Something Beautiful Happened: A Story of Survival and Courage in the Face of Evil

by Yvette Manessis Corporon Narrated by Pam Turlow

Overview

Seventy years after her grandmother helped hide a Jewish family on a Greek island during World War II, a woman sets out to track down their descendants¿and discovers a new way to understand tragedy, forgiveness, and the power of kindness.

Yvette Manessis Corporon grew up listening to her grandmother's stories about how the people of the small Greek island Erikousa hid a Jewish family¿a tailor named Savvas and his daughters¿from the Nazis during World War II. Nearly 2,000 Jews from that area died in the concentration camps, but even though everyone on Erikousa knew Savvas and his family were hiding on the island, no one ever gave them up, and the family survived the war.

Years later, Yvette couldn't get the story of the Jewish tailor out of her head. She decided to track down the man's descendants¿and eventually found them in Israel. Their tearful reunion was proof to her that evil doesn't always win. But just days after she made the connection, her cousin's child was gunned down in a parking lot in Kansas, a victim of a Neo-Nazi out to inflict as much harm as he could. Despite her best hopes, she was forced to confront the fact that seventy years after the Nazis were defeated, it was still happening today.

As Yvette and her family wrestled with the tragedy in their own lives, the lessons she learned from the survivors of the Holocaust helped her confront and make sense of the present.

In beautifully told interweaving storylines, the past and present come together in a nuanced, heartfelt story about the power of faith, the importance of kindness, and the courage to stand up for what's right in the face of great evil.

Editorial Reviews

Roma Downey

"This beautifully written story will light the way through life’s darkest moments proving that kindness is the most powerful force of all."

Nicholas Gage

"Part thriller, part history, this meticulously researched memoir tells a searing story of human kindness in brutal times."

People.com

"Moving."

Kimberly McCreight

As heartwarming, as it is moving and thought-provoking, Something Beautiful Happened is part evocative and touching personal memoir, part insightful and uncompromising factual accounting, lending critical perspective on the ongoing fight against intolerance.

Karen Abbott

SOMETHING BEAUTIFUL HAPPENED is both an engrossing peek into a little-known chapter of World War II, and one family’s harrowing tale of finding the lost pieces of its own history. With impeccable research and rich detail, Yvette Manessis Corporon deftly intertwines these narratives to create a powerful and unforgettable memoir. I will be thinking about these characters for a long time to come.

Laura Schroff

This heart-warming story has so many amazing twists, turns and beautiful invisible thread connections which proves how there is more goodness and love in our world than evil.

Library Journal

10/15/2017
Part memoir, part history, this book starts off promisingly, with the rhetorical question: "How do you accept that tragic irony is a cruelty reserved not merely for Shakespearean plot twists?" Here, Corporon (When the Cypress Whispers) shares several worthy tales. The first is of her Greek grandmother's efforts, along with those of her island community, to save a Jewish tailor and his four daughters during the Nazi occupation of Erikousa during World War II. The second is the author's journey to connect with the survivors of that story after her grandmother's death. And finally, it's the present-day account of a senseless hate crime that results in the death of two beloved family members. Corporon, a senior producer for the TV show Extra, unfortunately tends toward repetition to the point of distraction. At times, the narrative reads more sensationalist than what it intends to be—an homage to the silent courage of a few when faced with overwhelming evil. VERDICT A heartfelt story that ultimately survives the shortcomings of its delivery.—SC

Kirkus Reviews

2017-07-03
Continuing a tale echoed fictionally in her When the Cypress Whispers (2014), Emmy Award-winning writer and producer Corporon relates a story of compassion and collective resistance during World War II, linking it to contemporary events.A small island near the larger Adriatic island of Corfu, Erikousa served as an unlikely refuge when, as Allied forces advanced, the Nazis rounded up Corfu's Jewish population and sent them by boat and train to Auschwitz. Perhaps 1 in 10 Jews survived, and that thanks to Christians who hid them away—often in plain sight, telling Jewish children to answer to Christian names: "From now on, your name is Nikos. Do you understand?" said one of the rescuers. "If the soldiers hear the name Daniel, they will know you are Jewish, and they will take you from us." In a place marked by the old blood libels and ethnic uneasiness, the act was nothing short of heroic. When the Allied soldiers finally arrived later in 1944, many of the remaining Jews began to disperse, finding homes in Palestine and other lands. It took the author years to connect her grandmother's occasional reminiscences with these larger events, and when, as an adult, she finally did, she began to retrace them, traveling to places such as Yad Vashem, Israel's Holocaust memorial, as well as Erikousa. Corporon's account can be a little by-the-numbers, a little too self-directed, and a little overly sentimental ("we hugged and we cried in a jumble of English, Greek, and Hebrew, but we understood each other perfectly"), but there is undeniable emotional power in the connections her story helps forge between the living and the dead, some of whom might be otherwise forgotten. The narrative gathers extra force when the author's nephew is killed by an anti-Semitic gunman in a well-publicized attack in America, prompting her to wonder how removed the Nazi past really is from our own time. Heartfelt and most effective when the author's lens moves from herself to the events beyond her.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940172187919
Publisher:	Oasis Audio
Publication date:	09/12/2017
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

Something Beautiful Happened
New York

April 13, 2014

It was 1 a.m. when I walked into Nico’s room. His back was to me, but he was still awake. I knew he would be. We all were.

Earlier that day we had gotten a call that didn’t seem real. It still doesn’t, and I imagine it never will. My 14-year-old nephew, Reat, and his grandfather, Bill, were dead.

Bill and Reat had gone to the Jewish Community Campus in Overland Park, Kansas, so Reat could attend a singing audition. They were shot and killed by a white supremacist neo-Nazi as they exited their car. The man who killed them shouted “Heil Hitler!” when he was arrested and said he wanted to know what it felt like to kill Jews before he died. He murdered three beautiful people that day, none of whom were Jewish.

I sat on the edge of Nico’s bed and reached my hand out to stroke his hair. My sweet nine-year-old boy rolled over to face me, his big brown eyes brimming with tears. And then he spoke, breaking my heart for the second time that day.

“I’m so sad, Mom,” Nico said. “I don’t understand. When you told me about our family and what they did, you told me the Nazis were gone and that the people were saved. How could this happen?”

Nico was right. I did tell him that the Nazis were gone. And I did tell him that the family was safe. I’d thought they were. But then I was branded a liar that day, our family’s history rewritten by a hate-filled man on a mission to kill Jews.

Nico knew the story as well as I did. Again and again I’d told him how during World War II, my Greek grandmother, my yia-yia, was one of a group of islanders who helped hide a Jewish tailor named Savvas and his family from the Nazis. Despite the risk, despite the danger, and despite the fact that they were told that anyone found helping Jews would be killed along with their entire families, not one person on our tiny Greek island gave up the secret of Savvas. Not one. Savvas and his girls were saved and they all survived.

For the past several years, Nico had witnessed my personal journey, my search to find Savvas’s family, the girls my yia-yia had risked everything for. After countless dead ends and disappointments, I had finally found them. They were a beautiful family, including five people who are alive today because of what happened on our tiny island 70 years ago. We had celebrated with the descendants of Savvas’s family. We celebrated and cried, because they had survived; goodness had prevailed and the Nazis were gone. That was on Thursday, April 10, 2014.

Three days later, on Sunday, April 13, 2014, we cried again, because Bill and Reat were dead and we realized that the Nazis weren’t really gone after all.

“I don’t understand,” Nico asked. “How could this happen?”

How do you accept that tragic irony is a cruelty reserved not merely for Shakespearean plot twists?

How do you admit to your son that monsters exist outside of fairy tales?

How do you explain to a child something you can’t understand yourself?

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