"The child in the Snow" by Wlodek Goldkorn

Ateneo Veneto, ANPPIA Venice, BEIT VENICE (House of Jewish Culture), GL-FIAP

MEMORIAL DAY 2017

Book presentation
"The child in the snow"

of Wlodek Goldkorn (Milan, Feltrinelli publisher 2016)

Coordinator: Renato Jona

The author was talking with Shaul Bassi


What is memory? What is the past? What remains of the lives and deaths of those we love, those who came before us? universal reflections, which become excruciating when you apply to the past of a jew, Polish and Communist, grew after the war in a country that has then reneged.

Wlodek Goldkorn has long been a familiar voice of Italian culture, interviewed famous artists, writers, Nobel Prize winners, and told many stories. Never his own: that of a child born to parents who survived the horrors of the Second World War, who lived in a house abandoned by the fleeing Germans, still full of dishes and furniture equipped with swastika, which grew into the void of a family memory impossible to tell, impossible to forget, impossible to live.

"Then, it happens that the grandchildren are born. And the time comes in which there arises the question: how to tell them the unspeakable? How to transmit the memory? "

Here then is a return trip: in Krakow, Warsaw, Auschwitz, Belzec, in Sobibor, Treblinka. And a trip down memory lane, to rebuild, to invent, to be projected into the future: parents, friends, the heroes and the victims, the little boy playing with his teammates in the yard pretending to be in Auschwitz, the man who chooses Marek Edelman as a teacher of life, the grandfather who has to tell the grandchildren the story.

A journey that is not afraid to go into the deepest darkness of the twentieth century, without losing the clarity of vision, the disenchantment of those who know that every memory is also imagination, that being the son of the Holocaust does not mean empathize with the victims but must lead to the revolt . Without losing the moral strength to those who think that "the coming of the Messiah will be irrelevant. And for this we must act as if you expected. "