Bettina was born in the USA of parents who migrated from Italy. In the summer she visited her grandmother in the Italian village of Campagna. Later she lived in Italy herself. She accidentally learned that that village had hidden Jews from the Germans during WW II but no one seemed to know about it. Her grandmother never mentioned it and when she asked people she knew about it, they too denied it had happened.

This book is the story of her search for the real story and when she found people who had been saved by Italians she collected and recorded their stories. She enlisted the assistance of the Catholic Church right up to meeting the Pope to recognize what the Italian people had done to save and protect 1000's of Jews from the German death camps.

She also wished to record before it was lost, the evidence that Italian internment camps were nothing like German concentration camps. Jews could marry, practice their religion and work under the table even though they were technically detained. Even police officers protected them by warning them of an impending raid by the German soldiers. This is a fascinating story that is well worth studying for it is part of the Holocaust history that is not well known. ( )

The book It Happened In Italy presents us with a wonderful and untold WWII story: the story of the Jews who survived, and actually didn't have that bad of a time, thanks to Italian Catholics who helped them hide and escape from the clutches of the Nazis.

The problem with this book is that it doesn't really tell this story.

Oh, we do get personal stories of survivors, and the clear difference between being in a camp in Italy and a camp anywhere else in Europe. (Many survivors said that living in a prison camp in Italy was like being in "a hotel"). As I said, it's a wonderful, upbeat story of WWII -- and a story we haven't heard before, which is a shame.

However, this book is mainly about the author, Elizabeth Bettina, and her experiences after she dug up this story and helped a few of the survivors go back to Italy to visit the people who helped them survive. And that's the problem with this book! It's only partly about those incidents during WWII. It's mostly about Elizabeth Bettina and the coincidences she encountered and good times she had.

When a book pertains to be about an incident during WWII, it should be about that, and not about someone finding out about that. I felt that instead of being titled It Happened in Italy, it should have been titled, "My Adventures In And Around What Happened In Italy." (Less succinct, but more precise.) In fact, this has been a problem with a number of recent non-fiction books I've read lately; they didn't need to be in first person, and in fact could have benefited by not being in first-person. She comes off as just a touch self-congratulatory. And because the book focuses on her, and she's presumably going to go on locating and helping survivors, it doesn't really have a big finish -- it just ends.

However, as I said, the book does make some good points and presents us with formerly untold stories; something any WWII buff would be interested to find out about. It IS important that these stories get told. I simply wish they had been told on their own. ( )

The book tells us the Holocaust story through a completely different view of the conventional history about Jews. We are used to read or hear about the Nazi fields in Germany then we are challenged to a really opposite reality. Jews in Italy are treated in a complete special way, far from stripped pajamas as prisoners and from the mistreats and punishment received in Holocaust. The author takes a familiar story and from point establishes a much more profound investigation about the Second World War survivors. Through interviews and researched documents a portrayal of an unexpected atmosphere of one of the most important events of the first half of last century is presented.

The text language is extremely accessible, with a nice presentation in and out of the book. The book, for introducing us new analysis of a history event established in a canonic view for historians, appears as a riveting, important source as well as theoretical foundation for present or future researches about the analyzed theme. So much the better because it is essentially constituted of veridical material. Photographs are another important resource used to recreate in fragments a piece of our history and taking us to the event portrayed in the book, where feelings and emotions in the survivors’ faces tell us more than words. I thank Thomas Nelson Publishers for the opportunity of reading this book as well as Elizabeth Bettina for the excellent book and research. ( )

All I can say about the book It happened in Italy by Elizabeth Bettina is WoW! I'm a WWII buff and this is one of those stories that no one has ever heard of until recently. Jewish concentration (detainment) camps in Italy during WWII and they have been described as a picnic in comparison to German camps.
The books starts off with Jimmy Gentry looking a photos of the camps. He is one of the American soldiers that liberated Dachau. "The first thing I notice about these people is that they're not wearing rags of striped clothes; the clothes these people are wearing are nice, like clothes the men wore back home in Franklin at the time. They're well dressed - jackets, ties. Not what I saw in Dachau, no ma'am. These people are fleshy, not like the walking dead I saw in Dachau. They look well-kept. Nothing like the ones I saw in Germany - with those eyes - people with haunting eyes." And thus starts the story of camps in Italy and the Italians who helped the Jews.
In Italy, most Italians believed Amare gli altri come te stesso - love thy neighbor as thyself. Most Italians hindered the Nazis in Italy and helped the Jews because they saw them as humans just like themselves. Appoxamately 75-80% of the Jewish population in Europe died but compare that to 75-80% of Jews living in Italy, survived the war.
This book documents the stories of 12 survivors but thru it, many more stories have surfaced (see www.elizabethbettina.com). Few people outside the remote areas of Italy where the camps were located, knew such camps existed. In these camps, the Jews were able to worship, have visits from family members who were in other places, wear their own clothes and not have to wear the star of David. The main requirements placed on them was to check in each day at the police station, not leave the village, they couldn't own land, couldn't officially work their profession (ie: doctor). An attempt was made to reunite families living in seperate camps - something unheard of in any German camp!
In 1943, Italy broke rank with Germany and joined the Allies and that is when the true problems for Jews in Italy began. The Jews in German occupied Northern and Central Italy were rounded up and deported to German camps - 1259 in Rome alone. However, the numbers could have been greater but the police who were given the orders to round them up, often ignored those orders, in turn warning the Jews to leave the area to avoid capture.
The stories of the survivors all have a theme in common: if it weren't for the Italians, I wouldn't be alive today! They expressed their gratitude for Italians constantly and many of them were able to return to Italy with Elizabeth to visit the places they once lived. Several were even able to meet with the Pope!
In the book, there are numerous photos of the survivors as they were then and as they are now as well as copies of some of their documentation that has survived the years. There is plenty more I could say but eventually, I would spoil the book for you so I will conclude. ( )

Elizabeth Bettina is an Italian-American Catholic who spent her childhood summers with relatives in Campagna, Italy. During one visit as an adult, she discovered that Jews had been interned in Campagna during the war. She was fascinated by this, wondered why it wasn't talked about, and proceeded to become deeply involved in finding people who had been interned, telling their story and taking them back to the places where they had been. This should have been an absolutely riveting book. It's not. It's dreadful.

I finished reading this book for one reason, and one reason only: I got it through the Amazon Vine™ program and owed them a review. I cannot count the number of times I wanted to throw it against the wall or gritted my teeth in frustration and irritation. It is one of the worst books I have ever read.

And that is sad. Because there is a story to be told here, a story about how and why some Italians helped their Jewish neighbors. But, oh lord, Bettina hasn't got a clue about how to tell it.

She cannot write a straight-forward narrative. She hops, skips and jumps all over the place, repeats herself, and talks about people who haven't been introduced yet. Her language is repetitious. Every phone call requires the recipient to sit down. Everything is a surprise, unbelieveable, "unimaginable". If she described a sindaco's (mayor's) badge of office as a "Miss America sash" one more time, I'd have screamed.

And that's another thing! She constantly throws in Italian words and phrases for no reason or any reason. It's bad enough when she's quoting, because why pick out a few words in the quotation to put in Italian and translate? But "[t]he people . . . took note of the two stranieri, foreigners." "I [was] imagining the fogli, pieces of paper . . ." It's not only annoying; it's pretentious.

Worse, it's all about her. Everything is presented through her reactions, how she felt, what she did. The survivors are mere stick figures. One has no sense of them as individuals. Even when she is quoting them (and she was taping and filming so the dialogue is presumably accurate), there is no emotion. I don't know if that's due to her editing or if she simply hasn't got a clue about interviewing people. (If you want to know how to do oral history, read Studs Terkel!) We barely meet the "good" Italians she is so proud of. But we get Bettina, ad nauseum, ad infinitum.

More disturbing to me was the substance of this book, or, should I say, its lack of substance. There is absolutely no attempt at any analysis of why Italy was different (if it was). (I compare this to another book I've read, Trudy Alexy's The Mezuzah in the Madonna's Foot: Marranos and other secret Jews, which at least tries to answer the perhaps unanswerable question: why did Fascist Spain open its borders to Jewish refugees from the Holocaust?) It seems as though it never occurs to Bettina to ask the question.

Nor does Bettina make any effort to contextualize her story. Look. I know that the concentration camps in Italy were not death camps. I know that conditions were better there than elsewhere (though to say that is rather like Berlusconi telling the survivors of the L'Aquila earthquake to treat the experience like a camping weekend). I know that some Italians did their best to save Jewish lives. And I know that this book is focused on a sliver of Holocaust history. But do not toss a glance at the racial laws, at the anti-Semitic policies that prevented Jews from attending school or practicing their professions, and act as though that was nothing. It wasn't nothing! Do not ignore the effect of the profound, historic anti-Semitism of the Catholic Church! Do not ignore the murder of 15% of Italy's Jewish population! Do not ignore the failure of the Pope to speak out! Acknowledge these things!