Our class, 4C of the Luigi Einaudi Institute in Ferrara, has joined the project “Le Case di Micòl”, an initiative whose goal is to remember all the victims of the Holocaust, using the figure of Micòl — the protagonist of the novel The Garden of the Finzi-Continis — as a guiding example.
More specifically, all of us will take part in a learning pathway designed to help us understand the causes of this historical tragedy and to ensure that we can immediately recognize early warning signs of discrimination and persecution in their different forms. At the end of our classroom activities, we will also participate in a dedicated workshop at the MEIS, and we will select a classmate who will represent us as a “bearer of active remembrance” (alfiere della memoria) during an afternoon discussion in English with students from other schools. On that occasion, several short films produced by European film schools will be screened at the Blow-Up Academy in Ferrara. These films tell the stories of other “Micòls” — women who, because of hatred toward an ethnic, religious, or political group, lost everything except their dignity and the right to be remembered not only as victims, but as individuals.
In the initial phase of our project, we divided into groups and assigned each member a specific task in order to document our lessons. Professor Eleonora Bentivogli, our English teacher, introduced the topic through a multimedia presentation that brought us closer to the figure of writer Giorgio Bassani, born in Bologna into a Jewish family of Ferrarese origin. His name is very familiar to us because many places in our city carry it or are linked to his life. However, not all of us knew how cultured and committed Bassani was: he loved tennis, taught Italian and history to Jewish students expelled from public schools, and actively participated in the resistance against Fascism.
Bassani’s novel, published in 1962, describes the consequences of the 1938 racial laws, which profoundly affected the lives of Italian Jews. These measures introduced unjust and cruel prohibitions: Jews were excluded from public employment, expelled from schools, and forbidden to marry people of the “Aryan race.” Reading through this list, we were especially struck by the cultural and intellectual sphere targeted by these laws, and by how education, ideas, and the arts were viewed by the regime as expressions belonging to one “race” or another.
We also watched an excerpt from the film The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, directed by Vittorio De Sica, one of the greatest filmmakers in Italian cinema. The scene in which the protagonist and his father discuss the racial laws made us reflect on the role of young people: the boy seemed far more aware of the seriousness of the situation than his older father, who was almost unable to accept the reality around him.
Through this first introduction to the novel and the film, we realized how important it is not to forget and to pass on the memory of those who suffered the injustice and violence of the Holocaust.
Benedetta Passafini, Greta Taormina, Class 4C