Sami Modiano

Sami Modiano remained silent, without telling his life, his experience, his long journey through the twentieth century. How can we give voice to such a deep pain? The loss of an entire family, the erasure of the Jewish community of Rhodes from the face of the earth? With the application of the racial laws, he is suddenly considered different, he wakes up as a child like many others and goes to sleep like a Jew. From that moment on, nothing will ever be the same again. He ends up in Auschwitz Birkenau where he loses all his dearest loved ones. He remains alone in the world but does not know the languages of hatred and violence: he manages to survive to build a new life accompanied by his wife Selma. An extraordinary couple held together by love for life. Several decades later, Sami’s voice has become a precious, unique testimony, starting with a question that the author has kept inside for a long time and runs through the pages of the volume: “Why did I come back alive? Why me?”

This book, which has been published in Italian since 2013 in various editions and reprints, today finally in English delivers the reading of an extraordinary testimony to a vast international audience. A story of pain and destruction, but also a sign of hope for those who have managed to tell and make the word become a seed of peace and solidarity, a path of knowledge and culture.

The book is available at Sapienza University Press