OURS PERLASCA

The cinema, the television, the press, has recalled to the memory and the acquaintance of we all, before the manufacturer Schindler and then the figure of Perlasca.
Little know, or at least they knew until some month makes, that also Gallarate has had a its Perlasca: FERNANDO TORREGIANI.

The debit of rewards towards this figure has been knit slid 5 December in Knows it Reached of the city one of Gallarate. Present the city authorities and the Councilman of Embassy of Israel sig. Tibor Schlosser, has been conferred the medal of Just gold 'between the Nations' to its memory.
That to continuation of the deliberation of the 4/3/2001 of the Institute for the Memory of the Martyrdoms and the Heroes of the Holocaust.
The event deserves of being cited and advertised, just in made relation to Hush of discretion that up to now the gesture of Torregiani had encircled. Gesture ignored also from who always has been careful observer of the local things.

After the Liberation, second a custom never sunsetted, several castled on the wagon of the winner, revenging true or presumed anti-fascist merits, but neither Torregiani neither others of its family, were made ahead for an acknowledgment, right, from part of the community.

Fernando Torregiani (1886-1967), been born to Milan and moved in youth to Gallarate, craftsman a lot appreciated, teaching in the public schools, was protagonist, in December 1943 of an episode that could have upset calm 'menage' the familiar one and expose to feracious reprisals.
One family of Italian Hebrew in escape from Ferrara: Nelda and Giulio Melli, the daughter Carmen with the husband Mario Rossi and gransons Anna (15 years) and Gianfranco (12 years), had tried to catch up the South occupied from ally to you. Failed the enterprise, it had been addressed from friends towards Fernando Torregiani who possessed one house to Marchirolo, to little kilometers from the Swiss border.
Torregiani joined without hesitation to the proposal to favor the expatriation of the Melli family that was uniform in three braces in order to facilitate of the escape.

All it went well for the grandfathers and the parents, not therefore for the boys who, catches in the nets of the nazifascisti, were delivered to the nuns of the House of S.Giuseppe of Varese with it obligation of one careful sorvoglianza. Torregiani was not given for won: with the aid of two patriots and the generous fiction of Madre Superiora, pretended a 'capturer' in full rule and could by now re-unite the young people to the familiar nucleus in but. She had been Anna Rossi, witness of those facts to the Gallarate's ceremony, to remember the telephone number of Torregiani signaling where it was withheld with the brother.

Periodic the catholic 'Light', then official organ of the Catholic Action, had published in maggio/giugno 1945 the episode in way, through the story of Don Sonzini (the name past year 'Varesino of the century').

Councilman of Embassy Schlosser, sure alluding to the archangel Gabriel who guides Tobia in the perilous travel, has defined Fernando Torregiani 'an angel' and has remembered that in Italy the percentage of the Hebrew escapes you to the holocaust thanks to these 'angels' is much high one, while in other nations to near we, is a paltry minority.
The name of these Angels is affected the Stele of honor in the Garden of the Just ones, near the YadVashem di Gerusalemme and it exhorts to us to hope that, also in times oxen, everyone meetings and knows to express the better energies of its mind.