A Holocaust survivor was given a standing ovation in Italy's Senate on Tuesday after she made a speech to the country's new coalition government about anti-immigration sentiments.
Liliana Segre, an 88-year-old survivor of Auschwitz and who was made an Italian senator for life in January, gave the speech during a debate on a vote of confidence for the new government.
"I refuse to think that today our democratic civilization could be dirtied by special laws against nomadic people," CNN quoted Segre as saying.
"Colleagues, senators, taking the floor for the first time in this room, I cannot help but thank, first of all, the president of the republic, Sergio Mattarella, who decided to commemorate the 80th anniversary of the elimination of the racist laws of 1938, making a surprising choice and appointing as senator for life an old lady, one of the very few still alive in Italy and who still has on her arm the number of Auschwitz – who has the task not only to remember but also to somehow give voice to those who 80 years ago did not have it.
"To those thousands of Italians, about 40,000, belonging to the small Jewish minority who suffered the humiliation of being expelled from schools, professions and society for the persecution that prepared the Italian Shoah [Holocaust] of 1943-1945 and that, unfortunately, was also a crime of Italian fascism. Above all, we should ideally give the floor to those many who, unlike me, did not return from the extermination camps and who were killed for the sole fault of being born, who have no grave, who are ashes in the wind.
"Saving them from oblivion does not only mean honoring a historical debt to our fellow citizens of the time but also helping the Italians of today reject the temptation of indifference towards the injustices and suffering that surround us," Segre told the audience.
Italy's new Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte had addressed the Senate, promising to bring radical change to the country, including a crackdown on immigration.
The government, backed by the Five Star Movement, founded nine years ago as a grass-roots protest group, and the right-wing League (formally known as the Northern League), won the vote of confidence by 171-117 in the 320-seat Senate.
