A Child al Confino: The True Story of a Jewish Boy and His Mother in Mussolini's Italy
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 family’s 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 mother’s 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