In spare, beautifully translated language, Sonnino details her life in Genoa prior to 1938, when the racial laws went into effect.” —Publishers Weekly, Starred Review
“A moving account of a family caught up in the Shoah….An important contribution to Holocaust literature...Four illuminating essays bookend this slim memoir. David Denby acknowledges the ‘tinge of irritation and guilt' people often feel upon the publication of a Holocaust memoir, then brilliantly demonstrates why this one is necessary.” —Kirkus, Starred Review
“The uniquely devastating quality of this book comes from the Old World refinement embodied by Sonnino's parents and the systematic degradations their children see them endure. Sonnino also displays a propensity to dwell on human kindness.” —The New Yorker
“I have read any number of overwhelming and despairing works about the Holocaust, but I don't think I have ever read anything so simply structured, so clearly composed—so heartfelt a tragedy, especially from the pen of someone who never considered herself a writer—as the one that unfolds in this brief memoir.” —Robert Leiter, Jewish Exponent
“Our world of habit would suggest that little more can be said about the Nazi death camps and the horrors of the Final Solution. But a narrative with the dignity and concise elegant candor of This Has Happened is a pointed reminder that suffering is inescapably individual, unique, and present. Piera Sonnino's account of the terrible end of her family achieves a kind of classic starkness that makes it a living representation of human loss.” —W.S. Merwin, Pulitzer Prize winning poet, National Book Award winner for Migration
“Piera Sonnino wasn't supposed to survive and she didn't expect anyone to read about her family's, her community's and her people's suffering. Aiming only for truth, using only the most beautiful of language, she's created an accidental masterpiece. This Has Happened is a stunning gift by a remarkable woman from an intolerable era.” —Melvin Jules Bukiet, author of After, Strange Fire
“What can I say to make you read this book? That it is imperceptibly moving, encroachingly horrifying, utterly soul-wrenching? But you've heard that before, and won't believe me. Instead I will tell you this: reading this book is not at all like reading a book. Instead, it is like talking with a person, knowing a person, knowing an entire family—and then knowing, not through art but through life, what it means to lose everything, by knowing precisely what 'everything' is.” —Dara Horn, award-winning author of In The Image and The World To Come
“A rare, beautiful and movingly written book. The simplicity and honesty with which Sonnino conveys her family's experiences are gripping and heartbreaking. As a historical document, this book is particularly valuable in view of the fact that there are fewer records of the Holocaust experiences of Italian Jews than of most other European Jews. With the historical significance of this book comes an unobtrusive message of familial love and devotion, a message which will undoubtedly resonate for generations to come.” —Nechama Tec, Holocaust Scholar and Professor Emerita of Sociology, University of Connecticut in Stamford, and author of the National Jewish Book Award-winning Resiliance and Courage: Women Men and the Holocaust
“Consice, restrained, and tightly written, a look from the inside of the Holocaust out.” —Entertainment Weekly
Published after Sonnino's death in 1999, this haunting memoir recounts the story of her Italian Jewish family, including her parents and five siblings, who perished in the Holocaust. In spare, beautifully translated language, Sonnino details her life in Genoa prior to 1938, when the racial laws went into effect. Within a lower-middle-class environment, her parents and siblings were "lambs, good people, ready to suffer many wrongs rather than be stained by a single one, eager to make as little noise as possible and occupy the least space possible on this earth." In 1943, when the Germans arrived in Italy, the Sonninos hid in mountain villages, but were betrayed, arrested and, in 1944, sent to Auschwitz. The author's account of the last night they spent together is eloquent. Her parents and two of her brothers were killed in the gas chambers. Sonnino watched her sister, Bice, succumb to dysentery at the Braunschweig concentration camp after the two were incarcerated at the Bergen-Belsen camp. After the war the author spent five years in rehabilitation centers and sanitariums and returned to Genoa in 1950. She married, raised two children and penned this searing testimony for her family in 1960. B&w photos. (Nov.) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.
A moving account of a family caught up in the Shoah. In 1960, Italian Holocaust survivor Sonnino wrote a spare account of her experiences during World War II. Intended for her children, the manuscript stayed in her possession in a red leather binder; only in 2002, three years after her death, did her daughters permit its publication in an Italian newspaper. The author was one of six children in a Jewish family living in Genoa when the Germans swept through Italy in 1943 and 1944. She tells of the Sonninos' attempt to hide and their eventual deportation to Auschwitz, where her parents and five siblings all died. The book's most chilling passage comes early on. German-Jewish refugees flooded into Genoa in 1934, causing considerable economic hardship for those, like the author's family, who tried to help them. No more came after 1935, and the Italians assumed that things in Germany had improved. "The death struggle of the German Jews had begun," Sonnino writes, "and we were unaware of it." Four illuminating essays bookend this slim memoir. David Denby acknowledges the "tinge of irritation and guilt" people often feel upon the publication of a Holocaust memoir, then brilliantly demonstrates why this one is necessary. He comments helpfully on Sonnino's prose, noting that her writing becomes more terse and urgent as her narrative marches toward the camps. His arresting foreword is followed by a helpful sketch of the historical background from New Yorker editor Goldstein, who also crafted this wonderful English translation. An epilogue by Italian journalist Giacomo Papi describes how the manuscript came to light, and novelist Maria Doria Russell's provocative afterword explains why Italian Jewsfared relatively better than their brethren in the rest of Europe. An important contribution to Holocaust literature.
