Tatiana and Andra Bucci, ages six and four were sent to Auschwitz-Birkenou on March 28, 1944, where they were in a barracks for children who would be eventually be subjects for the Nazis deranged experiments.

Ordinarily children were gassed and cremated when they arrived at Auschwitz. 230,000 children from all over Europe passed through Auschwitz, and only about fifty survived. Tatiana and Andra surmise they were chosen to survive because they looked like twins, primary subjects for Dr. Mengele. Their mother also told the guards they were Catholics. In reality they were part Jewish on the mother’s side.

Surprisingly the children were allowed to play outside the barracks, but there was nothing to play with other than mud and pebbles. Tatiana and Andra also had a friend of sorts, one of the guards who gave them sweaters and told them that if the guards asked them if they wanted to see their mother, they should should say no. Twenty of these children answered in the affirmative, including their cousin Sergio who was sent to Hamburg where he was brutally tortured and hanged. All twenty of them were hanged.

Their mother Mira also managed to come and see them while they were at Birkenou until she was transferred. Once they were liberated and reunited with their parents Mira refused to tell the children what she had experienced preferring to look toward the future.

Before their parents found them Tatiana and Andra were sent to a school for refugee children at Lingfield, England run by Anna Freud, Sigmund’s daughter. According to the girls it was a wonderful place where they experience normalcy and learned English. Previously they spoke only
German and Czech.

The two only agreed to share their experiences once they were married and had their own children. Many Italians declined to admit that the concentration camps existed. Only time defused that mentality.