In 2020, in full lockdown, Renato Giara did not agree. For him, who had never missed a ceremony on April 25, the Liberation Day without participation was a great suffering. But yesterday there they were, he and his 97 years old, in the front row. Nickname Sorcio, Renato Giara is, with Luigino Malinverni, the last partisan of Vercelli. And at the end of the prayers in Piazza Camana everyone’s applause is for him, who talks with the mayor Andrea Corsaro, with those who do not give up a handshake to those who really did the Resistance, with a child brought to know history.
Before, after the tributes to the fallen in Piazza Cesare Battisti and in the park, Monsignor Mario Allolio, during the homily of the mass, was the first to recall the “dark hour” we are experiencing, with Ukraine “the victim of a brutal and lacerating armed aggression ». For this reason, “when the certainties that we all took for granted are in danger of disappearing, the memory of the sacrifice of the generations that preceded us must be testimony”.
A concept that was the common thread of all subsequent interventions, from the one heard by the mayor Corsaro, who retracing the moments of the liberation of Vercelli, as heard from the stories of the parents, invited us to remember and celebrate “a memory that must not divide but strengthen our democracy “, so that” the memory of those who gave their lives for freedom become a moment of awareness, an act of civil valor today that the world is in serious danger amid racist, nationalist and ideological delusions that they want to suppress that same freedom: for this we must not be silent, but protect the great privilege of living in a democracy ».
Even the president of the Province and mayor of Varallo Eraldo Botta spoke of “values that we, for whom the war is only a memory, must not take for granted”. The official oration entrusted to Giacomo Ferrari, president of the Anpi of Vercelli, opened with a “thought of gratitude not only to the fighting partisans, but to all the persecuted, arrested, confined, exiled, and to those who laid down their arms. life to the Constituent Assembly and our Constitution ». The partisans, soul and foundation of the Anpi, are appearing and “to us – Ferrari stated – remains the legacy of a memory that today must be dearer to us than ever, in the face of a trend towards revisionism that leads to same plan and therefore to make those different and opposite ideals and values that were at stake disappear ». What is the Anpi for today? “To preserve what the partisans have left us, to reopen spaces for discussion: we are politics, democracy and freedom must be built every day, combining thought and action. Today this is resisting, and there is no lack of challenges to face, from the energy crisis to the economic and climate crisis ». A speech that looks to the future. Fortunately, in the front row, there is still the living memory of the past to clap.