A musician of great talent, he graduated when he was only 15, winning a State prize from the Ministry of Education, thereafter beginning a musical career of successful concerts.
He was directly involved in the Villa Emma experience at Nonantola, where hundreds of Jewish orphans from Germany and the Balkans were finding shelter.
He procured false identity cards for the boys of Nonantola so they could emigrate to Switzerland and offered similar help to many others, including the priest Don Leto Casini and the entire clandestine DELASEM Committee of Florence.
I deem myself truly fortunate in having known him and to have collaborated with him in such a humane endeavour..."[2]Finzi was arrested on 31 March 1944, whilst going to the local hospital to pay for the stay of a sick Jewish boy.
Incarcerated in the Bologna jail of San Giovanni al Monte and subsequently in the Fossoli concentration camp, he was then transported in a sealed railway-car to Auschwitz-Birkenau in May 1944.