This year, for the Holocaust Remembrance Day, we will have the pleasure of hosting Sergio Roedner, son of Ernst Roedner, interned in the Urbisaglia camp from 29 July 1940 to 02 April 1942.
Sergio Roedner is the author of the book Il piombo e l’anima (ATì, 2006), set in Milan in 1944, inspired by the story of Ruth, who died in a concentration camp, and the book L’orologio di Armin. L’Europa, due guerre, una famiglia (Marinotti, 2002), in which he reconstructed the events of his family over two centuries. Five generations involved in the sad vicissitudes of anti-Semitism and Nazism, including the internment of his father in the camp of Urbisaglia: “In 1988, after my mother’s death, a worn-out suit-case, crammed with papers and photographs, which had been buried for forty years in the attic of our house in piazzale Brescia, was moved into the storage of my new home. It was still preserving all its secrets intact.” (p. 7).
Sergio Roedner will be in Urbisaglia next Saturday, January 27, 2024, at 17 at the Teatro Comunale in Corso Giannelli 45.
To introduce the meeting Giovanna Salvucci, President of Casa della Memoria di Urbisaglia, and Emanuela Balelli, President of the Centro Studi Balelli and professor of Cataloging and management of photographic archives at the Academy of Fine Arts of Macerata, that will speak of the value of photography as historical documentation.
At the end of the meeting the male section of the Choir Equi-Voci of Urbisaglia will perform the song “Komm mein Schatz auf den Bocceplatz” composed by Egon Mosbach and Paul Schwenk during their internment in Urbisaglia.
Mosbach did not survive the Shoah, while Paul Schwenk worked with Ernst Roedner under Emilio Winter, another fellow internee in Urbisaglia, playing “the cello at night to relieve his homesickness of an exiled Viennese.” (L’orologio di Armin, p. 215).
Given the friendship between Ernst Roedner and Paul Schwenk, we decided to perform the song for the first time on this occasion.