On 6th April 1945, the Jews of Milan gathered to see who was left. Before the war they had numbered some 6,000; after it they were nearer to 900. It was in Milan that Benito Mussolini had first declared that, like Nazi Germany, Italy had to do something about the Jews. After 1943, when the Germans occupied Italy, Milan became a centre of power for the Nazis.
There is no Jewish local dialect in Milan, unlike elsewhere in Italy, because Jews didn’t really live there until 1800. I learned these facts on my first ever visit to the north Italian city, on a tour themed around its Holocaust history. The Shoah memorial is underneath Milan’s central station, because it was there that Jews and partisans were rounded up and dispatched to Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen or one of more than 200 Italian concentration camps.
How does one deal with all of these memories in such a place? The big arch in the city centre was only completed after Napoleon left Milan in 1814. It was meant to face in the direction of Paris. There are trees behind it and as we sat there listening to our guide the sun was so strong that I put on my sunglasses. The city is filled with drinking fountains decorated with green dragons. The green dragon is some sort of symbol of Milan.
It was exactly a month ago I visited, which was nearly a year since the atrocities of 7th October, nearly a year since the horrors in Gaza began. It was nearly a year since the Middle East was engulfed in pain and crisis. I was there to attend a seminar organised by a progressive Zionist youth movement and a liberal Zionist political party. I wanted to see where this section of Israeli politics, so weakened in recent elections, saw itself in the years ahead. There were people from Europe and the United States. One of my European companions had tattoos all over his arms and legs. On his calf, in Hebrew, was the saying attributed to Theodor Herzl: “If you will it, it is no dream.” He also had suns, roses, a scary clown, a star of David in a dove of peace, thorns, creatures, the sign of the youth movement he belongs to. That morning he was wearing a “Bring them home” T-shirt.
We had spent the past day together discussing the Zionist left. I may have missed it, but no one had really mentioned the Palestinians or Gaza. I had never been in such a group of people. Zionism was togetherness and their childhoods, something to fight for, something joyful. The conversations felt detached from reality.
The morning of the tour was pleasant. As it continued our guide peeled back the layers until we could see the truth that most Milanese going about their daily lives likely forget. The young Jewish man giving the tour, a history student, had developed it in an effort to preserve this history. Every stop was a mark of suffering and of fear. I followed along, trying to do two things at once: to give this history its due; and to remember that while we were engaged in this act of commemorating a painful history, there was a war happening where I was born, and a government doing unspeakable things in all of our names. That so many people had forever lost their hearts.
How does one hold all of these things at the same time? What does it mean to preserve such history as atrocities unfold ostensibly on your behalf? Only a few weeks earlier, I had been on holiday to Greece. A day or two before leaving, I picked up an old guidebook in the house where we were staying and read the section about the Jews of Thessaloniki. I learned that 87 per cent of Greece’s Jewish population perished during the Second World War, and I felt uncomfortable, knowing that I had been there for a whole week, enjoying the sun and the sea, without thinking to ask what had happened to Greek Jews.
The guide in Milan took us to a theatre which was once used as a squat by a fascist gang. Piccolo Teatro became a place where people were taken and roughed up or tortured or killed. We stood in the shade and tried to hear him over a street performer who was using a soundtrack of loud music, who had pitched up far too close. I tried to understand how these things could co-exist, that it is possible to commemorate one horror, long past, while another tied to you still unfolds.
I remembered how, on the morning of 7th October, when my partner had told me to look at the news but not to react too much lest our daughters know, too, that all I could do was watch as headlines kept updating, the death toll rising, and footage and commentary bounced around on X. The days and weeks that followed were a waking nightmare that still hasn’t ended. In those weeks and months, even far away in London, even at home, I have felt a mix of fear and grief so strong that my mind would play out horrific scenarios. It was that familiar feeling, the one that recurs for many Jews, for many people who have known violent persecution, of vulnerability and awareness of history, of holding the knowledge of horrors past. But it was also something new; this thing in particular, seeing how human cruelty has no limits, and how some hearts harden when they meet it.
In Milan there were sessions about the left in Israel and the future of the Zionist left in general. There were discussions about the elections for the World Zionist Congress—a bureaucracy that seems like a hangover from another age—which are happening in 2025. In between there were breaks for coffee and fruit and cigarettes. There was talking outside in the sun and an understanding that everyone there had come with the particular tragedies of their country (Ukraine, for instance, or Georgia), and that many were trying to understand how to be both progressive and Zionist and how to act with the urgency required for ending war and the occupation.
We had a meeting with an Italian group, Left for Israel, in which two Israeli residents of kibbutzim in the north, near the border with Lebanon, took part, too. The message seemed to be that rather than criticise Israel’s actions in Gaza, or in general, everyone needs to try to empathise more with Israelis. Somebody said that what would work better than toughness with Israel would be a hug.
And when we spoke of the Israeli left, of the future, the thinking seemed to be that Israelis were too traumatised by 7th October for any talk of peace, and certainly of compromise. For the next five years or 10, no one would be able to touch it or even to suggest anything like dialogue with the Palestinians. The war in Gaza at that time had claimed around 40,000 lives and wounded so many more, and destroyed the infrastructure and buildings of the Strip. There were still, as there are now, hostages in Gaza. There were still many thousands displaced within Gaza and from the south and the north of Israel. There had been exchanges of fire between Hezbollah and the Israeli military, months of those, but it was nowhere near the levels of recent weeks.
So, I tried to hold all of these things simultaneously: the blindness of insisting that atrocities somehow cancel out any attempts at making peace; the assumption that people don’t want to try to do something other than war; the idea that a left can make do with a status quo that means little more than military might and the engendering of hate; the absence of humanity at so many moments this past year.
And there in the sun, the history and present knowledge crystalised. All that was left to feel, aside from sadness, was anger. Past sufferings would be forgotten and these truths would continue to co-exist. As would wilful blindness.
Attendance at the Milan seminar was part-funded by the World Union of Meretz. Prospect retained complete editorial independence throughout
