As I walk by Via di Sant`Ambrogio, a little alley in the heart of the Roman Ghetto, I see the morning sun hitting the brick walls of Lello Di Segni old’s house and my mind starts to wonder back in time. As Lello told me, he used to play soccer with a paper ball with his friends in that same alley where the Nazi came to arrest them at dawn of October 16, 1943 and took them to Auschwitz.
With “Born Twice” I revisited the survivor’s stories in the camps through the lens of their daily lives back in Rome after the massacre. My photos want to show a light out of the broken pieces of a horrific past.
Although many before me have photograph and wrote about the holocaust, I felt compelled to portray the story of “my survivors” the ones I see at temple every Shabat, the ones who belong to my city and my past. I find it important to show the Roman Jews with their own, very original secular tradition since they are already very few and a step away from extinction. I believe, the more we talk about them, the less they will be deemed to disappearance. The project is a tribute to the ones, like my great-grandparents, who never made it out of the camps and also to the people who came back to honor the memory of the siblings and parents left behind.
May their stories and the images portraying them stop the rally crying of the ones who fail to believe in the holocaust and its aftermath.
portfolio
- born twice
