Inter at the Shoah Memorial: Alessandro Antonello's message

MILAN – The customary ceremony organised by the Community of Sant'Egidio to remember the date of Liliana Segre’s deportation was held yesterday afternoon on 30 January at the Shoah Memorial of Milan. The Senator for Life, who was appointed as such by the President of the Italian Republic in 2018, is a Holocaust survivor and was a witness to Nazi concentration camps. Yesterday, Segre told her story in front of the people who had gathered. It was a message of love, hope and strength. It was a message without the slightest hint of hate.

The Senator was deported from platform 21 of the Milan Central railway station to the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp on the morning of 30 January 1944, when she was thirteen years old. Hundreds of people took part in the very modest and traditional ceremony. In addition to Liliana Segre, other speakers who took to the stage to give speeches included Alfonso Pedatzur Arbib, the Chief Rabbi of Milan, Don Giuliano Savina, the Head of the Ecumenism and Dialogue Office of the CEI, and Alessandro Antonello, FC Internazionale Milano’s Chief Executive Officer Corporate.

The speech made by the Nerazzurri director was extremely moving. This is what he had to say: "As a representative of FC Internazionale Milano, I would like to come here and speak from the world of football, which certainly hasn’t transmitted a positive message in recent weeks. We, as Inter, want to bring you the message that our founders wrote in our constitution and that is still a source of inspiration for all of the directors and all those who work at the club: ‘We are Brothers of the World’. Those who found our club in 1908 used these words to break away from another football team who didn’t let non-Italians play for them. This was the inspirational way our club was founded, and they are words that continue to inspire us today.

"What do we do to prove this? We try to do many things, including collaborating with the Community of Sant'Egidio, to whom we’d like to extend our thanks for inviting us here, as well as the Shoah Memorial. Last year, it was our aim to bring more than 400 young players from our Elite Academy here, and we’re very proud to have made this collaboration a reality. We don’t hide the fact that, in addition to teaching youngsters to become great footballers, our primary mission is to educate them so that they become men. The educational pathway promoted by the club involves us trying to put them through different experiences. At the end of every season, we make the lads fill in questionnaires with questions relating to both football and how they feel personally, on how they'd experienced the season. One of these questions involved us asking about the experience which had had the most impact on them that season. I want to bring a message of hope because the majority of these lads, who often seem disinterested or uncommitted, responded that the experience that had affected them the most was the visit to the Memorial. For us, this is a very strong message. A message of hope, because it means that young people today can be bearers of a positive message, even those who seem to be far removed from certain topics. Our young people feel things within, something we sometimes don’t give them credit for.

"We want to grow and enhance our collaboration with the Memorial and, with this in mind, we’ll be holding something important here in 2019: an exhibition dedicated to Arpad Weisz, a famous footballer and an even more famous coach with Hungarian roots who was a victim of the Holocaust. During the 1929-30 season, he coached our club, then called Ambrosiana, to a league title. While in charge of Bologna, he won the league twice more in addition to the Paris Expo Tournament, which could be compared to the Champions League today. Arpad Weisz is part of our history, he’s part of our club. We want to remember him as we go down a path of remembrance. We believe it is vital to teach history today because it teaches us to not repeat the mistakes of the past. It’s really important that testimonies are there for young people today and that they can experience such places so that future generations don't experience the same things.

"So the message that I’m bringing from a world that isn’t always a shining example is that Inter’s directors and fans are known for having a certain kind of awareness, even if some of our supporters have been poor examples of this recently with the instances of racism that have occurred. As a club, we have never and will never accept such incidents. This resulted in us reflecting seriously on what had happened, and we’ve since gone on to launch a very strong campaign that we’ve called BUU – ‘Brothers Universally United’. We are Brothers of the World, and this is the message that we want to bring to the world of football."