Platform #21

If you’ve ever been to Milan, you will already know about the Centrale FS station. What you probably didn’t know about is the infamous Platform 21 and the tragic history of The Secret Holocaust Trains.

After the Italian surrender on September 8th 1943 and the occupation of northern Italy by German Nazi forces, Milan became a centre for processing, interrogating and torturing captured resistance fighters and Jews from all over Italy.

Victims were held at San Vittore Prison, but were also taken for interrogation and torture at either the headquarters of the German police at Hotel Regina or at the headquarter of the Muti unit in an army base at Via Rovello.

Milan served as central deportation place for the Jews of northern Italy, who were brought there from other cities as well as rural regions. The loading of deportees onto carriages took place in the early mornings to ensure secrecy and to prevent disruption.

The first Holocaust Train with deportees left Milan from the now infamous Platform 21 on December 6th 1943, carrying 169 Jews to Auschwitz; only 5 of them would survive the Holocaust. A second train left on January 30th 1944, this time carrying 600 deportees, 40 of them children including the famous Liliana Segre, who were taken on a seven-day journey to Auschwitz. Upon arrival at Auschwitz on the morning of February 6th, 500 of them were killed immediately and their bodies burned in the crematorium.

After the fall of the Axis powers of WW2, Platform 21 remained virtually forgotten for the next four decades. It was rediscovered only in 1995 when the local Catholic organization Sant’Egidio made the Jewish community of Milan aware of it.

On January 27th 2013, Holocaust Remembrance Day, a memorial was inaugurated in the presence of Prime Minister Mario Monti and other institutional and religious dignitaries and guests.

According to the foundation for the memorial, Binario 21 is the only European site which was involved in the deportations that still remains intact. The memorial features two original freight cars that were used in the deportations to the death camps, and a wall onto which the names of the people deported from the station to concentration camps are projected.

In recent times, the memorial has also served as a shelter for refugees from Syria and Eritrea, who have travelled through Libya to reach Italy.

Centrale FS Milano MI