Odoardo Focherini (Servant of God)
Odoardo
Focherini, whose family came from Trentino, was born in Carpi the 6th of
June 1907.
He grew up in Carpi’s ecclesiastic reality, where he experienced the care
for the last and the concrete and real love for one’s neighbour.
In 1930 he married Maria Marchesi and between 1931 and 1943 they had seven beloved
children.
In 1934 he was employed by the Società Assicurazione Cattolica di Verona
(a catholic insurance company) as an agent for the Modena branch: later on he
became an inspector and carried out his duty in the areas of Modena, Bologna,
Verona till Pordenone.
In 1936 Odoardo Focherini became president of the Azione Cattolica and between
1930 and 1942 he was engaged in organising important diocesan happenings, the
eucharistic congresses, which deeply marked the religious and social life of
that time.
In 1939 he became managing director of L’ Avvenire d’ Italia, a catholic
newspaper whose head office was in Bologna.
In 1942 his activity in favour of the Jews started out: the first ones he saved
came from Poland on a train for injured people and arrived in Genoa, where
they were directed by Genoa’s cardinal to Raimondo Manzini, who was L’ Avvenire
d’Italia’s chairman.. Raimondo Manzini deeply trusted Odoardo Focherni
and asked him to help them.
His massive activity in favour of the persecuted Jews, however, began after the 8th of September 1943: after asking for and obtaining his wife’s support, Odoardo got in touch with reliable people who helped him in providing blank identity cards, filling them in with false data and taking the persecuted Jews to the Italy-Switzerland border.
Together with his trusted
friend Don Dante Sala, parish priest of San Martino Spino (MO) Odoardo
provided the first documents for his friend Giacomo of jewish origin and
his family. In a very short time the news about this possibility of escape
spread around and over 100 people turned to Focherini and Don Dante Sala
for help.
The men and women who met and got to know him during that time remember Odoardo
as always serene and smiling, even when people were waiting for him at home or
at work or at L’ Avvenire d’ Italia’s head office.
Odoardo was arrested at Carpi’s hospital the 11th of March 1944, when he
was organising Enrico Donati’s escape, the last Jew he was able to save.
The 13th of March he was taken to San Giovanni in Monte’s prison in Bologna,
where he stayed till the 5th of July. From Bologna he was moved to Fossoli’s
concentration camp: on the 4th of August Odoardo was sent to a labour camp near
Bolzano (Gries) and from there deported to Germany the 7th of September, first
to Flossenburg’s camp and finally to Hersbrueck.
A not healed wound on the left leg caused his death the 27th of December 1944.
The body of the letters Odoardo managed to send, both in clandestine way and
not, to his wife, his parents and his friends testify to these dreadful
months: thousand tricks to stay in touch with the loved ones, love letters to
a deeply loved wife, his obsessive thought on the children he knows to have left
in a difficult and uncertain situation.
Among the several acknowledgments he was awarded we would like to mention the Gold Metal of the Israelitic Communities (Milan 1955), the title of Righteous among the Nations (Jerusalem 1969) and the Gold Metal to Civil Merit (Rome 2007).
In 1996 the process of canonization began and is now in its Roman phase.