Vandals destroyed his tribute to Holocaust survivors — and yet this artist persists
AleXsandro Palombo, an Italian muralist, uses his art to educate young people about the Holocaust
AleXsandro Palombo’s mural, seen here with Rome’s mayor Roberto Gualtieri and Holocaust Museum president Mario Venenzia, pays tribute to Holocaust survivors Liliana Segre and Sami Modiano. Courtesy of AleXsandro Palombo
Benito Mussolini, the erstwhile Fascist dictator of Italy was killed by partisans on April 28, 1945. The following day, his body was hung upside down from the roof of a gas station in the center of the Piazzale Loreto in Milan. His corpse was ridiculed and stoned in that particular piazza because, on Aug. 10, 1944, it had been the scene of a public execution of 15 Italian partisans. The Nazi forces occupying Italy had chosen those prisoners for death as a reprisal for the bombing of a German military vehicle. That bombing, suspiciously, had killed no Germans although six Milanese bystanders died as a result. The bodies of the executed partisans were left to rot in the sun for a full day. In short, the Piazzale Loreto is no stranger to controversy and violence.
On Sept. 30, 2024, Italian artist and provocateur, AleXsandro Palombo, chose Piazzale Loreto as the site for a mural honoring two Italian Jewish Holocaust survivors: Liliana Segre and Sami Modiano. Both survived Auschwitz after having been sent there at age 13. And both are still alive today. Sami Modiano wrote a memoir, For This I Lived My Life at Auschwitz Birkenau and other Exiles, and Liliana Segre was honored for her educational work promoting justice and Holocaust awareness with an appointment as Senator for Life in the Italian Parliament.
Fifteen days after Palombo painted the mural honoring Segre and Modiano, it was vandalized.
The mural portraying the survivors is connected to Palombo’s earlier work on the Holocaust. In January, 2023, he painted a mural depicting the Simpsons, dressed as Jews, each wearing a yellow star as they await deportation to Auschwitz, then later, emaciated and wearing striped concentration camp “pajamas” at Auschwitz. The mural appeared on the wall of the Milan Shoah Memorial which is housed in the railway station where Jews and others were deported to death and concentration camps. That mural too, was vandalized several times with antisemitic and neo-Nazi slogans, as were several of Palombo’s wall paintings of Anne Frank and again Bart Simpson, this time as the well-known Warsaw Ghetto Boy with arms held above his head.
The mural honoring Segre and Modiano consisted of two life-size portraits of the survivors, each wearing striped pajamas and yellow stars on bulletproof vests. The portraits were vandalized twice before they were entirely destroyed. Palombo told me over email that he received a text message that read: “You’re a shit Jew. Segre whore. Auschwitz the only solution. We will rape all the women Jews.”
Shortly thereafter, Palombo repainted the portraits, and, on Holocaust Remembrance Day 2025, they were displayed outside the Holocaust Museum in Rome. Liliana Segre attended the ceremony unveiling the paintings along with Rome’s mayor Roberto Gualtieri and numerous other dignitaries. Shortly thereafter, the portraits became part of the museum’s permanent collection.
The enemy of indifference
Segre and Modiano did not know each other at Auschwitz, but both have devoted themselves to Holocaust education. Segre remained silent about her experience in the death camp for 45 years of marriage, motherhood and depression. When she began to speak to school assemblies and conferences, she found a single word that encompassed the relationship between the victims and victimizers and bystanders — the collaborators and complicit. That word is ‘indifferenza’ or indifference. When she was being trucked from San Vittore prison to the Milan train station for deportation to Auschwitz, traversing familiar streets, she felt the indifference of everyone behind their windows as the fatal procession passed without protest.
“Suddenly we were thrown into the gray area of ‘indifference’ — a fog, a wadding that wraps you softly, then paralyzes you in its invincible pincer,” she was quoted as saying in a 2019 article in the Academicus International Scientific Journal. An indifference that is more violent than any violence, because it is mysterious, ambiguous, never declared: an enemy striking you without ever seeing it distinctly.”
Now, when visitors enters the Milan Memorial to the Shoah, located at that the very railroad siding where 1,200 Jews, including Segre, were deported from Italy to Auschwitz, Mauthausen, and Bergen-Belsen, they are greeted by a monumental inscription, a single, enormous word carved into the north wall: INDIFFERENZA.
Modiano, as a result of Mussolini’s Racial Laws, was expelled in 1938 from an Italian public school on the island of Rhodes, then a part of Italy. Years later, Modiano began to address schools in Italy concerning the Holocaust. He would begin each class by telling the students that he had had no more than a third–grade education — the Fascist government had refused to educate him because he was a Jew. He would go on to tell the story that is also recounted in his memoir, describing how he, a teenager, survived Auschwitz through determination but also through moments of kindness and courage from his fellow inmates, including one who hid him in a filthy latrine to save his life.
A powerful shield against ignorance
Palombo, 52, is an improbable heir to both survivors. Though not Jewish, he has devoted his art to remembrance, freedom of expression and the persecuted.
“Liliana Segre wanted the word ‘indifference’ to become a warning,” he told me via email. “The key to understanding the cause of evil, and it is clear that those who continue to be indifferent to these repeated antisemitic outrages become accomplices to this terrible social, civil and cultural drift.”
Like Modiono and Segre, Palombo has sought to educate young people about the Holocaust, particularluy in a climate of rising antisemitism on social media.
“[T]he language that has always been used to tell the Holocaust is no longer enough,” he told me. “Those who have understood this are using the powerful machine of social media to foment antisemitism in every possible way to reach an incredible mass of ignorant young people. Visual art can become a powerful shield against all this.”
For Palombo, the images he creates around injustice are meant to draw unsuspecting viewers into a world where brutality, corruption and inequity come to life in iconic and recognizable forms. It is a strategy he has used across an array of issues including not only the Holocaust but also the victimization of African-Americans (he has portrayed the Simpsons as a Black family) and women — in one work, Marge Simpson, Wilma Flintstone and Snow White are all depicted with black eyes.
Though he and his work have been reviled and threatened, Palombo has persisted. Last month, after vandals had destroyed the mural of Segre and Modiano, he painted a new mural depicting them along with Edith Bruck, another living Holocaust survivor, and Pope Francis who is seen lamenting the spread of antisemitism.
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