Tel Aviv, 2014
I was the one who recited the words from Dante Alighieri’s Inferno when I saw the gate at Auschwitz. Believe me!
Through me you pass into the city of woe:
Through me you pass into eternal pain:
Through me among the people lost for aye.
Justice the founder of my fabric mov’d:
To rear me was the task of Power divine,
Supremest Wisdom, and primeval Love.
Before me things create were none, save things
Eternal, and eternal I endure.
All hope abandon, ye who enter here.
In her interview Nata Osmo recited the lines of Dante’s Canto III, Vestibule of Hell (“Inscription over the gate to Hell”) in Italian. Cited here is the English translation of the text by Henry F. Cary, in The Harvard Classics, Charles W. Eliot, ed. (New York: P.F. Collier & Son, 1909-14).
Citation: “Nata Osmo Gattegno”, Excerpts from her interview to Artemis Alcalay as part of the “Greek Jews Holocaust Survivors” project, Tel Aviv, 17 November 2014, https://greekjewsholocaustsurvivors.art/en/profile/nata_osmo/