Prefazione al volume "Io perpetratore, io vittima"

Although very different and not comparable, the unique story of the Shoah and that of the post-WWII Istrian-Dalmatian exile offer the opportunity for a painful reflection on the meaning of memory and on the risk that a memory not lived and participated, but ritual and rhetoric, perpetuate that same distance (cultural, social and psychological) from the victims which constitutes one of the main factors which conceal to the conscience the perception of inhumanity and violence. The well-known Milgram test offers a fundamental illustration thereof and indicates, as Z. Bauman observed, commenting it, that the most terrible news revealed by the Holocaust and by what had been learned about its perpetrators was not the probability that something similar could be done to us, but the idea that we could do it ».