Priest and benefactor

On 30th April 1895 Don Biagio Marabotto, priest and benefactor, was born in Sanremo from Filippo and Gabriella Cassano. Belonging to the Congregation of Divine Providence, during the last world war, he did his best with praiseworthy spirit of sacrifice and living Christian charity to alleviate the sufferings of many sick, elderly, Jews and Italian soldiers interned in Nazi concentration camps in Poland.
In 1912 he met Don Luigi Orione in Sanremo, who, having learned of his desire to become a priest, convinced him to move to Tortona to study theology there. After taking part in the First World War, during which he suffered a serious illness and was forced into heavy imprisonment, in 1920 he was ordained a priest and entered the Congregation of Divine Providence.

In 1925 Don Orione decided to send him to Poland to establish new branches of his congregation there. In fifteen years of intense pastoral and organisational activity, he made a substantial contribution to the increase in the number of religious in the Orione Congregation in Poland, where he worked hard to spread the most genuine spiritual message of Don Orione.

After the return to Rome of the apostolic nuncio Monsignor Filippo Cortesi, not liked by the German occupier, the Matutian priest became a valuable source of information and communication with the Vatican sending means and aid for the clergy in difficulty in the country torn apart by the conflict and the Nazi occupation. Later he began to take care of the numerous bishops and priests interned in Nazi concentration camps, including many members of his congregation. Among these he was particularly interested in the fate of the Polish priest Fr Francesco Drzewiecki, who, after coming to Italy very young and meeting Fr Orione, had then returned to his native country. Here, however, he ended up in the shirts of the SS, who locked him up first in the Lad camp and then in the Dachau camp.

Don Marabotto did not fail to help him in every way in both Lad and Dachau, at the price of tremendous hardship and serious risks, but in the end the Polish priest, after inhuman suffering, was eliminated on 13 September 1943 during a transfer from the camp of Dachau. In the same year Don Marabotto also fought for the successful outcome of the negotiations then underway in Sanremo for the transfer of the premises of the former Mauritian Hospital to the Opera Don Orione, which would eventually obtain ownership by inaugurating the Sanremo headquarters of Don Orione's Piccolo Cottolengo on 12 March.

In the meantime, in the tormented Poland, during the last years of the war, he continued to do his utmost to cure a great number of sick, young and old people from many nations, including numerous Jews and Italian Armir soldiers, who had been displaced after the tragic events of the Russian campaign.

A typhus epidemic spread in Warsaw, contracted the disease and perished in the Polish capital on 5 May 1945.

(source: Sanremonews : Dr. Andrea Gandolfo )