Something Beautiful Happened, Yvette Manessis Corporon
Something Beautiful Happened, Yvette Manessis Corporon
6 Rating(s)
List: $32.99 | Sale: $23.10
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Something Beautiful Happened
A Story of Survival and Courage in the Face of Evil

Author: Yvette Manessis Corporon

Narrator: Pam Turlow

Unabridged: 10 hr 12 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Oasis Audio

Published: 09/12/2017


Synopsis

Seventy years after her grandmother helped hide a Jewish family on a Greek island during World War II, a woman sets out to track down their descendants—and discovers a new way to understand tragedy, forgiveness, and the power of kindness.

Yvette Manessis Corporon grew up listening to her grandmother’s stories about how the people of the small Greek island Erikousa hid a Jewish family—a tailor named Savvas and his daughters—from the Nazis during World War II. Nearly 2,000 Jews from that area died in the concentration camps, but even though everyone on Erikousa knew Savvas and his family were hiding on the island, no one ever gave them up, and the family survived the war.

Years later, Yvette couldn’t get the story of the Jewish tailor out of her head. She decided to track down the man’s descendants—and eventually found them in Israel. Their tearful reunion was proof to her that evil doesn’t always win. But just days after she made the connection, her cousin’s child was gunned down in a parking lot in Kansas, a victim of a Neo-Nazi out to inflict as much harm as he could. Despite her best hopes, she was forced to confront the fact that seventy years after the Nazis were defeated, it was still happening today.

As Yvette and her family wrestled with the tragedy in their own lives, the lessons she learned from the survivors of the Holocaust helped her confront and make sense of the present.

In beautifully told interweaving storylines, the past and present come together in a nuanced, heartfelt story about the power of faith, the importance of kindness, and the courage to stand up for what’s right in the face of great evil.

About The Author

Yvette Manessis Corporon is a three-time Emmy Award–winning writer, author, and producer. Her debut novel, When The Cypress Whispers (Harper, 2014), has been translated into fourteen languages and was an international bestseller. She has received the Silurian Award for Excellence in Journalism and the New York City Council and Comptroller’s Award for Greek Heritage and Culture. Yvette lives in New York with her husband and two children.


Reviews

A lot of the literature of WWII focuses on the Holocaust as it took place in Germany and France and Poland for the most part, so I found this book fascinating because it dealt with an aspect that I knew little about - the story of how some Jews in Greece were hidden and saved during the war by some......more

Goodreads review by Clif

A holocaust story and a recent hate crime, two events separated by seventy years and apparently unrelated to each other except for the fact that they involved members of the author’s extended family. These events anchor this memoir to provide optimistic life lessons by honoring the good that can gro......more

Goodreads review by Kate

I picked up this book because I’m currently working on a novel set in Greece during World War II, and am interested in reading more stories about that terrible time. Yvette Manessis Corporon grew up listening to the story of how her grandparents helped save the lives of a Jewish family on their smal......more