From
Most accounts of Holocaust survival are centered on central or eastern Europe, in which the Nazi program of genocide was so explicit. Although Mussolini and his Fascist minions were not necessarily genocidal in intention, they were still virulently anti-Semitic as this engrossing and moving account reveals. Lamet was born in Vienna. When he was seven, his familyβs middle-class existence was shattered by the Nazi seizure of Austria. His father fled to Poland, where he presumably perished in a death camp. Lamet and his mother made a harrowing escape to Italy, where they spent months seeking refuge in various isolated mountain villages. They resided in a southern rural hamlet east of Naples until the Allied liberation in 1943. Lamet recounts his motherβs struggles to provide a secure home for her child while both attempt to adjust from their urban, relatively sophisticated background to life in what initially appears to be a bleak, primitive setting. This memoir will be an excellent addition to Holocaust collections. --Jay Freeman
Product Description
Eric Lamet was only seven years old when the Nazis invaded Vienna--and changed his life and the lives of all European Jews forever. Five days after Hitler marches, Eric Lamet and his parents flee for their lives. His father goes back to his native Poland--and never comes back. His mother hides out in Italy, on the run from place to place, taking her son deeper and deeper into the mountains to avoid capture.
In this remarkable feat of memory and imagination, Lamet recreates the Italy he knew from the perspective of the scared and lonely child he once was. We not only see the hardships and terrors faced by foreign Jews in Fascist Italy, but also the friends Eric makes and his mother's valiant efforts to make a home for him.
In a style as original as his story, the author vividly recalls a dark time yet imbues his recollections with humor, humanity, and wit. Very few Holocaust memoirs address the plight of Jews sent into internal exile in Mussolini's Italy. Lamet offers a rare and historically important portrait, one you will not soon forget.