A Park Dedicated to Emanuele Artom

Tomorrow morning at nine thirty, in a simple ceremony at the intersection of Via Artom and Via Candiolo, in Turin, Emanuele Artom will be commemorated forty years after his death. The ex-partisans of the Mirafiori section of ANPI (National Association of Partisans of Italy), the Jewish community of Turin, and the Christian congregation of San Andrea will honor him. A small park, funded by students and partisans, will be dedicated in his name; Giorgina Arian Levi and Giuseppe Reburdo will speak.

Emanuele was born in 1915, into a family in which education was considered the supreme good in life. His father and mother were esteemed teachers, he and his younger brother, Ennio, were precociously mature students and then scholars. Four people bound by a quiet, intense affection, but respectful of one another’s intellectual independence: a family that in normal times might seem destined for a tranquil future.

But the times were not normal. The racial laws went into effect in 1938, and the Artoms, anti-Fascist by culture and by nature, reacted with dignity and courage. Shortly afterward, in 1940, Ennio died in an absurd mountain-climbing accident, and a shadow began to spread over the family. Emanuele responded to grief with a renewed spiritual tension. He translated Polybius, he applied himself to study and to teaching, but he didn’t withdraw: he felt the hour of decision was near, what he had learned from the classics and from the Bible must not lie inert, must lead him to understand, to choose.

On September 8, 1943, the Nazis invaded northern Italy, and Emanuele didn’t hesitate: though he had no military experience, and was a stranger to violence, he joined the partisans, in the mountains. He endured discomforts and dangers with cheerful pride, he became quick and daring; in January 1944, he was the political representative for the Action Party in Val Pellice. He was captured in a roundup, tortured atrociously for days, and humiliated, but he found in his frail body the strength to be silent: he didn’t name names. He died on April 7, racked by torture; his parents, twice bereaved, were denied the consolation of knowing where his remains lie.

Fichte’s maxim fits him as it does few others: the educated man requires not only knowledge but also virtue, which is the highest degree of morality.

La Stampa, April 11, 1984