Parish priest and Clerk honoured as war heroes

FLORENCE, ITALY – A parish priest and a clerk were honoured Tuesday in Florence by Jerusalem’s Shoah institute for their efforts to help a young Jewish family escape Nazi-Fascist soldiers in 1943.

The “Righteous Among the Nations” award for martyrs and heroes of the Holocaust was given by the Yad Vashem organization to Don Ugo Corsini and Antonio Gigli who helped Guido Spiegel, his wife and two children when they were forced to flee Trieste in 1943.

The family, lost and exhausted, found shelter with the parish priest Corsini, who helped them to connect with Gigli. He, in turn, found false documents for the Spiegel family that allowed them to escape capture and likely death. In fact, Guido Spiegel later used his knowledge of the German language to work with Italian partisans in undermining the central command of the Nazi forces in Florence. After the Second World War, the Spiegel family returned to Trieste and eventually made their way to Israel.