Ginetta Sagan was born in
Milan, Italy, to a Catholic father and Jewish mother. Both of her parents were doctors. Her father was later shot in a staged "attempted escape", and her mother sent to
Auschwitz, where she was murdered. Ginetta, then seventeen years old, was already active in the resistance movement, delivering food coupons and clothing to Jews who were in hiding. Due to her energy and small size (she never grew to more than five feet tall), In late February 1945, Sagan was betrayed by an informer in the movement and, like her parents, arrested by the Black Brigades. During her 45 days of imprisonment, she was beaten, raped, and tortured, leading up to a scheduled April 23 execution. At one point, a jailer tossed her a loaf of bread that contained a matchbox with the word
coraggio ("courage") written inside, a moment which would motivate much of her later work on behalf of prisoners. On the day of her scheduled execution, she was being beaten by guards in a villa in
Sondrio, Italy, when a pair of German officers forced her Italian captors to release her into their custody. She later recalled watching the stars from the window of their car and thinking, "I will never see another dawn." However, the Germans revealed themselves to be Nazi defectors collaborating with her resistance comrades, and they delivered Sagan safely to a Catholic hospital. Sagan annually celebrated the date of April 23 for the rest of her life. ==Post-war life==