Ulia at the Garden of the Righteous in Milan, on the Day of the Righteous 2018

Ulianova Radice, director of Gariwo and vice-president of the Association for the Garden of the Righteous in Milan, died in Milan on October 15, at the age of 64.

Philosopher, in the ‘80s a judicial secretary in the Court of Milan, where she dealt with the mafia trials: Epaminonda, Santapaola, the Catanesis. She deepened the intuitions of Giovanni Falcone on the money laundering and reports about this for a Swiss newspaper.

From this moment on she shared the cultural path of Gabriele Nissim, committed to investigating and supporting moral resistance against the Eastern European regimes, in contact with the protagonists of the Prague Spring, Charter 77, Solidarność, dissent in Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria. Hence the discovery of the rescue of Bulgarian Jews by the vice-president of the Bulgarian Parliament, Dimitar Peshev, the great theme of the Righteous, the meeting with Moshe Bejski in 1999.

"I had the immense pleasure and the honor to accompany him - Ulia remembered - during the visit to Rome in 2003, in the Parliament, to present the new book by Nissim Il tribunal del bene focused on the gratitude of a Jew saved by the famous Schindler’s list, who feels the deep duty of memory and makes it universal. A teacher for all of us ".

Gariwo story began with the meeting with Moshe Bejski: together with Gabriele Nissim, Pietro Kuciukian and Anna Maria Samuelli, Ulia founded our non-profit organization in 2001, with the aim of enhancing the stories of those who, during all the genocides and crimes against humanity, defended human rights, witnessed the truth against all denial, saved human life and dignity.

"I followed Gabriele in his stubbornness, I shared his desire to find a way, to affirm once again the values from which we started, in a concrete way, making them walk on the legs of reality. The Righteous are men and women who have assumed responsibility for the defense of human rights. They are an example for young people, the base of their "sentimental education" towards the world. We worked on the sense of memory, proposed the Gardens of the Righteous as symbolic places for its exercise, linking it to today’s challenges, from terrorism to epochal migrations that require non-obvious answers, but new solutions, high-profile inventions, first of all in politics. Europe is a cutting-edge project that risks being shipwrecked: alarming signals arrive in this regard. We have proposed the message of the Righteous as an antidote to the indifference and lack of responsibility, which political and civil society often manifest. We obtained from the European Parliament the establishment of a Day, March 6, to be dedicated to this message; the Italian Senate has definitively approved the law which makes March 6 also the Italian Day of the Righteous of the Humanity; more than a hundred Gardens of the Righteous were born in Italy and in Europe. We have built a cultural movement that is consolidating in depth, transversal and not ideological ".

With these words Ulia talked about her commitment with Gariwo in the book Che fine ha fatto il '68. Fu vera gloria? (Guerini e Associati, 2018, edited by Giovanni Cominelli).

She created Wefor, the 2009 project on the Virtual Gardens of the Righteous, aimed at schools. An instrument of dialogue with children tailored to them, supported by the European Union as an excellence project, which drove to the establishment of the European Day of the Righteous. Because young people have always been the main subjects of Ulia efforts and of the works carried by Gariwo and all those who, over the years, have worked with us on the theme of the Righteous.

Our commitment will be to continue with education, to transmit the values of freedom, democracy, dignity of the person, confrontation and civil coexistence, against the culture of hatred and enemy, totalitarianism and the discriminations.

Goodbye,Ulia.

We will say farewell to Ulia at the Garden of the Righteous in Milan on Friday October 19 at 10.30. The funeral parlor is open on October 16 and 17 from 10 to 18 in Via Amantea 3 in Milan.