In Florence, Italy, July 1944, Tour de France champion Gino Bartali faced possible torture and death at the hands of Italian military officer Major Mario Carita, whose idol was Heinrich Himmler, the Nazi leader in charge of Hitler’s Gestapo and SS. Why was Bartali, a major celebrity, being interrogated?
As revealed in Aili and Andres McConnon’s Christopher Award-winning biography Road to Valor, the devout Catholic led a secret life helping to save Jews from the Italian holocaust.
During an interview on Christopher Closeup, Andres McConnon shared that Bartali was picked on as a child because he was small for his age, causing him to identify with underdogs. He soon befriended another underdog, Giacomo Goldenberg, a Jewish emigre from Russia who fled to Italy to escape persecution.
As Bartali grew older, his proficiency at being an endurance athlete kept increasing, culminating in a Tour de France win in 1938. Even before that, his accomplishments had already drawn the attention of Italy’s dictator, Benito Mussolini, and his Fascist propaganda machine’s efforts to create a “warrior people” through physical training. Bartali, however, resisted becoming a tool of the regime. Part of his reasons were due to the lingering memory of his father’s colleague being murdered by the Fascists for speaking out on behalf of worker’s rights.
The other reason was because of the Catholic faith that Bartali had practiced since boyhood.
Bartali not only attended Mass regularly, prayed daily, and read about saints like Anthony of Padua and Thérèse of Lisieux, he joined a lay group called Catholic Action, which organized both religious and social activities for young people. Its members numbered 600,000 throughout Italy, and Bartali frequently spoke at meetings to share his faith’s role in his life and success. This didn’t go over well with the government-run Fascist press which started mocking him for his piety. They couldn’t stop covering him, though, because he won races.
Though Bartali felt devastated when World War II derailed his sports career, the situation led to a much darker reality. Hitler’s influence had led to Italy becoming a dangerous place for Jews. Despite that fact, Jewish refugees fled to Italy to hide their identities or escape into Switzerland. That’s when a vocal anti-Fascist and good friend of Bartali’s, Cardinal Elia Dalla Costa, stepped up a secret operation. He would use the Catholic Church’s resources to deliver forged identity documents to Jews in the surrounding areas.
Cardinal Dalla Costa asked Bartali to help take part in this mission as well. Though he could be killed if he was caught, the cyclist agreed. He would roll up the false documents, hide them inside the hollow frame of his bicycle, and deliver them to a priest in Assisi.
For Bartali, this battle was also personal. His friend, Giacomo Goldenberg, and his family were also being persecuted. Bartali hid them in an apartment he had bought with his cycling winnings.
With all that clandestine activity, it’s no surprise that Major Carita was alerted to suspicions about Bartali. Carita tried every trick and intimidation tactic he knew to break Gino, but despite being inwardly nervous, the sports hero played it cool and lived to continue his life-saving work.
There is much more to the life of Gino Bartali, whose story, as McConnon explained, “combines the dramatic appeal of a sports underdog with the surprising saga of a secret Holocaust hero.” It would be worth your time to read Road to Valor.
(This essay is a recent “Light One Candle” column, written by Tony Rossi, of The Christophers; it is one of a series of weekly columns that deal with a variety of topics and current events.)
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