Chuck Morse is joined by Enrico Lamet, author of "A Gift from the Enemy (A True Story of Escape in War-time Italy" to discuss his memoir of having lived as a Jew in Fascist Italy.
On March 12, 1938, the German army entered Vienna. Five days later, eight-year-old Eric Lamet and his mother, Jewish, escaped from Austria and crossed into Italy, beginning four years of exile in Ospedaletto in the Apennine Alps east of Naples, a village governed by a Fascist mayor. Scores of suspect foreigners, political activists, Jews, and other "potential enemies of the state" were required to remain within a certain area and to sign in daily at the local police station. Urban sophisticates, Lamet and his mother faced arduous adjustments to harsh new climes, new customs and cultures, and new languages--impenetrable dialects of the Italian mountain communities. But being interned in northern Italy saved their lives. Southern Italy was occupied by German troops, and the author and his mother probably would have been deported to Auschwitz. Wth 23 photographs, this book is the eleventh volume in the publisher's Religion, Theology, and the Holocaust series. George Cohen
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Review
A compelling story of World War II as seen through the eyes of an adventurous young boy during a period when his mother fears the Nazi hunt and is concerned about putting food on the table for her and her son.
Written from the perspective of a child of 7 to 11 years of age, this World War II memoir is unique in many ways. Growing up in Italy, away from his home in Vienna, the boy lives an adventurous life, unaware that the world is crumbling around him.