Gino Bartali had pedaled through the crowded streets of Florence, Italy, all his life. Then he began training to enter bicycle races. He cycled along the coast and up steep mountains. Over the span of eight years, Bartali pedaled in races all over Italy, earning trophies and first place ribbons. In 1938, Bartali won the biggest race in the world, the Tour de France. This made him a hero but Bartali considered himself just a cyclist.
In 1938, the world began to change in Italy and all over Europe. Eventually, all of Europe was at war. A dictator told that world that Jewish people were not human and must be rounded up and arrested. For Bartali, this idea was shocking since many of his friends were Jewish. His friends were good people and came from many walks of life. His good friend, Giacomo Goldenberg was Jewish. Bartali refused to believe this lie.
War soon came to Florence, Italy. Bartali watched as children were loaded onto trucks, and families were not allowed to work, perform in concerts or even live in their own homes. Bartali decided he had to do something to help these people.
Bartali was summoned by Archbishop Elia Dalla Costa. He was asked to help out by delivering special packages containing fake identity papers to people hiding in cities all across Italy. The new identity papers would allow these people in hiding to escape to neutral Switzerland.
Bartali hid the papers in the hollow bars of his bicycle and acted as a secret courier for the Italian resistance. But he also acted as a distraction at the local train station, allowing the resistance to place Jewish families onto train cars heading south out of Italy to freedom.
When Bartali learned that the soldiers were searching for his friend, Giacomo and his family, he decided to hide them in his basement. Eventually Bartali was drafted into the Italian militia, meaning he would be working for the enemy. But he used this opportunity to find where prisoners were being hidden. One time he entered the Villa la Selva and walked out with forty-nine English soldiers.
By 1944, Italy was being bombed and his beautiful Florence was a battle zone. But eventually the enemy were defeated, the Goldbergs were free along with the rest of Italy.
Discussion
Few people have heard of Gino Bartali and his work to help the Jewish people in Italy during World War II. That's because Bartali did not believe in speaking about his actions. He felt such heroic actions should remain secret. Bartali told his son Andrea many years later, "...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." It was due to this attitude that the truth of Bartali's work during the Second World War remained a secret until 2010.
Bartali was born in Ponte a Ema, a small village south of Florence, in 1914. He was the third child in the Bartali family, having two older sisters Anita and Natalina and a younger brother Giulio. When he was eleven years old, Bartali purchased his first bike as a means of transportation to middle school in Florence. Soon he developed a passion for cycling and won his first race at the age of seventeen.
In 1935, at the age of twenty-one, Bartali turned professional and won the Giro d'Italia, a multiple stage bicycle race held in Italy in 1936 and again in 1937. Bartali almost gave up cycling when his brother Guilio was killed in a cycling accident in 1936. In 1940, Bartali was married to Adriana Bani, in a ceremony celebrated by family friend, Cardinal Dalla Costa.
When Bartali won the 1938 Tour de France, he did not dedicate his win to Italian dictator and fascist, Benito Mussolini who believed that the Jews were an inferior race. That year saw the Fascist Grand Council approve measures that stripped Italian Jews of many of the civil rights. In 1940, Italy in alliance with Germany, declared war on France and England.
Bartali was able to avoid serving as a soldier with the Italian army due to an irregular heartbeat and was assigned to be a messenger. In 1943, Cardinal Dalla Costa, who had been hiding many Jewish refugees in his residence, reached out to Bartali with a plan: he would act as a courier bringing false identity papers and photos to Jews in hiding. The papers would be hidden in his bike frame and his training along Italy's roads provided the perfect cover for this.
As the war continued and Italy became the battleground between the Germans and the Allies, races were cancelled and Bartali could no longer use his training as a disguise for his resistance activities. He was taken in for questioning, but was freed when his army commander vouched for him. After the war, Bartali continued racing and won the Tour de France once again in 1948. He retired from racing at the age of forty.
Hoyt's picture book describes all of the most important aspects of Gino Bartali's life to the end of World War II including the contributions he made to the Italian resistance's work of hiding and saving Italian Jews. Strangely, Hoyt never mentions Hitler by name, instead calling him a "powerful leader" while German soldiers are labelled "enemy troops". Perhaps this is done to remind us that hatred and racism can come from any country.
The detailed, colourful illustrations, rendered in pencil and digital colour by Iacopo Bruno give life to the events described in Hoyt's text.
Bartali's Bicycle tells the remarkable story of Gino Bartali, famous cyclist, whose courage, and belief in helping others, led him to risk everything to do what was necessary and what was right.
Book Details:
Bartali's Bicycle by Megan Hoyt
New York: HarperCollins Children's Books 2021
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