Sant'Egidio with the Jewish Community and the Municipality's institutions
Once again Sant'Egidio in Barcelona commemorated the "Night of the Crystals" (Kristallnacht) with a march of remembrance through the old streets of the Raval and the historical Jewish quarter of Barcelona. "There is no future without memory" and therefore small people, especially the new generations together with 'new Europeans' of different origins, religions and cultures, came together to never forget.
The tragic memory of the Shoah helps us to orient ourselves towards the future, to take responsibility for it and to cultivate a universal fraternity in our city and in the whole world. At the end of the silent march there were speeches by representatives of institutions (Barcelona City Council, Generalitat de Catalunya and Ombudsman of Catalonia) together with the Jewish Community and the Community of Sant'Egidio. The importance of living together and of never leaving any people, community or person alone was emphasised.
The night between 9 and 10 November 1938 was a point of no return, a memory that cannot be forgotten and must be transmitted from generation to generation as it continues to speak to all of us. 'Memory,' as Marco Impagliazzo recently pointed out in a publication, 'is a vaccine to stop anti-Semitic contagion. The night of the broken glass, a night of fear and violence for Jews and a prelude to many other atrocities, was prepared with hate speech, the spreading of racial laws, inflammatory propaganda, fake news and the indifference of many others. That night the road to Auschwitz was paved with the deportation of Jews during the Second World War and then the Holocaust. A monster that made no distinction between children, young people, adults or the elderly. Nazi ideology was accepted, a monstrous short-circuit of thought that fed on identifications, categorisations and generalisations that fuelled racism and the elimination of the other, the different.
