Flying low over Italy on April 25, the anniversary of Italy’s liberation from fascism, you would think from the flags on display that Italy was liberated by Hamas, Hezbollah and even Iran.
Listening to the speeches echoing from the microphones on the stages, you would understand that the enemies of freedom are the Americans and the Zionists. We are living in an upside-down world.
Liberation took place 81 years ago in the name of victory over Nazism and fascism, whose black banner was the extermination of the Jews. On April 25, 1945 (Festa della Liberazione or Liberation Day), partisan fighters and Allied forces drove German troops out of major cities in the final days of World War II.
The date became a national symbol of freedom, resistance and the defeat of a regime that had aligned with Nazi Germany and enforced anti-Jewish racial laws.
My mother, Wanda Lattes, was a decorated partisan courier, capable—while still a young girl, expelled from school and university under the racial laws—of carrying out her heroic mission while hiding from the Nazi-fascist manhunt with her entire family. In her forged documents, Wanda Lattes became Elena Lattanzi in order to pass inspections as she transported partisan pistols in her bicycle basket, without fear.
My father, Alberto Nirenstein, a historian of the Shoah, was among the extraordinary group of some 5,000 young men—many survivors of the Holocaust, others shaped by the heroic labor of cultivating and defending the land to which they had finally returned—who came as “Palestinians” with the Jewish Brigade to Italy to fight the Nazis and fascists, organized by the British army.
He risked his life for us, after much of his family in Poland had been deported to Sobibor. The partisans, the Brigade and the Allied forces saved Italy.
But on Saturday, the flag with the six-pointed star was expelled and vilified. This April 25 is self-destructive; it becomes so when it drives Jews out of the marches, shouting “we will make soap,” and glorifying jihadist violence.
It is a warmongering and anti-American April 25, praising those responsible for current wars, exalting the broad Iran-backed jihad that besieges and has also invaded Israel, turning the United States into an enemy, and ignoring the Russian aggression that has occupied Ukraine.
The constant invocation of a supposed triumvirate—“Trump, Putin, Netanyahu,” devoid of any real meaning—serves only to incite the same bloody misfortune as always: antisemitism.
This April 25 should have been dedicated to combating antisemitism, whose shameful wave is engulfing the world. The Israeli and Ukrainian flags should have been raised together. It did not happen. Thus, a great anniversary was destroyed.
