NPR

Italian Holocaust Survivor Faces Threats After Calling For Investigation Into Hate

"This is a real crisis for all of us, of all the system, of all the democracy," says the head of Rome's Jewish community. "That means that she must be protected from the hate as it was in the past."

More than seven decades after the fall of fascism in its country of birth, Italy is in the grip of an intense debate about anti-Semitism, racism and hate speech.

The national psychodrama was unwittingly triggered by an 89-year-old Jewish grandmother and Holocaust survivor who has been put under police escort following threats from members of Italy's ultra-right.

In 1944, 13-year-old Liliana Segre from Milan, Italy, was deported to the Auschwitz concentration camp with the number 75,190 tattooed on her arm. After the war, most people didn't want to hear about the Holocaust, she says.

When she became a grandmother at age

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