This Has Happened: An Italian Family in Auschwitz »

Piera Sonnino was deported to Auschwitz in 1944. She was later transferred to Bergen-Belsen and Braunschweig. The sole survivor of a family of eight, she returned to Italy in 1950. She died in 1999. Ann Goldstein is an editor at the New Yorker. She has translated works by Roberto Calasso, Alessandro Baricco, Pier Paolo Pasolini, and Aldo Buzzi. The recipient of the PEN Renato Poggioli Translation Award, she is the editor of the forthcoming collected works of Primo Levi. She lives in New York.

In the vein of Primo Levi's bestseller Survival in Auschwitz comes this rare and stark testimonial of an Italian woman who survived the Nazi concentration camps

The New Yorker

Sonnino’s story of her Genoese Jewish family’s deportation to Auschwitz was published by her daughters in 2002, in response to an Italian weekly’s call for readers’ memories. Born in 1922, Sonnino describes the family’s slow decline from middle-class respectability to “dignified poverty” (a situation that the 1938 racial laws made irreparable) and the proud isolation that forged a tight family unit, thereby making individual escapes inconceivable. The uniquely devastating quality of this book comes from the Old World refinement embodied by Sonnino’s parents and the systematic degradations their children see them endure. Sonnino also displays a propensity to dwell on human kindness. Although her family is betrayed by a fellow-Italian, she takes care to mention all who offer assistance along the way, even the elderly German woman who gives hot tea to her fainting sister.

Foreword by David Denby

• Translator's Note by Ann Goldstein

• This Has Happened

• Epilogue by Giacomo Papi

• Afterword by Mary Doria Russell

• Further Reading

• Reading Group Guide for This Has Happened