Stazione di Milano Centrale
The departure station of the trains heading to concentration and extermination camps and active center of the Resistance.
During the nazi occupation of Milan, hundreds of men, women and children, both Jews and political prisoners departed from Stazione Centrale and reached the concentration and extermination camps in Europe, often passing through the transit camps of Fossoli, at first, and later Bolzano. Trains would depart from platform number 21.
On 27th January 1998, a stone plate was placed on the wall on the side of the platform saying “Between December 1943 and May 1944, the journey of jewish men, women and children, as well as political opponents started from the basement of this station and ended in Auschwitz and other nazi camps. Their memory lives within us, together with the memory of all the victims of the genocides of the 20th century”. It is coupled by the first verse, “Because everyone’s anguish is our own”, from Primo Levi’s poem La bambina di Pompei, which pulls together the image of the young girl in Pompei “convulsively” holding herself to her mother and the tragic fate of an unknown Anne Frank, a “young Dutch girl”, a “Hiroshima schoolgirl”, in a strong call for peace to the “powerful ones, owners of the new poisons”. The bishop of Milan, Carlo Maria Martini, and the Chief Rabbi, Giuseppe Laras, took part to its inauguration.
On the same wall, on the left, besides historical plates dedicated to the fallen soldiers of other wars, there is a marble plate commemorating 41 antifascist railwaymen and six of their sons who died during the Liberation war.
The participation of railwaymen to the Resistance was important, albeit hardly mentioned.
The most famous episode happened at the station Milano Greco, which lead to the shooting of three men in reprisal, but every station of Milan was subject to sabotages to delay departures, break the switches, electrical wires and locomotives, with the purpose of setting the prisoners heading to camps free.
And this happened even though the Azienda Autonoma delle Ferrovie dello Stato was subject by the fascist regime to a radical restructuring of their personnel, which over the span of 20 years determined the firing of hundreds of antifascist workers.
In 2007, the rooms under the platforms were destined to house the project of the Memoriale della Shoah, extending across around 7000 square meters on two levels, ground floor and basement, which was inaugurated on 27th January 2013.
This is where mail wagons were loaded and unloaded, with the entrance in via Ferrante Aporti.
This is where the prisoners were loaded on freight wagons, lifted with an elevator and trasported on the overlying platform, where the wagons were eventually latched to the trains headed towards concentration and extermination camps.
In this space, you can feel the vibrations coming from the railways directly above and the noise, caused by the passage of the trains, fills the room, thus triggering in the visitors a physical perception of closeness between the present space and the remote space of historical memory.
The Memoriale della Shoah, whose entrance is in piazza Edmond J. Safra 1, formerly via Ferrante Aporti 3, aims at being a polyfunctional center of meeting and discussion on the topic of Memory as a “civil commitment” and “moral commitment”.
Massimo Castoldi