From the past to the present

80 years after the end of World War II, the slogan "Never again!" has now lost its initial meaning.

New forms of forced labour, genocide, and concentration camps continue to appear in our contemporary world. How can we resist the return of the nightmare of Nazism?
How important is it to preserve the memory of this period?
Listen to the messages sent to the younger generation by three survivors.

Primo Levi (1919–1987)

In the afterword to his book If This Is a Man, Primo Levi responds to questions from high school students. He places himself among those who consider the transmission of memory to the next generations a duty. And he warns of the dangers of history repeating itself. “The Nazi Lagers were the apex, the crown of European fascism, its most monstrous manifestation; but there was fascism before Hitler and Mussolini, and, in forms both open and disguised, it has survived the defeat of the Second World War. Anywhere in the world, if one begins by denying the fundamental freedoms of Man, and equality between men, one is heading toward a concentration-camp system, and this is a trajectory that is difficult to stop. Primo Levi, If this is a Man, translated by Stuart Woolf, in The Complete Works of Primo Levi, 2015.

Omiros Pellas (Odysseus Giannopoulos, 1921-1962)

“How I wish you could see these wrinkled skins, free of charge, my distant friend, you who will one day worry about your first wrinkle... To all of you who live a good life after this thunderstorm that hurled us here, I wish you could see to what extent one human being can degrade another, when madness, hatred, greed, and vanity become the regulators of the world's fate.” Omiros Pellas, STALAG VI C. Diary of captivity (1962: 217)

Parisis Maliokapis (1925-2016)

Until the end of his life, Parisis Maliokapis kept in his wallet a picture of the piles of corpses he saw in Dachau. In an interview he gave to his granddaughter for a school project, he linked this photograph to the importance of memory and the horror of war: “[My friend] took a photograph. And he gave me a copy, which I still keep to this day. To remember the tragic fate that befell those emaciated people. To remember the corpses we wanted to show. You will see them. You will see them. […] Deep down, I believe there should never be a war again. No more wars. There is nothing worse than war. Everything else can be endured, but war is unbearable. It has all that is evil. Life's value drops to zero; there is no value in life. I often saw dead bodies thrown away, severed heads thrown to the ground. You saw them being dug up in the streets, in the ruins. Horrendous." Parisis Maliokapis