Rieti, the State Police on Remembrance Day. “Stumbling Stones” to remember Filippo Palieri and Salvatore Poti.
On the occasion of Remembrance Day, established to commemorate the victims of the Holocaust on the day in which, in 1945, the Russian armed forces entered the Auschwitz concentration camp, freeing the few survivors and revealing to the whole world the horrors committed by the Nazis, the State Police wants to remember the men who, even at the cost ofextreme sacrifice, worked to save human lives and protect the persecuted.
Yesterday, on the eve of the anniversary, the Police Commissioner of Rieti, together with the Prefect and the Mayor, during a public ceremony, positioned, at the entrance to the current headquarters of the Rieti Police Headquarters, in Largo C. Graziosi nr . 3, two “Stumbling Stones” named in memory of the two heroic Public Security Commissioners Filippo Palieri and Salvatore Poti, serving at the Rieti Police Headquarters during the Nazi occupation in Italy.
Filippo Palieri, gold medal for civil merit, was born in Cerignola (Foggia) on 22 May 1911, was a former student of the Nunziatella Military School in Naples, graduated in Law in Rome in 1933 and entered the Police at a young age, following a rapid career that led him to become the Chief of Staff of the Rieti Police Headquarters, assuming responsibility due to the absence due to illness of his hierarchical superior. Precisely during his service in Rieti, the young Commissioner Filippo Palieri he worked to avoid the deportation of around 300 Rieti artisans to work camps in Germany, hiding their names and personally warning them of the danger.
In the same period, together with Filippo Palieri, the Commissioner of Public Security Salvatore Poti also served at the Rieti Police Headquarters, who was a fervent anti-Nazi and he committed himself to warning numerous citizens of the imminent Nazi arrest allowing them to escape and thus saving them from certain death.
The two Commissioners, accused by the Nazis of non-collaboration, they were deported to the Wietzendorf concentration camp, where Palieri, on 13 April 1945, died due to the hardship and torture he suffered, while Poti had to wait for the end of Nazi hegemony in Germany before being freed.
The ceremony was held in the presence of the highest provincial authorities, representatives of the State Police and the Civil Administration of the Interior, representatives of the "Filippo Palieri" Section of Rieti of the National Association of the State Police, Filippo's grandchildren Palieri, Giuliana, Claudio and Ornella, of Salvatore Poti's son, Francesco and his niece Valeria, as well as of the Provincial Chaplain of the State Police, Don Fabrizio Borrello, who gave the blessing during the laying of the two stones, commissioned for the circumstance, by the Department of Public Safety.
Police Commissioner Mauro Fabozzi, in his brief speech, underlined the importance of the State Police joining the “Stolpersteine” (Stumbling Stones) project, started in 1995 by the German artist Gunther Demnig, creator of all the stones, with the aim of depositing, in the urban and social fabric of European cities, a widespread memory of the citizens deported to the Nazi extermination camps. The presence of simple stones covered with shiny brass attracts even the most distracted passer-by who is forced to "stumble", mentally, every day into history, that is, to question the fate of millions of people killed in the concentration camps so as not to ever forget.
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