It is September 8, 1943, and Claudette Blum is learning Italian with a suitcase in her hand. She and her father are among the thousands of Jewish refugees scrambling over the Alps toward Italy, where they hope to be safe at last, now that the Italians have broken with Germany and made a separate peace with the Allies. The Blums will soon discover that Italy is anything but peaceful, as it becomes, overnight, an open battleground pitting against one another the Nazis, the Allies, resistance fighters, Jews in hiding, and ordinary Italians trying to survive. Set against this dramatic background, Russell traces the lives of a handful of fascinating characters - a charismatic Italian resistance leader, a Catholic priest, an Italian rabbi's family, a disillusioned German doctor - telling the little-known but true story of the Italian citizens who saved the lives of forty-three thousand Jews during the war.

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