Lorenza Mazzetti, who as a child in Italy survived the wartime killings of her caretaker family by German soldiers and went on to help create an influential British film movement and write a prizewinning novel based on her experiences, died on Jan. 4 in Rome. She was 92.

The death was confirmed by her twin sister, Paola Mazzetti.

Ms. Mazzetti’s work spanned film, television, painting and book-writing; she even ran a popular puppet theater in Rome’s Campo de’ Fiori neighborhood in the 1980s. Her searing experience in World War II shaped her most acclaimed book, “Il Cielo Cade” (1961), a best seller that won Italy’s prestigious Viareggio Prize. It was published in English the next year as “The Sky Falls.”

As children, she and her sister were placed in the care of her aunt Cesarina Mazzetti and her husband, Roberto Einstein, a cousin of the physicist Albert Einstein. The cousins had grown up together in Germany. When Albert fled Germany in 1933, settling in the United States, Roberto remained in Italy, where he had gone to study and had started a family.

As the German army was retreating from Italy, soldiers searching for Roberto and seeking retaliation for Albert’s move to America came across the Einstein family villa near Florence. Roberto had already fled to the hills, but his wife and daughters, accused of being spies, were shot to death on Aug. 3, 1944.