Stuff of legend
After an idyllic childhood in Milan and the mountains of northern Italy, Ginetta lost both parents to the Nazis. She began to work for the Resistance. She put precious sugar into gas tanks, sought to identify boarded up "safe houses" where fascists tortured and killed prisoners, helped publish an underground newspaper, and carried information and money.
Nicknamed "Topolino" -- "Little Mouse," because she was so small -- Ginetta also guided fugitives to the Swiss border and safety, more than 300 of them, she later estimated.
Her luck ran out in February 1945 when she was betrayed, thrown into prison, and then interrogated, raped and tortured for three months.
Her Resistance friends did not forget her. One day a guard threw a loaf of bread into her cell. Inside was a matchbox scrawled with the word "coraggio" -- courage. On April 23, two German officers -- Nazi deserters working with the Resistance -- bullied her Italian fascist guards into releasing her for further questioning, and yanked her into a car.
"It was a beautiful night with a lot of stars. I thought, 'I shall never see another dawn.'" Ginetta recalled later.
After years of recuperating and studying in Europe -- she narrowly missed becoming a chef in Paris -- Ginetta came to study child development at the University of Chicago in 1951. There she met and married a young medical student, Leonard Sagan. They had three sons: Loring, Duncan and Pico.
Dr. Sagan's work on the long-term effects of exposure to atomic radiation took the couple to Nagasaki from 1961 to 1964, There Ginetta volunteered at a local orphanage, where she soon organized help for all orphanages in Nagasaki, bringing food, medical care, and building improvements to six orphanages.
Living in Washington in 1967, Ginetta became involved with Amnesty International, then based in Britain, and helped found Amnesty International USA.
After moving to Atherton in 1968, Ginetta helped build Amnesty International on the West Coast. She served two terms on the board of directors and was named Honorary Chair in 1994.
Mrs. Sagan's first publicity coup came in 1971 when she engineered a public concert featuring superstars Joan Baez of Woodside and Melina Mercouri of Greece. It drew 10,000 people to the Greek Theater in Berkeley to raise money for political prisoners and refugees in the then-Greek dictatorship.
The next day, the participants met at Stanford and founded Group 19, the local chapter of Amnesty International.
The first prisoner of conscience adopted by Group 19 was released after a deluge of letters. Christos Sartzetakis went on to become president of a free Greece; his story was told in Costa Gavras' popular movie, "Z."
Ever since then -- between orchids, food, and family -- Ginetta worked relentlessly for prisoners of conscience. Through her Aurora Foundation -- named after that dawn she did see in 1945 -- she has been a major source of support and communication for human rights workers in Vietnam, Chile, Poland, South Africa, Czechoslovakia,and elsewhere.
"She has been extraordinarily effective," said Vincent D'Andrea of Atherton, an emeritus professor of clinical psychiatry at Stanford. "She's bent the ear of every national leader in the world -- including the bad guys."
Ginetta's travels put her into some scary situations. In Poland in 1987, she suffered an "accident" when the car she was riding in rolled off the road. The steering had been tampered with.
In 1994, Amnesty International established the Ginetta Sagan Fund in her name to stop torture and help educate the world about human rights abuses, with special emphasis on abuses against women and children.
Ginetta has received many awards, including Italy's top honor in 1996. In 1998, she gave an invitational address at the Third International Human Rights Conference in Warsaw, Poland.
"Silence is complicity," Ginetta used to say. "If we remain silent when other people are mistreated, we become accomplices."
Dr. Leonard Sagan died in 1997. Ginetta is survived by her sons, Loring of San Francisco, Duncan of Fremont, and Pico of London; and six grandchildren.
The Ginetta Sagan Fund will organize a memorial service in October.
The family suggests donations to the Ginetta Sagan Fund of Amnesty International at 500 Sansome St., Suite 615, San Francisco, CA 94111.
