Trump, Zelensky showdown alarms Holocaust survivor

Holocaust survivor and Life Senator Liliana Segre expressed deep concern following a showdown between US President Donald Trump and his Ukrainian counterpart Volodymyr Zelensky at the White House on Friday, saying that, as a victim of hatred, she did not want the United States to collapse.

"As the victim of hatred I was and still am, I don't want America to collapse", she said after Trump and Vice President JD Vance accused the besieged Ukrainian president of standing in the way of a peace agreement with Russia, CE Report quotes ANSA.

Speaking during a meeting with Interior Minister Matteo Piantedosi at the Holocaust memorial in Milan, Segre said she was "terrified" when she saw the shouting match in the Oval Office Friday in which, she said, "the invaded became the invader" in a "reversal" that started when Trump was elected president for a second term.

Segre, 94, at the same time expressed "deep gratitude" for the Americans who had freed her from the concentration camp and then set up field hospitals where "everyone was treated with fraternal generosity".

Born in 1930 into a Milanese family of Jewish origins, in 1938 Segre was expelled from her primary school after the promulgation of the Italian Racial Laws.

In 1943, she was arrested with her family and deported to the Auschwitz concentration camp.

The only survivor among her relatives, with the end of World War II in 1945, she returned to Milan.

After decades of silence, in the 1990s she started to speak to the public, especially young students, about her experience.

In 2019, she was assigned a security detail after she was the target of online threats and insults.