European Museums, Migration, and Social Inclusion

The year of 2015 will remain in history as a time that saw population movements in Europe unrivaled since the end of the Second World War. In June, the photographs of migrant camps in and around Milan filled news reports. In July, we saw spectacles of migrants in and around the Channel tunnel; August brought drowned children near the Greek isle of Kos, and September bore witness to walls and armed clashes in Eastern Europe. In this sea of dispiriting events, one of the rare positive news accounts relating to migrants focused on a museum; a very small museum to be precise, one that is largely unknown. Even its physical location is difficult to trace. Binario 21 (or track 21) is the site where Milan’s Jews were shipped off to the concentration camps in Eastern Europe during the Second World War. This dark and mostly empty space, which contains two of the original boxcars, is situated beneath Milano Centrale Station. Trains rumble overhead, while the plaza in front of the Mussolini Modern edifice is filled with migrants, eating, sleeping, hanging out laundry, playing with their children, bathing. The silence and darkness of Binario 21 alone would be an effective testament to the horrors of deportation as a form of coerced migration. But the museum acquired new resonance in July 2015. The site’s organizers and sponsors enacted their commitment to social justice by transforming the coatroom into a nightly shelter for North African migrants. Cots were installed, along with showers in the visitor toilets. Kosher food was provided by a Jewish charity. A Catholic community, Sant’Egidio, which has been a partner to the institution since its founding, provided volunteers. The space, a transitional site in the 1940s and again seventy-five years later, offered safety and comfort to individuals who awaited a resolution to the impasse at Italy’s borders. But it also offered a startlingly innovative example of how museums may adapt an activist position.