rondi adamson.ca

Some people are amazing, and given my last post I thought it might be nice to recognize an amazingly courageous and righteous Italian.

Further details have emerged of the efforts the Italian cycling legend Gino Bartali made during the Second World War to help protect the country’s Jews from the Holocaust with the news that not only did he use training rides to act as a courier, but also hid a Jewish family in the cellar of his own home in Florence.

As reported on road.cc last month, Bartali, who won the Giro d’Italia three times and the Tour de France twice in a career disrupted by the war, is under consideration for the award of the title Righteous Among The Nations for his role in rescuing hundreds of Jews. However, Bartali, nicknamed ‘Il Pio’ – ‘The Pious’ - kept his clandestine activities secret during his lifetime.

Those efforts involved using long training rides, often between Florence and Assisi, to carry messages and documents hidden within the frame of his bike on behalf of an underground network that was pledged to supporting the country’s Jewish population, nearly 10,000 of whom were deported to Nazi death camps, most of those after Germany invaded the peninsula in the wake of Mussolini being overthrown in 1943.

Now, however, the Italian Jewish newspaper Pagine Ebraiche, its findings reported in La Gazzetta dello Sport, has revealed that Bartali’s efforts – and the consequent risk to himself and his family – went much deeper.

Read the whole story -- remarkable. Interestingly, Italians (in general) were better in regards treatment of Jews than the French, even though the former were part of the Axis and the latter an ally (supposedly). Looking at numbers, fewer Italian Jews (i.e., a smaller percentage) were deported to camps and murdered than French Jews, and for the most part Italian Jews were arrested by Germans, whereas the French police did much of the dirty work for the Germans. Even Hitler commented that the French were so "co-operative" and that he had so much trouble with Il Duce and Franco when it came to the Final Solution.  

Since the summer, I've been taking Italian lessons at the Italian Cultural Institute. Loads of fun. There was a Christmas party for the students and the guest of honour was Ninalee Craig, the girl -- now 83-year-old beauty -- in the famous photo. (Seriously, I should be so nimble and lovely now, much less decades from now.)

She gave a little talk and went on rather a bit too much about how poor Italy was in the post-war period. They were so poor, these men, she kept saying. They had nothing to do but stand around on the street corners. They had no jobs! Et cetera. What she failed to mention was the cause of the poverty. She rather made it sound as though Italians had been victimized by someone other than themselves.

I had an overwhelming urge to cry out, "That's what you get for supporting Fascists and hooking up with Hitler!" But I didn't, as the event was festive. By the way, she also failed to mention the Marshall Plan and the considerable help given to our former enemies after the war. Further -- and maybe I'm being harsh -- but look at the below picture. Do those fellows really look as though they're interested in employment? Do they really look as though there is anything else on their minds but picking up a beautiful girl?