of Auschwitz, the loss of his entire family, and his wandering in search of a new life.

1938. Eight-year-old Sami Modiano from the Jewish community of Rhodes—an island occupied by Mussolini’s troops—learns for the first time that he is not like everyone else: he is expelled from school and no longer allowed to study. A few years later, the island comes under Nazi control, and the community is deported to Birkenau—the most horrific Auschwitz death camp. A twelve-year-old boy will have to survive separation from his sister and watch his father’s slow fading. And he must survive himself in inhuman conditions…

Surviving the “death march” and escaping the camp, Sami ends up at the front line with the Soviet army. Then, on foot, he reaches Italy—only to realize he has no home anymore: almost the entire Jewish community of Rhodes was destroyed in the camp’s hell… Years of wandering and hard labor lead him to understand that the only way to come to terms with his past is to remember. And to speak on behalf of those whose voices fell silent forever.

“Exactly for this my book is needed. To keep the memory of those who perished in the gas chambers and couldn’t endure the icy nights in Auschwitz. Now I speak for them.”

—

“On that day I seemed to have lost my innocence: in the morning I woke up still as a child, and to sleep I went already as a Jew.” That’s how Sami Modiano, a Holocaust survivor, recalls the day when—because of racial laws—he was thrown out of school in Rhodes. It was only the first step toward horror. In fact, Sami was one of 2,500 Jews from the Jewish community of Rhodes deported to Birkenau. And one of very few who survived. “Why me?” he asks again seventy years later. The only answer is: to tell. Not to forget.

— Corriere de la Sera