Ginetta Sagan

Leonard and Ginetta Sagan

April 23, 1945, somewhere near Milan. Two "German soldiers" came to the boarded-up villa where "Topolino"--"Little Mouse"--was being interrogated, beaten and tortured. They bullied the Italian fascist guards into releasing her for further questioning, and yanked her into a waiting car.

"It was a beautiful night with a lot of stars. I thought, 'I shall never see another dawn,'" recalls Ginetta Sagan of Atherton.

It was only after the soldiers delivered her to a hospital and she was welcomed by the Mother Superior that the 20-year-old resistance fighter realized that she had been rescued by her friends in the underground. The "German soldiers" were Nazi deserters who performed the daring rescue and vanished.

(-Marion Softky, in the October 12, 1994 issue of "the Country Almanac," quoted with permission.)

Fifty years ago on April 23, Ginetta, the founder of Group 19, gained her liberation from the fascists. During the war, Ginetta worked with the Italian resistance, helping to publish an underground paper, carrying information to the Allies in Switzerland, and escorting fugitives to the Swiss border. She escorted more than 300 fugitives-Jews, anti-fascists, soldiers who deserted, and many others--across a barbed wire fence that separated Italy from Switzerland. In February 1945, Ginetta was caught, and like many prisoners that Amnesty works to free today, she was tortured and kept in a cold, black prison cell. One night, the door to her cell opened, and the jailer threw her a loaf of bread. Hungrily she tore open the loaf...to discover a matchbox nestled inside! In the box were some matches and a note. She lit a match and on the note read the single word, "Coraggio!" (Courage)

In 1967, Ginetta Sagan found herself in Washington D.C. with her husband, prominent physician Leonard Sagan. She joined one of only 18 Amnesty groups in the country. The following year, the Sagans moved to Atherton, California, and Ginetta set up the first AI group in Western United States. As Marion Softky describes in her Country Almanac article:

Ginetta's first publicity coup was to engineer a public concert in 1971, following a political coup in Greece. International superstars Joan Baez and Melina Mercouri drew an audience of 10,000 to the Greek Theate in Berkeley to raise money for political prisoners and refugees in the then-Greek dictatorship. Ginetta recalls the thrill of 10,000 fans screaming, "Free Greece! Free Greece!"

The next day the two performers joined a group on the Stanford campus, and Group 19, the local chapter of Amnesty International, was formed.

Ginetta and her band of Bay Area activists traveled to many towns and colleges throughout the nation, and within three years, established 75 new groups. In 1973, Ginetta and the local groups in the Bay Area worked to expose the truth behind the military coup in Chile. She became the first non-easterner to be elected to the board of directors of AIUSA. Also that year, she and a group of Bay Area AI supporters started Amnesty's premier direct mailing campaign. They also started the first newsletter for AIUSA, which they called "Matchbox" in honor of the matchbox that gave Ginetta inspiration and comfort in the prison.

To expand her work with Amnesty, Ginetta founded the Aurora Foundation, which seeks to document human rights abuses and funnel money to families of prisoners of conscience. Among other things, she and her team interviewed some 800 former prisoners in Vietnam, and the results were published in a gruesomely detailed report, "Violations of Human Rights in the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, April 30, 1975 to April 30, 1983." She and Aurora Foundation also worked on human rights in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. In 1987, while she was visiting Poland and working with Polish human rights activists, her suffered major injuries in an "accident" when the car she was riding in with a dissident leader suddenly lost its steering and rolled over.

Ginetta has received numerous honors for her human right work. She was elected the honory chair of AIUSA Board of Director; in 1996, she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom; and in 1994, AIUSA established a Ginetta Sagan Fund (GSF) to honor her. GSF will provide emergency support to organizations and individuals working to stop the torture and abuse of women and children at the hands of a government, army, police, political party, or opposition group, and will also educate people about human rights issues.

She passed away September 1, 2000.