Memoriale della Shoah di Milano

Beneath the elevated tracks of Milan Centrale station lies Binario 21, the Platform 21 loading area from which Jewish and political deportees were shipped to Nazi camps between 1943 and 1945. Opened as a memorial in 2013, the Memoriale della Shoah preserves this historic deportation site.

Why it matters

Among the European sites of deportation, the memorial's own materials describe it as the only one to have remained intact. From this hidden freight area, prisoners taken from San Vittore prison were loaded onto cattle trucks, hoisted to the platforms above and attached to convoys for Auschwitz-Birkenau, Mauthausen and the transit camps of Fossoli and Bolzano. The first Jewish transport left on 6 December 1943 with 169 people, of whom five returned; of the 605 deported on 30 January 1944, twenty-two survived, among them the thirteen-year-old Liliana Segre, later a life senator of Italy. The site makes the history of the Italian Holocaust inseparable from the physical infrastructure of deportation.

What to notice

The underground loading bays include the Wagon Room, with original freight cars on the trackbed, and the Muro dei Nomi, engraved with the names of those deported from Milan; the complex also includes the Place of Remembrance. Documentation presents the chronology of persecution in Italy, from the 1938 census to the deportations. Milan's Pietre d'Inciampo, brass memorial stones created by Gunter Demnig, carry the names of deported people at former homes across the city.

Context and history

The space below the railway platforms was originally used for handling mail wagons. Between 1943 and 1945 it became the assembly point where thousands of Jews and political opponents were loaded onto freight cars destined for the extermination and concentration camp system. The memorial opened in 2013 on the initiative of civic and Jewish community organisations, and in 2022 the site was joined by the new premises of the Centro di Documentazione Ebraica Contemporanea, the Jewish contemporary documentation centre.