Give Help Where it is Needed

One of the recurrent themes through A Thread of Grace is that if a person can help, he should help. This theme not only applies to the Italian Catholics' attitude toward the refugees, but also carries over into the partisans' attitudes. Claudia Blum, a Jewish partisan, carries this philosophy to her grave, not so much out of a sense of generosity but out of the knowledge that the suffering of human beings can only be relieved by the mercy and kindness of other human beings and the grace of God.

The Italians, and particularly the Catholics, live by this concept and because of it, manage to save more than forty thousand Jewish people from the Nazis. Even Werner Schramm, after seeing it illustrated repeatedly, adopts this philosophy and tries to help the injured. As a doctor, helping others was initially part of Schramm's...