THE GARDEN OF THE RIGHTEOUS IN PADOVA/2

by David Monticelli

President Peace Culture!

English translation by Michela Moroni

....there were Ivanka Sukur, a woman who lost her husband during Sarajevo siege, during the Balkans war, and Elvis, the one year and a half old child (he’s now a young boy aged 17), who was rescued from certain death by Ivanka in 1993, in Bosnia-Herzegovina. There were also all the other personalities, of whom I will tell you later on.
The ceremony in honour of the Righteous was foreseen for Sunday morning, at around 11.30. But on Saturday, we agreed with Filippo Pittarello, who’s a member of Beppe Grillo’s staff, to make an interview for the blog, in front of the basilica of Saint Anthony of Padua. Therefore, around 10, we went “in front of the Saint” (as they say in Padua) and we made the interview, that will be issued in the next days on Beppe Grillo’s blog, the more visited site in Italy and the seventh more visited site in the world! http://www.beppegrillo.it/ .
At 11, we went to the Garden of the Righteous, which is in Via Forcellini. The site that hosts the Garden of the Righteous Worldwide borders on a bank. The Garden will continue along this bank and, following the natural course of the river Bacchiglione, it will reach the Adriatic Sea, creating a kind of Righteous Path. At the entrance of the Garden, there’s an iron wall, where this inscription stands out: “You can always say Yes or No”. On the other side of the road, the Internment Museum and the Unknown Prisoner Temple stand out. By the position of these two monuments, Padua wants to remember the victims of lagers and concentration camps on one hand and, on the other, people who, in the horror of genocides, have made a choice: they saved human lives instead of killing them, they said yes to non-violence and no to violence, they said yes to the courage and the dignity of good and no to the banality of evil.
(to be continued in the next episode)