Professor Sergio Della Pergola is a demographer who cultivates the feelings behind statistics and for whom history should not be reserved for historians. “To understand it, you must first understand life”, insists this Italian-Israeli researcher interviewed by video, from his office in Jerusalem. As such, he tirelessly defends the thesis according to which the cycling champion Gino Bartali (1914-2000) saved Jews in the Florence region during the Second World War, by carrying false papers on his bicycle, hidden in spaces cramped: the frame tubes or the inside of its saddle.
The thesis was approved by the Yad Vashem memorial committee, which awarded him the title – posthumously – of “Righteous Among the Nations” in 2013. This chapter resonates with the past of Professor Della Pergola, who was hidden by the Righteous at the end 1943 in the Tuscan capital, barely 1 year old.
The Tour de France has chosen to pay a heartfelt tribute to its former double winner (1938 and 1948), as the event sets off from his hometown on Saturday, June 29. The first stage will pass in front of the house where Gino Bartali was born. “Just among nations, this is an exceptional story”detached Christian Prudhomme, met in Paris, in February. Few sports have known such a moral figure, a positive protagonist of “the big story”The cycling microcosm, and beyond that the whole of Italian society, discovered these “exploits” late, in May 2005, five years after Bartali’s death, when the head of the transalpine state awarded him the gold medal for Civil Merit, for having “saved eight hundred Jewish citizens” between 1943 and 1944. His widow and children seemed to learn this immense news at the same time as everyone else: the very Catholic runner, known as “Gino the Pious”, had never confided anything to them.
The fear of “gossip”
But the tributes have also been met with suspicion. What if the Bartali case had been magnified, or even fabricated? The first doubts emerged in 2016 among historians critical of the methods of Yad Vashem, which has recognized more than 20,000 Righteous throughout the world. First warning: nothing appears in the Catholic archives, the usual sources of the Tuscan resistance. Also, these Holocaust specialists are trying to uncover the genesis of the myth. The oldest trace is that of a docufiction broadcast by RAI in 1985, The Assisi Undergroundwhich recounts an episode of Catholic resistance around Assisi, in Umbria.
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