Italian mural of Holocaust survivors defaced

A recent mural depicting Italian holocaust survivors has been defaced in Milan.

The mural depicts Italian senate member Liliana Segre and author Sami Modiano, both survivors of Auschwitz-Birkenau in the striped extermination camp’s uniform with bullet proof jackets featuring the yellow star of David that Jews were forced to wear by the Nazis.

The mural was painted by Italian artist and activist aleXsandro Palombo in Milan on 28 September.

Palombo posted on Instagram “Anti-Semitism, History Repeating Itself” alongside “Liliana Segre and Sami Modiano, two of the last witnesses and survivors of the horrors of the Shoah” shortly after creating the mural.

Palombo was responding to a pro-Palestine march that had taken place earlier that month to recognise a year since the October 7 Hamas attacks and Israel’s resultant assault on Gaza. One sign pointed out Segre, 94, who was named a senator for life in 2018 as a “Zionist agent”.

The faces and yellow stars of the mural have now been scratched off of the mural.

“These acts not only harm art, but undermine the value of Memory, which is fundamental for building a conscious and just society,” a statement from Italy’s Holocaust memorial museum, the Fondazione Museo della Shoah read.

“The vandalism against the mural dedicated to Liliana Segre and Sami Modiano in Milan, scratched by unknown persons, is a despicable and demented act. These hooligans tried to deface the sense of Memory, but they failed. A scratch does not erase people, nor what has been. They can damage walls, but history and its teachings remain intact,” Mario Venezia, the president of the museum added.

Politicians have also weighed in on the defacement.

Democratic Party politician Piero Fassino wrote: “The outrage against the mural dedicated in Milan to Senator Liliana #Segre and Sami #Modiano demonstrates the level of cowardice and cowardice that anti-Semitic impulses that are manifesting themselves with ever greater aggressiveness reach. Impulses that must be rejected and opposed in the most firm and uncompromising way.”

Palombo is known for his political street art. Last year, just over a month after the start of Israel’s war on Gaza, he created a mural depicting Anne Frank side by side with a Gazan girl. He posted this new mural alongside another of a Gazan boy dressed up as a member of Hamas with an adult terrorist pointing their guns at an infamous image of a Holocaust-era boy.

“The antisemitic fury unleashed by Hamas is overwhelming Jews in every part of the world, this horror that re-emerges from the past must make us all reflect because it undermines freedom, security and the future of us all. Terrorism is the very denial of humanity and has nothing to do with resistance, it uses people with aim to divide and drag them into the abyss of its evil, into an infernal vortex that has no end. There can be no peace until terrorism is eradicated; legitimise it means condemning to death the whole humanity,” Palombo wrote at the time.

This is the second Palombo mural following October 7 to be defaced. A new mural revealed on the anniversary which depicted Vlada Patapov escaping the Hamas attack was defaced almost immediately.

News of the mural’s defacement comes shortly after Palombo revealed his latest mural opposite the Iranian consulate in Milan, of Iranian student Ahoo Daryaei who was apprehended by the country’s morality police after walking around a Tehran square in her underwear as an act of defiance against the state’s compulsory hijab laws.