On Friday 15 May 2020, a group of students of UWC Adriatic organised an online event to launch a Garden of the Righteous in Duino where almost 200 students from 80 countries form the UWC Adriatic student community. The event was organised online due to coronavirus pandemic. The college in Duino is the first one within a network of 18 United World Colleges to join the Garden of the Righteous Worldwide (Gariwo) initiative.
In the presence of President Ambassador Cristina Ravaglia and the school head, William Turner, Gaia, Jördis and Laura – the three students who promoted this project – presented the initiative to the entire College community. During the event they read the names of the first ten Righteous chosen with their peers and showed an extract from the interview with the guest of honour of this event, Gabriele Nissim, President of Gariwo, who is also journalist, historian and essayist. Lina Attalah, co-founder and editor in chief of the independent Egyptian newsroom Mada Masr, also attended; she is a former student of the College of Duino as well as one of the ten Righteous chosen by the students of the College.
The garden is located in front of Villa Lucchese, one of the student residences in Duino, where there are about thirty olive trees. Rettore William Turner announced that a group of students will take care of its maintenance and of the promotion of similar initiatives at other UWC colleges during next academic year. The construction and inauguration of the garden has been postponed due to coronavirus pandemic. However, participants ended the event with the intention of meeting again as soon as possible next year, for the real inauguration at the college in Duino.
Nominations for the Garden of the Righteous in Villa Lucchese, Duino
| 1. Sophie Scholl | 2. Chico Mendes |
| Sophie was a German student and anti-Nazi political activist, active within the White Rose non-violent resistance group in Nazi Germany. She was convicted of high treason after having been found distributing anti-war leaflets at the University of Munich. As a result, she was executed by guillotine. Since the 1970s, Scholl has been extensively commemorated for her anti-Nazi resistance work. | A Brazilian seringueiro (rubber tree tapper), trade union leader and environmentalist, Chico Mendes fought to preserve the Amazon rainforest and advocated for the human rights of Brazilian peasants and indigenous peoples. His activism earned him recognition throughout Brazil but also provoked the hostility of local land-owners. He received death threats for years and was murdered on December 22nd in 1988, one week after his 44th birthday, when he had predicted he would “not live until Christmas”. |
| 3. Paolo Vittone | 4. Ilaria Alpi |
| Paolo was a trade unionist and a radio correspondent for Radio Popolare. He went to former Yugoslavia during Balkan War, Iran and Nepal as a war correspondent and also wrote about exploited workers in Pakistan, Thailand, the United Arab Emirates and in Italy. In the 1990s he volunteered as a humanitarian relief worker in the Balkans and stayed on in Bosnia after the war to contribute to the country’s reconstruction. When he discovered he had cancer he moved to Trieste, a city he loved because of its cultural and geographic ties to the Balkans and died there. | Ilaria was an Italian journalist killed in Somalia together with her camera operator Miran Hrovatin – a member of the Slovenian ethnic community in Trieste. At the time she was investigating on weapons and illegal toxic waste trafficking in the country. An outstanding investigative reporter, Ilaria was committed to finding and revealing the truth and paid with her life her commitment and dedication when she and Miran were killed by 7 men who ambushed their jeep in Mogadishu in 1994. |
| 5. Giuseppe (Peppino) Impastato | 6. Bruno Rustico |
| He was an Italian political activist who opposed the Mafia, although his own father was part of the organisation. He started a self-financed radio station called Radio Aut and used it to expose the crimes committed by the Mafia. Peppino then decided to stand for local elections with a left-wing party and during his campaign he was killed by the Mafia in 1978. | Bruno was a Prisoner of War during WWII and was brought to a German concentration camp in what was then Eastern Prussia (Königsberg). He and his fellow comrades managed to devise a plan to have 37 Jewish girls escape. He returned home when the camp was liberated by the Red Army. When he retired, Bruno decided to write down his wartime experience, describing the strong feeling of solidarity among his fellow soldiers. His memoirs revealed repeated efforts to to defend human dignity and of heroic gestures in everyday life aimed at opposing the gratuitous violence prisoners were subjected to. |
| 7. Zanis Lipke | 8. Nagham Nawzat Hasan |
| A dock worker in the port of Riga, Janis was determined to help save Latvian Jews from capture by the Nazis after witnessing actions against them in the streets. He retrained in order to become a contractor for the Luftwaffe and used his position to smuggle Jewish workers out of the Riga ghetto and camps in and around Riga. He concealed them with the aid of his wife Johana until the arrival of the Red Army in 1944. The Lipkes and their various helpers saved forty people in this way, one fifth of the approximately 200 Jews who survived the war in Latvia. | She is an Iraqi Yazidi gynecologist and midwife who was awarded an International Women of Courage Award in 2016 for “promoting gender equality and combatting gender-based violence”. She first came to notice in 2014 following the takeover of the town of Sinjar by Islamic State forces when the local Yazidi population were killed and young girls were taken into sexual slavery. Hasan realised the impact that this would have and she visited camps to offer counselling to those involved. She is still continuing her activity in the Women Survivors’ Center in Duhok. |
| 9. Halima Bashir | 10. Lina Attalah |
| Halima is a Sudanese doctor and author of Tears of the Desert, a memoir about women’s experiences with genocide and war in Darfur. She worked as a doctor in rural Sudan, before being abused at the hands of the National Intelligence and Security Service after reporting truthfully to United Nations officials about an attack by the Janjaweed militia on a nearby school. She has since moved to the United Kingdom, where she claimed asylum. | Lina Attalah is the co-founder and chief editor of Mada Masr, one of the very few reputable independent online newspapers in Egypt. She is a staunch supporter of freedom of speech and has been a journalist for over a decade, covering primarily Egypt and the region, including the Syrian revolution, the 2013 Iran presidential elections and the Darfur conflict in Sudan. Time magazine has recognized her as a “New Generation Leader”. Lina is a frequent public speaker and has been invited, amongst others, to address UNESCO’s World Press Freedom Day. |
UWC Adriatic Student organisers: Ebtsam Hamdy Abdelghani (Egypt), Gaia Tilotta (Italy), Laura Saliaj (Italy/Albania) and Jördis Jhon (Germany).
UWC Adriatic Students who have chosen and read the names: Azeez Khudeeda, Anselmo Scano, Laura Saliaj, Letizia Nada, Lira Zajmi, Lukas Marma, Maria Lua Pintor Duarte, Micky Jordaan, Muneba Jato, Nina Muller and Shubhashree Sathe.
