One Good Thing
By Georgia Hunter (Pamela Dorman Books)

“She could carry the boy, but it would slow them down. He’s too heavy. She grips his small hand as they run….” Georgia Hunter’s One Good Thing begins with this desperate escape from the Nazis. The novel then takes readers back in time to 1940 in Ferrara, northern Italy, to the day Lili’s best friend, Esti, gives birth to her son, Theo.

Hunter’s first book, We Were the Lucky Ones—a best seller later adapted into a popular television miniseries—fictionalized her own family’s struggle to survive the Holocaust in Poland. In One Good Thing, Hunter shifts her focus to the story of Italy’s Jews during World War II.

Lili and Esti, two Jewish friends, meet at university. Lili is from Bologna; Esti and her husband, Niko, who is also Jewish, are from Greece. Although Italian dictator Benito Mussolini’s 1938 Manifesto of Race—a set of race laws similar to Germany’s infamous Nuremberg Laws—causes Lili to lose her part-time job at a newspaper and threatens Esti and Niko with expulsion should they lose their student visas, the friends still feel safe, convinced that everything will soon return to normal.

Two years later, life is unrecognizable. Niko has returned to Greece to try to save his parents. Self-confident and brave, Esti has joined the underground, forging fake Aryan papers for Jews. Lili, more fearful and timid, follows her friend, first to a shelter
for Jewish refugee children from Eastern Europe and then to Florence, where the forgery network operates.

The rest of the novel unfolds as a fast-paced tale of courage and resilience as the war escalates, with the Allies landing in the south of Italy while Germany invades from the north. After Esti is bedridden following an injury sustained during a raid, she implores Lili to flee south with Theo. “Please Lili,” she begs. “You have to do this for me.”

The arduous journey to Rome involves trains, bicycles and weeks on foot. Pretending to be Theo’s mother, Lili discovers within herself the bravery she had admired in Esti. She stands up to Germans at checkpoints, smuggles papers and even helps Thomas, an escaped American prisoner of war—perhaps opening her heart to love—while always protecting Theo, who begins to call her “Mama.” Indeed, one of the novel’s themes is the nature of “motherhood”—is it defined solely by blood, or is it shaped by sacrifice and devotion?

Although One Good Thing is a work of fiction, it fills a gap in English-language literature about Italy during the Holocaust. Hunter vividly portrays how Italian Jews navigated new restrictions in the early war years, even as other European Jews were being deported and murdered. In real life, Italian Jews were not deported to Auschwitz until 1943, primarily from northern Italy, as the Allies provided some protection in the south—hence Lili’s traumatic flight toward perceived safety.

The Italian setting also allows the novelist to explore the role of the Catholic Church in the Holocaust. As Lili flees south with Theo, she encounters a network of helpers, including many Catholic clergy who are portrayed as essential in saving Lili, Theo and other Italian Jews, though the Church itself remains silent. However, when Lili questions why the pope does not “publicly condemn the barbarity,” Hunter may be attributing 21st century sensibilities to her 1940s hero—perhaps influenced by recently opened Vatican archives that detail Pope Pius XII’s decision to remain silent, even as Vatican officials insisted that he did what he could to save Jewish lives.

During her desperate journey, Lili hears rumors of Nazi death camps and sees moments of brutal violence perpetrated by German soldiers and her own Italian countrymen.

“I imagine explaining this war to my late mother,” she says to Thomas, “telling her what’s going on around us…. She’d never believe me.”

That sentiment left this reader with a poignant and timely reminder of current world events.

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Elizabeth Edelglass is a fiction writer, poet and book reviewer living in Connecticut.