A DATE WE SHOULD REMEMBER. A SPECIAL AWARD FOR ISTITUTO COMPRENSIVO TITO LUCREZIO CARO - 85° C.D. BERLINGIERI FOR THE VIII EDITION OF THE MEMORIAE PROJECT BY VALENZI FOUNDATION
05.02.2017 19:28
This year the international week to commemorate the Shoah victims gets a special meaning for our school. Many activities have been organized for January 27th, not to forget the genocide of six million Jews.
An important event makes this day really special for us: class III D of our Scuola Secondaria di Primo Grado has been awarded by Fondazione Valenzi - organizing the Memoriae Project. They have realized the graphic novel The Reasons of Memory: Irena Sendler. The Extraordinary Life of A Woman Who Saved 2500 Jewish Children From Extermination. Irena Sendler was a Polish Catholic nurse who risked her life to carry many children away from Warszaw ghetto.
Such graphic novel was realized last year during a cross curricular activity. Different kinds of expressive languages were used: the iconic language of drawing, the narrative language of the storyboard and ICT (a photo editing software). The students made such work under the guide of their Italian teacher, Mr Vincenzo Somma and of their Art teacher, Mrs Roberta Gragnaniello.
"We thought to make a graphic novel" - Mr Somma said - "because we would like to explain to kids and teenagers such a difficult subject as Shoah. All students became enthusiastic to take part in this work, after learning about Irena Sendler's extraordinary life. To this concern, we would like to remark a curious detail: Sendler's story was discovered just a few years ago, thanks to the researches made by some American university students.
Students were fascinated by Sendler’s story when they heard it from Mrs Suzana Glavas, a Croatian Language Professor at the Università L'Orientale and a member of Jewish Community here in Naples. On January 27th of last year she came to our school and met students. First they watched together the film The Book Thief, then she was interviewed by the young journalists of Carogiornalinonline staff.
Some days later the students went to the theatre and watched the drama Irena Sendler, The Third Mother of Warszaw Ghetto, directed by Roberto Giordano and taken from his book, supervised by Mrs Glavas.
At the conclusion of such itinerary students and teachers of class III D were invited on January 27th to Trianon Theatre in Naples by Mr Nico Pirozzi, the Manager of Memoriae Project. During this ceremony, witnesses and survivors of Nazism got an important award, the Star of David .
Other people were awarded the Stars of David for their merits, such as fighting criminality or doing their jobs responsibly: Marco De Paolis, State Military Prosecutor in Rome who took part in many trials against World War II Nazi criminals; the National Fire Brigade, for rescuing the populations of Centre Italy during recent earthquake; Dr Paolo Siani, in the memory of his brother Giancarlo, a journalist of the Neapolitan daily newspaper Il Mattino killed by Camorra on 23rd September 1985.
This is so because the Memoriae Project not only aims to keep the memory of Shoah, but also to revive the attention of people against all forms of racism or against cultural, social and political discriminations throughout Italy.
As a conclusion of all this, on 27th January students and teachers of class III D took part in the TV programme Buongiorno Regione at 7.30 a.m. on Rai Tre, the third channel of Italian public TV network.
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