Library's review
This book tells the story of Jewish refugees in northern Italy during the final months of World War II. The Nazi regime is in its death throes, but that only increases the urgency of the Jewish extermination it has been carrying out. What they weren't counting on was the warm-hearted Italians, who had lived in harmony with Jews for many decades. They bravely defied the orders of their Nazi occupiers and risked their own lives to hide as many Jews as possible among their farms, churches, and convents. Native Italian Jews, as well as Jews fleeing from the Nazi threat all over Europe, found sanctuary in the mountains and valleys of the Piedmont region.
This book is fiction, but much of it is based on true stories. And so you probably know going in that there won't be a lot of happy endings, even for those who survive the end of the war. But Russell never fails to slip some hope in among the despair, a thread of grace in the tapestry of pain that was created. This book, these characters, will stay with me for a long time.
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Description
It is September 8, 1943, and Claudette Blum is learning Italian with a suitcase in her hand. She and her father are among the thousands of Jewish refugees scrambling over the Alps toward Italy, where they hope to be safe at last, now that the Italians have broken with Germany and made a separate peace with the Allies. The Blums will soon discover that Italy is anything but peaceful, as it becomes, overnight, an open battleground pitting against one another the Nazis, the Allies, resistance fighters, Jews in hiding, and ordinary Italians trying to survive. Set against this dramatic background, Russell traces the lives of a handful of fascinating characters -- a charismatic Italian resistance leader, a Catholic priest, an Italian rabbi's family, a disillusioned German doctor -- telling the little-known but true story of the Italian citizens who saved the lives of forty-three thousand Jews during the war.… (more)