Memory. Here are the new Righteous for the 2023 ceremony
For the twenty-year anniversary of the birth of the Garden of the Righteous, the choice fell on four figures from yesterday and today: Gareth Jones, Alfreda Noncia Markowska, Hersch Lauterpacht, Akram Aylisli. Celebrations on March 6, Day of the Righteous of Humanity
Milan, October 26 2022 - The Committee of Guarantors of the Association for the Garden of the Righteous of Milan, of which Gariwo and the Municipality of Milan are part, has ratified the choices expressed by the Assembly regarding the theme for the celebrations of 6 March 2023 at the Garden of the Righteous of Monte Stella in Milan: “Saving the human in man. The Righteous and personal responsibility".
The approved figures are:
- Gareth Jones, Welsh journalist, was the first to document the Holodomor, facing Western indifference and Soviet censorship until his mysterious death.
- Alfreda Noncia Markowska, Roma woman, lost her family during the Porrajmos but risked her life to save the greatest number of children, Roma or Jews, from extermination.
- Hersch Lauterpacht, a British jurist, placed the individual at the center of law and promoted the idea of personal responsibility in the face of inhuman orders at Nuremberg.
- Akram Aylisli, an Azerbaijani writer, denounced his country's violence against the Armenians and supported dialogue between the two peoples, paying with an "exile" in his own land.
The ceremony for the new Righteous will take place at the Garden of the Righteous in Milan as part of the Day of the Righteous of humanity on 6 March 2023. On that occasion the chosen figures will be honored as part of a special anniversary: the first twenty years of the Garden of the Righteous from all over the world of Monte Stella. The Garden was in fact "born" on January 24, 2003 with the intention of honoring the Righteous of all genocides, totalitarianisms and crimes against humanity.
“An anniversary which, in a historical moment like the one we are living in, with Europe and the world tormented by wars and intolerance, takes on a value that is not only symbolic - comments the President of the City Council, Elena Buscemi -. Unfortunately, we still have a great need for the Righteous who inspire society towards a development of peace, respect and tolerance. The life and struggles of the new Righteous who will be enrolled in March in the garden of Monte Stella are examples of sacrifice in the name of freedom, truth and respect for peoples. They are certainly a further step in the construction of a shared and widespread memory of stories and values that can and must help us and help the new generations to form aware citizens and citizens. Memory and justice, like democracy and peace, are not points of arrival but paths that must be freed and widened every day so that more and more people can know them and follow them."
Gabriele Nissim, president of the Gariwo Foundation and vice-president of the Garden of the Righteous Association, explains the reflections that led the Assembly to propose these four figures as Righteous to be honoured: “On the twentieth anniversary of the Garden of the Righteous in Milan we want to send a strong and clear to the whole country: the example of the Righteous teaches us on the one hand to fight every day against hatred and the culture of contempt and the enemy, which often permeate public debate; on the other to defend the truth against the lies of totalitarianism and autocracies that still bloodied the world today. The invasion of Ukraine arises from a historical manipulation by Putin, who called into question the identity of an independent nation. For this reason, among the Righteous who will be honored on 6 March 2023 we remember the journalist Gareth Jones who denounced to the world the Holodomor, Stalin's extermination by starvation, which caused millions of victims in Ukraine in 1933. The honor is also of great importance which Milan gives to Hersch Lauterpacht, to whom we owe the first Charter of Human Rights in 1945 and the notion of Crime against humanity which was adopted in the Nuremberg trials. Added to them is the extraordinary figure of Alfreda Noncia Markowska, a Pole of Roma ethnicity who saved dozens of Jewish and Roma children and the Azerbaijani writer Akram Aylisli, persecuted and forced into silence for having tried in his country to put an end to the hatred towards the Armenians."
Below are short biographies of the Righteous, available in full on the Gariwo website.
Gareth Jones. Welsh journalist, he was the first to document the Holodomor, the starvation genocide perpetrated by the Soviet regime against the Ukrainian population in the years 1932 - 1933. He visited villages devastated by lack of food without any escort, entered areas that were then off limits to the eye international and wrote everything he saw. He also called a press conference in Berlin to denounce the brutal consequences of Stalin's policies but faced Western indifference and Soviet censorship until his mysterious death.
Alfreda Noncia Markowska. Polish woman of Roma origin originally from Stanisławów. During the Second World War all the members of her tribe, over 80 of which many were children, were exterminated by the Nazis and piled up in a mass grave within a few hours. From that day Noncia had a mission: wherever there was a massacre, of Roma or Jews, she approached and tried to bring as many children to safety as possible. In this way she saved over fifty.
Hersch Lauterpacht. Jurist born in Zolkev, today in Ukraine, to a Jewish family, he conceived and published an International Charter of Human Rights in 1945, a pioneering writing that supported the need for a treaty that protected fundamental human rights and which inspired the United Nations Charter signed in San Francisco in which the first explicit mention of “fundamental human rights” was made. Lauterpacht was the protagonist of the Nuremberg trials, where he fought to ensure that the urgency of protecting individuals within collective tragedies and of judging personal responsibilities in the face of inhuman orders emerged.
Akram Aylisli. Azerbaijani writer, his works have been translated all over the world. In 2013, after the publication of the novel Dreams of Stone, which talks about the pogroms carried out by Azeris against Armenians in Sumgait and Baku, Azerbaijani President Aliyev signed a presidential decree that stripped Aylisli of the title of “People's Writer”. His books were burned by the Azerbaijani intelligentsia, his son and wife were fired from their jobs, and a “bounty” of around $13.000 was promised for anyone who cut off his ear. In 2016 Aylisli was blocked at Baku airport where he was supposed to board for Venice. Since then he has lived in Baku in a sort of forced residence and cannot leave the country.
The Righteous of civil society
The Committee also approved the applications received by the Association for the Righteous reported by civil society. This year too, in fact, reports have arrived from citizens and the world of associations of exemplary figures whose stories will be remembered during the ceremonies for the Day of the Righteous.
They are: Don Girolamo Tagliaferro, Don Paolo Liggeri, Elvira and Ernesto Cattaneo together with Mother Superior Sister Teresa (aka Colomba Tamanza), Mussie Zerai, Lodovico Targetti, Luca Attanasio.
Their biographies are available on the Gariwo Foundation website.
For information and registration:
Forest of the Righteous Foundation – Gariwo Onlus
Press office: Joshua Evangelista - comunication@gariwo.net
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Updated: 26/10/2022