On 21 November 1943, 329 men, women and children, were massed on the square of the Borgo San Dalmazzo railway station. They were put on freight wagons and taken first to the Drancy camp, near Paris and then to Auschwitz, where 311 of them were killed. They were foreign Jews, fleeing from France, locked up for two months in the concentration camp set up not far away. On 15 February 1944, another 26 Jews were deported from this station, headed to Fossoli di Carpi, from where they were then sent to Auschwitz or Buchenwald. Only two of them survived.
As then, the names of these people are in rows on the square that saw them leave for the last journey after years of persecution, violence and humiliation.
The names of those who returned are upright, to show the strength to call passers-by and visitors with living proof. The names are next to each other according to family bonds, because this is how they left on the wagons, clinging to each other in an attempt to reassure themselves.
The memorial consists of a reinforced concrete plate, a hypothetical service platform for freight wagons acquired by the Municipality in memory of the deportation that took place here. Surrounded by stones of various sizes, the plate supports the twenty standing silhouettes representing the survivors and the three hundred and thirty-five slabs fixed to the ground bearing the name of each deportee who did not return from the extermination camps. The name, surname and age of each person is entered in the register at the entrance of the concentration camp of Borgo and the nationality of origin is indicated with an acronym).