Memoriale della Shoah, Milan

The Memoriale della Shoah is a Holocaust memorial beneath Milano Centrale, built around the concealed loading area known as Platform 21. This is where Jewish prisoners taken from San Vittore Prison were brought for deportation during the Holocaust in Italy. From here, twenty trains carried as many as 1,200 Jewish prisoners toward extermination camps, chiefly Auschwitz, either directly or through transit camps.

The memorial preserves two original freight cars used in those deportations, and a wall projects the names of people sent away from this station. Look for the former railway space itself: its rough, industrial surfaces make the machinery of deportation impossible to separate from the place of remembrance. Platform 21 had previously handled postal trains, which helped conceal the movement of prisoners.

The site remained largely forgotten for about four decades before its rediscovery in 1995. The memorial opened on 27 January 2013. Among those deported from here was Liliana Segre, who was thirteen when she was sent to Auschwitz with her father; he was murdered there in 1944. This place therefore holds both a physical trace of the deportations and the memory of the people carried away through it.