David Warburg, newly minted
director of the US War Refugee Board, arrives in Rome at war’s end, determined
to bring aid to the destitute European Jews streaming into the city. Marguerite
d’Erasmo, a French-Italian Red Cross worker with a shadowed past, is initially
Warburg’s guide to a complicated Rome; while a charismatic young American
Catholic priest, Monsignor Kevin Deane, seems equally committed to aiding
Italian Jews. But the city is a labyrinth of desperate fugitives, runaway
Nazis, Jewish resisters, and criminal Church figures. Marguerite, caught
between justice and revenge, is forced to play a double game. At the center of
the maze, Warburg discovers one of history’s great scandals—the Vatican
ratline, a clandestine escape route maintained by Church officials and
providing scores of Nazi war criminals with secret passage to Argentina. Warburg’s
disillusionment is complete when, turning to American intelligence officials,
he learns that the dark secret is not so secret, and that even those he trusts
may betray him.
James Carroll delivers an authoritative, stirring novel that
reckons powerfully with the postwar complexities of good and evil in the
Eternal City.
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