To remember, however, does not mean to celebrate.
It means to think against oneself.

The Shoah is not merely a historical fact to be placed between 1933 and 1945, nor a closed chapter of European history. It is a limit-event that continues to question our way of conceiving civilisation, rationality, progress. Not for what it was, but for what made it possible.

Reducing Auschwitz to an eruption of barbarism amounts to reassuring ourselves: the barbarian is always other than us. But what makes the Shoah a permanent trauma of European culture is precisely the opposite. It takes shape within a literate, juridically structured, technologically advanced civilisation; a civilisation that chose deliberately to place its finest instruments — law, bureaucracy, organisation, science — at the service of annihilation.

Auschwitz-Birkenau is not the symbol of chaos, but of order. Not of irrationality, but of a rationality that has renounced questioning its own ends.

This is the point that continues to disturb, and it is for this reason that it is so often removed. Because it forces us to recognise that civilisation is not a moral guarantee. It can function even without conscience. It can operate with precision even when it has lost any sense of limit.

Extermination does not begin with the gas chambers. It begins when the human being is translated into administrative language. When the individual becomes a category, the face becomes a datum, life becomes a “case”. It begins when language ceases to name persons and starts to manage problems.

Before physical violence, there is semantic violence.

It is here that the Shoah questions the present. Not because historical forms repeat themselves identically, but because mental mechanisms are reproducible. Every system that separates efficiency from responsibility, every apparatus that rewards obedience at the expense of judgement, every language that neutralises the other by reducing them to a function, reactivates — on another scale, in another form — the same device.

Hannah Arendt spoke of the “banality of evil” not in order to absolve, but to aggravate guilt: the most dangerous evil is not the one that recognises itself as such, but the one exercised without any longer asking questions, within procedures considered normal.

For this reason memory is not a sentimental exercise. It is a critical exercise. It does not serve to confirm that we are on the right side of history, but to ask under what conditions it becomes possible to stop being so.

Every epoch elaborates its own vocabulary of exclusion. Words change; the function does not. Memory serves to recognise those signals before they become system: when complexity is derided, when empathy is treated as weakness, when simplification becomes a civic virtue.

If memory becomes merely a ritual, it ceases to function.
It becomes a form of collective self-absolution.

To remember, instead, should mean accepting a permanent unease: the awareness that no civilisation is immune, that no progress is irreversible, that no rationality is innocent unless it is accompanied by responsibility.