For the memory day 2008 the assersoship for the memory of the city has promoted,with the cooperation of the mayor of Naples, two expositions at the same time that tell about the years of the nazi horror about women of the holocaust and the persecution of psychic disabled through emblematic images.
"Psyche in chains" and "Golden and cinder hair": memories of the shoah in the works of Watching the sky group, it's possible to visit the expositions from 25th january to 8th march 2008, in the halls of The Historical Archive of Naples (Salita Pontenuovo 31) , 9 a. m - 1 p. m in ferial days.
In the first exposition, "Psyche in chains", realized in collaboration with EveryOne Group, an italian association that fights fot Human Rights, presents 12 " stations " that remind of the persecution of psychic disabled. They are digital pictures that celebrate the victims of the ill-famed german project "Aktion T4" , the oppression of Degenerated Art (Entartete Kunst) and the use of medicine as a persecution instrument.
"Psyche in chains" is followed by the photographic exposition "Golden and cinder hair" , of Roberto Malini and Steed Gamero (Watching The Sky Group): 20 portraits of women survived to ghetto and to extermination camps, captured in their familiar world, without any emphasis or celebration:from Goti Bauer to Heneli Pick-Goslar,Anne Frank's friend ; from the jewish heroine Mirjam Waterman Pinkhof to the "poet of Auschwitz" Halina Birenbaum; from the italian Rom survived to Porrajmos (The Holocaust of gypsies) Antonia Bezzecchi to the writer Ruth Bondy.
The expositions are patronized by the Memorial Museum Yad Vashem of Gerusalem and Naples. Roberto Malini, Matteo Pegoraro, Dario Picciau and Laura Todisco, who organize important campaigns for the Human Rights in EveryOne Group, explain: "Today more than ever the Memory of the Holocaust has to be a primary value of our civilty. When it begins to repress or to censure the freedom of art, when it begins to show intollerance towards minorities, when it underestimates Human Rights, the shadow of the most frightened persecutions of the history still survives in ourselves.
We are in contact with a decine of witnesses of the Holocaust, who don't stop to remind us that the horror isn't over yet, that its seeds of hate and death still springs up.
The two expositions remind everyone that human life is sacred, that don't exist inferior ethnic groups or minorities, that art and science are at the service of Human Rights and they don't have to turn into advertising instruments or oppression". The meeting among Naples, Everyone group and the group of Watching The Sky Artists repropose the message of witnesses as guide for the new humanity, against the persecution of lower classes and the forced psychiatry: from Compulsory Sanitary Treatment to Fermo 5150. " We are proud of being protagonists of parthenopean event", the artists and activists, who realized the event expositions, say, "because Naples, with its problems, is still the italian conscience. In other european States the extermination hit 75% of jewish people and a very high percentuals of gypsies; disabled, gays, witnesses of Geova, dissidents and foreign people hit an atrocius persecution, the neapolitan example has to strenghten us, where more than 700 jewish people of the local comunity survived to Holocaust.
Meanwhile nazi have programmed the deportation of jewish neapolitan people, the city revolts and in the glorious 4 days of Naples, from 28th september to 1st october 1943, 2000 neapolitans set the city from nazi gaolers. It was an episode of heroism that can't be forget. Common people, 12 or 13 years old Neapolitan urchins, defeated german death machine, set Naples free and avoid the deportation of jewish to gas chambers of Auschwitz". For this reason Everyone group officially ask to Memory Museum Yad Vashem of Gerusalem to award Naples as "City of justice". " Naples worths the award and we hope that Museum Commitee will accept our proposal".
" I'm proud to patrocinate these events" the mayor Rosa Iervolino said "because I share the aims and I'm sure of the necessity not to forget these dark moments of the history in order to they won't happen again".
The assessor Madaro commented on: " I'm really proud to have organized an exposition that calls the attention to the less remembered moment of racial persecutions: the one that hit physical and mental disables. Maybe it has been often forgotten because it was the first step of physical elimination of those subjects who were considerated "imperfect" and "unfit" for the developing of "arian race" in nazi delirium theory. They were the first persecuted people and so we don't have a lot of traces of their martyrdom has been often forgotten. Because from the persecution of "physical" diversities passed to the one of all the others ,every warning has to begin from this tragedy. The women Shoah has been forgotten in the same way, judged unfit for works in concentration camps, a lot of them were killed as soon as possible, without living signs of their tragedy".