During the second World War about 40.000 Italians were dragged away from their homes by the militiamen of the Social Republic or by the occupying German troops and deported into the concentration camps that the Nazis had set up in the whole Europe for the physical elimination of political opponents, Jews, gypsies, homosexuals, Jehovah's witnesses: more than 1'600 camps , considering both the bigger and the smaller ones, where millions of men, women and children were imprisoned and killed. Of the Italian deportees, the Jews were slightly fewer than 10'000, and about 30'000 were the partisans, antifascists, workers who were arrested after the big strikes of March 1944. Not more than 4000 out of these 40'000 came back: 90% of them died , wiped out by Hitler's machine of extermination.

After the war the survivors of the camps and the families of the ones who had died gathered, founding ANED, the joint association which represents, even nowadays, all the ex-deportees, without any distinctions of religious faith or political orientation.

More than 50 years have passed since the end of the war, but the commitment to give a name to all the victims of the Nazi slaughter keeps intact, as well as the obligation to prevent their sacrifice from being forgotten, in the belief that only the memory and the understanding of that boundless tragedy may establish the basis for a future of peace for all the peoples in the world.