This Has Happened: An Italian Family in Auschwitz - Hardcover

Sonnino, Piera

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1403975086 ISBN 13: 9781403975089

Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006

Synopsis

Ten years after her return home from the lager, Sonnino found the courage and the strength to tell the story of the extermination of her family by the Nazis'. Her account is strikingly accurate in bringing to life the methodical and relentless siege, from Mussolini's racial laws of 1938 to the final catastrophe of Auschwitz.

About this title

Review:

Runner-up in the 2006 National Jewish Book Award Biography Category

'A painful historical testimony, which achieves a genuine literary dimension in conveying the collapse of the narrator's identity at Auschwitz.' - Carlo Ginzburg, University of California, Los Angeles, USA

'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 and National Book Award winner

'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 has 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 and editor of Nothing Makes You Free

'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

'[Sonnino] is a true writer ... she refuses to give way to hatred or denunciation. In this reluctance, she is like her great compatriot Primo Levi. Her words, like his, have a force beyond any denunciation.' - David Denby, author of the bestselling memoirs Great Books andAmerican Sucker

'Heartbreaking ... [A] beautifully written memoir.' - Mary Doria Russell, bestselling author of The Sparrow and A Thread of Grace

'An important contribution to Holocaust literature.' - Kirkus Reviews

'A painful historical testimony, which achieves a genuine literary dimension in conveying the collapse of the narrator's identity at Auschwitz.' - Carlo Ginzburg, University of California, Los Angeles, USA

'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 and National Book Award winner

'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 has 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 and editor of Nothing Makes You Free

'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

'[Sonnino] is a true writer ... she refuses to give way to hatred or denunciation. In this reluctance, she is like her great compatriot Primo Levi. Her words, like his, have a force beyond any denunciation.' - David Denby, author of the bestselling memoirs Great Books and American Sucker

'Heartbreaking ... [A] beautifully written memoir.' - Mary Doria Russell, bestselling author of The Sparrow and A Thread of Grace

'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 experience 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 Resilience and Courage: Women, Men and the Holocaust.

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

Concise, restrained, and tightly written, a look from the inside of the Holocaust out. - Entertainment Weekly

'...a valuable addition to both Jewish and Italian historical and cultural studies.' - Elisabetta Nelsen, Shofar

Book Description:

In the vein of Primo Levi's bestseller Survival in Auschwitz the rare and stark testimonial of an Italian woman who survived the Nazi concentration camps

About this edition

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 1403975086
• ISBN 13: 9781403975089
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 224