ARCH_500-600 Options Studio: ‘Holocaust Memorial Florence, Italy: Remembrance, Indifference, Complicity’

In November of 1943, 284 Jewish refugees seeking sanctuary in Florence, Italy were arrested and deported to the Auschwitz extermination camp—only 15 survived.

In March of 1944, the Italian fascist authorities and occupying Nazis transformed the Scuole Leopoldine in Florence (now the Museo Novecento Firenze) into an interrogation and detention center for arrested anti-fascists. Hundreds of striking workers from Florence and Tuscany were detained by the Italian authorities in this building on Piazza Santa Maria Novella. On March 8, 1944, 338 were deported to Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria. Less than 20 percent survived.

Research in the studio arrived at three important conclusions:

1. State sponsored anti-Semitism in Italy began many years before the alliance with Nazi Germany in 1939.
2. While examples of heroic individual efforts to protect Jews in Italy from arrest and deportation were numerous, there was also indifference to the demonization of Jews and later complicity in the repression, arrests, and ultimately genocide of Italian Jews—a genocidal policy undertaken and shared by Italian authorities and the Nazis after September 1943.
3. The role of history and memory—and our responsibility today to be alert to racism and the manipulation of fear and facts—are connected. Specifically, indifference to racism and the persecution of fellow Italian citizens, in accordance with laws approved by the Italian government and signed by the king, sanctioned increasingly severe restrictions on Italian Jews and set the stage for the genocide that followed.

Each student determined the content of their memorial design: as a memorial dedicated to the specific circumstances of the March 1944 arrests, detentions, and deportations; as a memorial to Jewish victims of the Shoah in Italy; or as a memorial to all Holocaust victims. Each student also selected the site and settings of their projects: the appropriated site of interrogation and detention (Scuole Leopoldine), the public space of Piazza Santa Maria Novella, and/or the site of deportation by train to Nazi concentration camps (Stazione Santa Maria Novella).

All projects shared a common goal and intention: to remember the victims and to implicate those responsible for their victimization and suffering.