Memorial Day. In Rome an exhibition on Elisa Springer
How can we forget the fellow honorary citizen of Matera (December 10, 2002) Elisa Springer, her meetings with young people, together with the late Filippo Zollino of the association 21 September 1943, to present her books? And then the many unsuccessful attempts to open a “Museum of Memory” in the city with its documentary legacy and with a project made up of many promises to allocate part of the former “Alessandro Volta” middle school to that initiative? His works remain, his life of sacrifice. We remember her with pleasure and gratitude for the legacy left to those like Francesca Lopane, Francesco Ambrico, who always keep her memory alive between Basilicata and Puglia. And in particular when 21 September 1943 is the day of Liberation for Matera or that of the Shoah. On 24 January, on the initiative of the Austrian Culture Forum, there will be the inauguration of an exhibition and a musical performance in Rome. A small, significant contribution of high value, ideal for the testimony that Elisa Springer was able to carry on until the end. But more needs to be done to counter the attempts, submerged or overt, to reduce freedom and rights or to stifle the desire for freedom that comes from women, men, young people of various countries, including the West. The life and sacrifice of Elisa Springer is been and is also this.
from the website of the Austrian forum in Rome https://www.austriacult.roma.it/
EXHIBITION INAUGURATION AND MUSIC READING | MEMORIAL DAY
Eliza Springer
January 24, 2023 | 6.30pm
Rome – Austrian Cultural Forum, Viale Bruno Buozzi 113
Free admission by reservation: [email protected]
E. Springer/ Milan, 1941 ©Springer Foundation A-24020
Elisa Springer (1918 Vienna – 2004 Matera) was a tireless witness to the persecution of the Nazi regime in Italian schools until her death in 2004: born in Vienna in 1918, she survived the Holocaust also thanks to a facade marriage with an Italian citizen .
Its story is collected in two books from which the actress and director Maria Inversi will read some passages to recall the memories of Elisa Springer, also presented through some pieces interpreted by the pianist and singer Goar Faradzhian.
The exhibition will be introduced by the curator Sabine Apostolo (Jewish Museum in Vienna), Francesca Lopane (Elisa Springer Foundation A-24020) and Elisa’s cousin, Hans Bauer.
exhibition opening
ELISA SPRINGER The eloquent silence of memory
The exhibition is held in cooperation with the Jewish Museum Vienna (JMW) and the Springer Foundation A-24020
It remains open to the public until 17 February 2023 (Mon-Fri 09-17)
music reading
ELISA SPRINGER The silence of the living
dramaturgy and direction by: Maria Inversi
soprano voice and piano: Goar Faradzhian
Elisa Springer was twenty-six years old when she was arrested and deported to Auschwitz with the convoy departing from Verona on August 2, 1944. Saved from the gas chamber by the generous gesture of a Kapò, Elisa lives and experiences all the horror of the largest extermination camp Nazi. Soon reduced to a human larva, humiliated and offended, even during the subsequent transfers to Bergen Belsen, the camp where Anne Frank died, among others, and to Theresienstadt, she will be able to keep alive in her soul the desire to survive the destruction . Her strength and a series of lucky coincidences allow her to return to the living, first in her native Vienna and then in Italy, where at the beginning of the Nazi persecution against the Jews of Europe, pushed by her mother, she had sought refuge.
From this moment and for fifty years her story falls into absolute silence: no one knows about her, knows her drama; no one sees (or wants to see) the Auschwitz branding number that Elisa keeps well hidden under a plaster. The world needs her voice, her suffering, but her words are not enough to tell the sense of her infinite and always alive drama. Her life normalizes, she has a son. In those years, her motherhood was the sign of her revenge against the executioners. Fifty years later this very son, Silvio, wants to understand, to know and she, out of love for his mother, finds her words that seemed lost. (Marsilius)
Maria Inversi graduated as an actress, graduated in foreign languages and literature and in journalism. You follow advanced theater courses at the Sorbonne censier III. She studies directing and dance with several masters. She is a writer and theater director, she has published about twenty theatrical texts, plays, poems, and a novel with Castelvecchi in 2022. She conducts seminars and has given lessons in Rome 3.
www.teatroedonne-inversi.it, www.Alfabeticomuni.it, Facebook, Youtube