Rome mayor draws race lesson from Auschwitz visit

ROME - Rome's right-wing mayor Gianni Alemanno, just back from a trip to Auschwitz with 250 Italian schoolchildren, said remembering the Holocaust could help keep the threat of racism at bay.

Alemanno is Rome's first right-wing mayor since the 1940s in the fascist era of Benito Mussolini, when the city's Jewish community suffered at the hands of German and Italian fascists and thousands died in concentration camps.

He was a youth leader in a neo-fascist party that distanced itself from fascism and is a now mainstream conservative group.

It is the part of Silvio Berlusconi's government, which some civil rights groups accuse of fomenting racism with a crime crackdown that targets immigrants and the Roma minority.

But Alemanno said yesterday, a day after returning from Auschwitz, that recalling the Holocaust was "not just about the past and memory, it is also useful for the future."

"Intolerance can always resurface, in new and different guises, but the danger is always there," he told Reuters.

"We must teach our students to defend their identity and be proud of their own history but to always see in the identity of other people something positive from which they can learn, and something they must never hate or want to destroy," he said.

Speaking in his office on the ancient Capitoline Hill, in a building bearing a plaque to municipal workers sacked in the fascist era because they were Jewish, Alemanno said his visit to the Nazi death camp in Poland had been "deeply moving."

"I saw the abysses of negativity that human nature can reach but I also heard from the survivors about how human dignity can always respond and rebuild itself," he said.

Alemanno has cultivated links with Rome's Jewish community, thought to be the oldest Jewish diaspora in the world.

"You could say the Jews arrived here before the Christians as they were here before Rome's conversion to Christianity," he said on a balcony high above the ancient Roman Forum.