She examines the harrowing events surrounding the Rome roundup of Jews by the Nazis in October 1943 and the deafening silence of the pope. She then explores the efforts made by the church in Rome and northern Italy to assist those Jews who had managed to elude the Nazis. There is a good deal of fresh and often fascinating material here, drawn from local archives and from interviews by the author with survivors. Zuccotti's main point is to show that the many instances of Jews being sheltered or assisted by clerics were not due in any way to Pius. For all its scholarship, it feels driven by a remorseless desire to find wanting.
All historians make judgments, but their first duty is surely to try to understand.
Zuccotti condemns, but offers little new insight into why the Vatican and Pius acted as they did. Part of the problem lies with shortage of material. The only Vatican papers available for the war years are the 11 volumes published by the Vatican between 1965 and 1981. Accordingly, it is hard to gauge the complex interplay of political and moral considerations that necessarily informed papal actions. But even if more material becomes available, reconstructing the moral and emotional atmosphere out of which the genocidal atrocities of the war grew, as well as the silences of the pope, would be extremely hard.