In a post October 7 world when Jews again are tagged and targeted, the name of cycling legend Bartali personifies true heroism– reflections and recollections during the 2024 Tour de France.
By David E. Kaplan
This year’s 2024 Tour de France – won in spectacular fashion by Slovenian Tadej Pogačar – had plenty of high moments and the breaking of long-held records. For the most part, I watched on TV all 21 stages. What particularly caught my attention was on the Saturday and penultimate stage of the grueling 21-stage race that ended the next day in Nice in a nail-biting ‘time trial’, was the commentator’s line which he repeated again and again:
“If Pogačar wins today’s mountain stage, he will equal the record of 5 mountain stage wins in a Tour with Gino Bartali.”
Bartali? Where had I heard that name before?
It rang a clangor and for more than only cycling. I let the thought linger until the end of the stage when Pogačar won in spectacular fashion and the animated commentator was battling to catch his breath as if he had himself just raced the132.8 km and said:
“The only other man to have won five mountain stages in one Tour was Gino Bartali in 1948.”
Again, the name Bartali and coupled with a “76-year-old record had been equaled.”
76 years…Bartali……!
And then I remembered.
Pogačar had equaled a record of not only the leading cyclist of his era, a three-time winner of the Giro d’Italia (1936,1937 and 1946), who won the Tour de France in 1938 and again after the war, a decade later in 1948 but had, in the intervening years, saved the lives of Jews in wartime Italy.
It all came back to me when I recalled back to a Yom HaShoah ceremony many years earlier in my hometown of Kfar Saba in central Israel. That year, the annual memorial ceremony for the six million victims of the Holocaust focused on the connection between sport and the Holocaust and related the story of an Italian, not Jewish and a great cyclist named Gino Bartali, who at great risk to himself and his family, had saved Jews from certain death at the hands of the Nazis. There was good reason why on July 7, 2013, Yad Vashem recognized Gino Bartali as Righteous Among the Nations.
Writing on the Wall. Years later, Gino Bartali sticks his head out his car window to view graffiti honouring him and other Tour de France winners – Ottavio Bottecchia (1924), himself (1938), Fausto Coppi (1949) and Gastone Nencini (1960).
During his lifetime, Bartali didn’t talk about his wartime activities and was only after his death in 2000 that details began to emerge.
A villager from a poor Tuscan family, Bartali in the second half of the 1930s was reaching the peak of his career having won his first Giro d’Italia in 1936 and then retaining the title in 1937 when war clouds began to ominously loom over Europe. When he then in 1938, won his first Tour de France, it was in the aftermath of this triumph that revealed as much about Bartali’s moral character as his cycling prowess.
As related by Bartali’s son Andrea, there was one particular fan of his father who was following the cyclist’s progress with more Machiavellian than sporting interest – Benito Mussolini, the country’s fascist leader. Under the evil spell of Hitler, “He believed,” said Andrea, “that if an Italian rider triumphed in the Tour de France it would show that Italians too belonged to the master race.”
Bartali would go on to win won the 1938 Tour de France but for him, unlike for Mussolini it was a ‘race’ only in a cycling not in an ethnicity sense. While the Italian leader felt Bartali had contributed to fascist prestige and wanted to exploit the cyclist’s win, Bartali would have none of that.
“When my father was invited to dedicate his win to Mussolini and the fascist cause, he refused,”revealed Andrea. A risk-taker on the saddle, he was even more so when off. By refusing to dedicate his win to the fascist cause “my dad was insulting il Duce. He was taking a great personal risk.”
However, he would take far more serious risks in the near future.
In the middle of that year’s 1938 Tour de France, on the 14 July, Mussolini published the Manifesto della razza (Manifesto on Race), which led to Italian Jews being stripped of their Italian citizenship and any position in government or the professions. These antisemitic laws demonstrated the increasing influence of Adolf Hitler over Mussolini. Nevertheless, Italy still managed to remain a country in which Jews could at least take refuge, but that all terrifyingly transitioned when Italy surrendered to the allies in 1943 and the German army responded by occupying northern and central parts of the country. They immediately started rounding up Jews and sending them to concentration camps.
It was at this point that Bartali, a devout Catholic, was asked by the Cardinal of Florence, Archbishop Elia Dalla Costa, to join a secret network offering protection and safe passage to Jews.
His role in the network spearheaded by the Cardinal together with Rabbi Nathan Cassuto (later arrested by the Nazis, deported and sent to his death) was uniquely suited to his temperament and talents. As an internationally renowned cyclist; a national hero with a face recognised by all, he became an unsuspecting courier – on two wheels – relaying forged documents, most of it relating to Jews trying to escape.
ON THE ROAD
So, on the ‘surface’ (literally as well as figuratively), Bartali was undertaking long training rides for which he was renowned, but in reality, he was carrying photographs and counterfeit identity documents to and from a secret printing press produced by the Assisi network, another rescue operation initiated by Church people in that town. All these secret documents were hidden in the frame and handlebars of his bicycle.
Riding through many roadblocks manned by Italian fascists as well as Nazis, when Bartali was stopped and searched, he specifically asked that his bicycle not be touched “since the different parts were very carefully calibrated to achieve maximum speed.”
A perfectly credible explanation.
At remarkable risk, Bartali cycled thousands of kilometres across Italy, peddling between cities as far apart as Florence, Lucca, Genoa, Assisi and the Vatican in Rome.
At one point he was arrested and questioned by the head of the Fascist secret police in Florence where he lived and for a period, went into hiding, living incognito in the town of Citta Di Castello in Umbria.
In addition to these defiant exploits, Bartali hid his Jewish friend Giacomo Goldenberg and his family.
“He hid us in spite of knowing that the Germans were killing everybody who was hiding Jews,” Goldenberg’s son, Giorgio would later reveal.
“He was risking not only his life but also his family. Gino Bartali saved my life and the life of my family. That’s clear because if he hadn’t hidden us, we had nowhere to go.”
The Goldenberg family would emigrate to the emerging Jewish state after the war. Young Giorgio Goldenberg, son of Bartali’s friend, would take with him a signed 1940 photo Bartali had given him of his cycling victories. Giorgio now goes by the name of Shlomo Paz and has three children and five grandchildren and lives outside of Tel Aviv.
BRAVE BARTALI
Andrea Bartali says that eventually “little by little my father told me about his actions during the war.” However, “he made me promise at that time not to tell anyone.”
An unusual type of hero was Bartali.
When asked why he could not speak about his father’s heroic wartime exploits, he replied that his father had said:
“You must do good, but you must not talk about it. If you talk about it, you’re taking advantage of others misfortunes for your own gain.”
Because Bartali didn’t want to be acknowledged for what he had done, very few of those he helped ever knew his name or what role he had played in their rescue.
Andrea Bartali says his father refused to view his actions as heroic.
“When people were telling him, ‘Gino, you’re a hero’, he would reply: ‘No, no – I want to be remembered for my sporting achievements. Real heroes are others….”
Really? If Bartali been caught by the Nazis – despite being a sporting hero – he most likely would have been shot.
None of this was related by the sports commentator at this year’s 2024 Tour de France while he constantly made the comparisons between Pogačar and Bartali. Probably, like the Jews Bartali saved, the commentator did not even know the story.
However, for those who do know and remember, in a post October 7 world when Jews again are tagged and targeted, the name Bartali personifies true heroism – others before self.
*Feature picture:
Hero on and off the bike. Gino Bartali rides uphill in the 1938 Tour de France.(Photo STF/AFP/GETTY IMAGES)
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