Under His Very Windows: The Vatican and the Holocaust in Italy

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Under His Very Windows: The Vatican and the Holocaust in Italy describes what the Vatican did--or did not do--to help Jews in Italy in World War II. Author Susan Zuccotti, who has written two other books about the Holocaust, demonstrates that little help of any kind came from Popes Pius XI and XII or their senior officials. She finds that the most significant gestures of help offered by the Church to Jews in Italy were made by clerics and believers--mostly nuns, monks, and priests--uninvolved in top-level Vatican discussions. By 1942, the pope "knew and believed a great deal about the exterminations." In 1943, when Germans took control of northern and central Italy and attempted to exterminate the region's Jewish population, the Vatican knew very clearly the magnitude of the genocide. The Vatican's silence, Zuccotti argues, still resonates in the Church's statements about the Holocaust today. The Church has not yet completed the process of dealing honestly with its history during the Holocaust. It has not yet made clear whether popes and high Vatican officials are to be included among its sons and daughters in every age who sometimes committed regrettable errors. Zuccotti's research ranges wide, from the anti-Jewish tone of Jesuit publications in the years leading up to World War II to contemporary interviews with Holocaust survivors. Her book is a significant addition to a chapter of Christian history that the Church has still to reckon with. --Michael Joseph Gross


From Publishers Weekly
Even before WWII ended in Europe, defenders of Pius XII (Eugenio Pacelli), according to the author, were busy manufacturing a myth that the Holy Father directly and indirectly was responsible for saving the lives of "hundreds of thousands" of Jews. Coming both from Jews and Christians, these testimonials seemed to be proof that Pius XII personally intervened in the rescue of Jews from the Shoah, a view supported by the Jesuit Robert Graham, Sister Margherita Marchione, the Catholic League and the current pope, John Paul II.However, a recent spate of books, including John Cornwell's Hitler's Pope and Michael Phayer's The Catholic Church and the Holocaust, have severely damaged the claims of papal intervention. To definitively separate myth from reality, historian Zuccotti's new book, while hindered somewhat by the partial accessibility of Vatican archives to scholars, is an authoritative, balanced and, in the end, devastating indictment of moral failure on the part of the Church as an institution, despite the heroic acts of some of its members.Indeed, Zuccotti clearly delineates a history of anti-Semitism in Italy and the Vatican, including the policies of Pacelli's immediate predecessor, Pope Pius XI, who, despite his "hidden encyclical" denouncing racism, was, she says, publicly timid in the face of fascism and Nazism. Moreover, she maintains that her primary source, the 11-volume Actes et documents du Saint SiŠge relatifs … la seconde guerre mondiale, a collection selectively put together after the war by the handpicked representatives of the Vatican, is "more than adequate" to determine what the Vatican "actually did to help Jews in Italy, the country where they enjoyed the greatest opportunity to be useful." What emerges is a complex picture: According to this account, Pius XII was informed early on about the massacres taking place on the eastern front, but he publicly condemned neither Nazism nor the persecution of the Jews, nor did he provide refuge.Until scholars are permitted full and unfettered access to the archives, the story of the Vatican's actions during the Holocaust must remain incomplete. And until then, Zuccotti's treatise will stand for many as the the greatest access to the truth available. Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.


Paul Breines, Washington Post Book World
"Rigorously researched, judiciously argued and lucidly composed."


From Booklist
Much has been written chronicling the pernicious role of Pope Pius XII regarding the Jews during the Holocaust, most notably Walter Laqueuer's book The Terrible Secret (1980) and John Cornwell's Hitler's Pope (1999). In Zuccotti's devastating indictment of Pius, who was elected pope in March 1939, she draws on a wealth of documents, archival material, published memoirs, and personal interviews to explore such themes as the history of the Vatican and anti-Semitism, Italian anti-Jewish laws during the papacy of Pius XII, and the pope's personal knowledge of the treatment of the Jews. Zuccotti insists that the pope knew enough about the Jewish genocide to believe and understand that it was a disaster of immense, unprecedented proportions and should have acted vigorously. Her previous books include The Italians and the Holocaust: Persecution, Rescue, and Survival (1987) and The Holocaust, the French, and the Jews (1993); and like her other books, this one is meticulously researched, balanced, and free of bias. George Cohen
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Susan Zuccotti's solid work will be the standard by which other books will be judged.--(Arnold Ages, Chicago Jewish Star)  — Arnold Ages


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