It took Mary Doria Russell five years of research to write her WWII novel A Thread of Grace. The book showed how the Italians took in and hid 45,000 Jews, resisted the Nazi's, and struggled to survive. The story was very compelling and interesting, but also very difficult to keep track of. There were many characters, and many characters who were the same person with two or three and sometimes more names. Each work on WWII that I read, I learn something new of the horrors and the humanity of that time. For each terrible crime people committed against each other, there were also those who risked everything they had to help others, just because it was the right thing to do. Those are the people who should be revered and honored. They could easily have turned their backs, but did not because they knew it would make them no better than the gestapo. Russell shows us in her book the risks the Jews took going over the Alps into Italy and the Italians that helped them along the way and hid them once there. Priests and Rabbis working together to defeat the Nazi's, which is beautiful.
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Jennifer Mcgillis
I have been working at the Morse Institute Library for 18 years, and running the Wednesday evening book group since February 2005. |