On March 28, 1944, six-year-old Tatiana and her four-year-old sister Andra were roused from their sleep and arrested by German and Italian soldiers. With their grandmother, mother, aunt, and cousin, they were deported to Auschwitz, where Joseph Mengele performed deadly experiments on children. More than 230,000 children were deported to the camp, of whom only a few dozen survived.
Determined to keep track of her girls,
their mother Mira, whose barrack was on the other side of Birkenau, managed,
somehow, to visit them several times in the camp, each time repeating their
names and telling them to “always remember your name.” By keeping this promise
to their mother, the sisters were eventually reunited with their parents after
the war.
This book was first written in Italian,
when the sisters were already grandmothers; the English translation first came
out in 2022. The survivors’ journey after the war until the present, including
how this book came to be written, is very much a part of the story.
* * *
The sisters were born in Fiume, which was
in Italy when they were born but is today part of Croatia. The mother was from
a Russian Jewish family that had escaped the pogroms by fleeing to the Austro-Hungarian
Empire. The family was not observant, and only the grandmother, Nona Rosa, went
to the synagogue. In fact, Mira married a non-Jew. In 1938, Mira sought to save
herself and her children from the Italian racial laws by being baptized. That
might have helped a little with the Italians, but when Germany took over rule
of the northern parts of Italy, on September 8, 1943, their fate was sealed.
We must keep in mind that the sisters are
reconstructing their story after many years. They supplement what they remember
with what they have learned over the years from others.
“Our arrival is mostly noise. It’s April 4,
1944. Andra remembers the Judenrampe outside Birkenau, where the deportees were
forced to line up for selection. Although children are generally killed right
away, upon arrival, we escape the selection. Mamma keeps us close to her, and
with her we walk down the long street to the ‘sauna,’ the place where the few
deportees who will enter the camp are tattooed and disinfected before being
taken to the barracks.
“We are often asked why we were interned
and not killed immediately with our grandmother and aunt. Only a tiny, almost
insignificant percentage of children entered the camp. Even smaller is the
number of those who survived. We don’t have an unambiguous answer. Some say
it’s because they thought we were twins, which is plausible. In fact, we were
assigned to the barrack that housed the children, including twins, whom the
Nazis used for their experiments. More likely, we escaped immediate death
because we were children of a mixed marriage and not ‘pure Jews.’ We think our
mother emphasized that at every point, and it may have played a role.
“When the tattooing is over we are
separated from Mamma. We wear clothes that don’t belong to us and shoes that
are too big. We walk with a woman and enter our barrack, near the entrance to
the camp. A blockova, the barrack guard, is waiting for us. She’s probably
Polish and a prisoner herself. Ours was a kinderblock, Barrack number 1. In our
bunks there were no sheets, only an extremely thin mattress and a harsh, rough
blanket, which doesn’t protect us from the terrible cold we feel.
“Our memory of the 10 months we spent in
the camp is of an apparent normality. Of course, it was a normality that was
constructed only in our minds. Two little girls, alone in an unknown place,
with adults we’d never seen before. Every so often, an adult wearing a white
coat enters the barrack to take away some of us children. At the time, we knew
nothing about the medical experiments; all we saw was that some children went
away and didn’t come back.
“Cold is a constant sensation, food and
hunger are vague memories. We’re given a watery broth to eat, a sort of
tasteless minestrone. And then there is the constant smell of burning from the
chimneys that are almost always in operation. Only after a while do we
understand that we have to stay there because we’re Jewish.
“Death is everywhere around us. And yet,
strangely, we’re not afraid of it. We get used to this parallel reality. We are
always seeing the corpses of adults, but to us it seems ordinary. The idea of ‘going
out through the chimney’ seems normal to us. Someone must have explained it to
us, or maybe we heard it from the blockova.
“Near our barracks are barracks that house
only women. In one of them, the blockova loves to punish the prisoners. We
can’t say how many times we saw an orderly row of women, on their knees on the
gravel in a kind of courtyard, forced to hold two bricks in their raised hands.
It’s a terrible scene. This blockova, who is so cruel, behaves with odd
compassion toward us. Every so often she brings us something different to eat.
She’s taken a liking to us – we don’t know the reason.
“Mamma came to see us several times. Even
today we don’t know how she did it. Mamma must have bribed the blockovas, maybe
offering some objects that Aunt Gisella, forced to work in Kanada, managed to
steal. These are only hypotheses. She would arrive, hug us, kiss us, and the
first thing she did was to repeat our names to us. ‘Remember, your name is
Liliana Bucci, and your name is Andra Bucci.’ She did it with a purpose that we
understood only later. We didn’t have a roll call like the adults. (After
the war, we never spoke to Mamma about these episodes. Between us, was an
impenetrable, total silence.) One evening, Mamma informed us that she would not
be coming any more. The image of death was such that we were convinced that she
didn’t show up because she had died.
“One day, the blockova of the women’s
barrack, the one who seemed more kindly toward the two of us, told us that the
next day all of us children would be assembled and would be asked if we wanted
to see our mammas. The Germans would take 10 boys and 10 girls. We must not put
ourselves forward, she told us, for any reason; we must refuse the offer. She
didn’t add any explanation. We assured her that we would obey because Mamma
herself had told us that she wouldn’t come to see us anymore, and we
already believed that she was dead.
“The next day, they in fact assembled us
all outside the barrack. A man arrived; he wore a normal uniform rather than a
white coat. Maybe he was Dr. Kurt Heissmeyer himself, a Nazi doctor known for
performing experiments on human guinea pigs. He asked us the question we
expected. “Who wants to go and see Mamma?” The SS collected the 20 children who
had been so insidiously chosen and led them to the ramp; they were happy, they
didn’t cry.”
The story of these unfortunate children was
reconstructed sometime after the end of the war. Heissmeyer had gone back
to practicing as a doctor. He was eventually arrested and in 1966 went on
trial. This is what he testified at his trial: Twenty innocent children were
forced to undergo injections of tuberculosis bacilli and then the removal of
lymph nodes from their armpits. There are even photographs taken by the Nazis
to document the experiment. At the end of the experiment, all 20 were murdered
by hanging, during the night of April 20, 1945, in the basement of the Bullenhuser
Damm school in Hamburg.
Liberation
“It’s January 27, 1945. Russian trucks move
through the camp; we see them smiling. A soldier in a jeep stops in front of
us, he has a small wooden board on his knees on which he is cutting a piece of
salami. He looks at us, offers it to us. That, for us, is the liberation. After
liberation, we remember the train journey to Prague to an orphanage. We were
there for more than a year. We learned a new language, Czech. There was a total
lack of affection or sympathy.
“One day, all the children were asked, ‘Who
of you are Jewish?’ We stepped forward, and it was our salvation. What a
paradox. Being Jewish had caused us to suffer at the hands of the Nazis; now it
saved us. An English Jewish humanitarian organization brought us and other
Jewish children who had survived in various ways to England. Our destination
was Lingfield House, near London, in great and victorious England.
“At Lingfield we began to live again. There
we finally recovered our childhood. It’s a wonderful and indelible memory, one
of those memories that stays with you and makes you nostalgic. As we later
found out, the English country house belonged to Sir Benjamin Drange, an
English Jew who had kept a small wing of the building for himself and his family
and given the rest to the Jewish community to be used as a home for deported
children from all over Europe.
“Alice Goldberger, who had arrived in
England in 1939 from Berlin, was chosen to manage Linngfield House. Anna Freud,
the daughter of Sigmund and Martha Freud, who specialized in child psychology,
was the true guiding spirit. Between 1945 and 1957, Lingfield House took in
more than 700 children, helping them recover their sense of self and self
esteem.
“At Lingfield, we immediately felt loved.
The women who took care of us had a very clear idea of what we needed:
affection and empathy. In the first days, the assistants tried to get us to
talk and asked us to tell our stories. We repeated our names, as Mamma had
taught us to do at Birkenau, and we explained that we were Italian. Anna Freud
told us that we had to learn to speak in English, not in German.”
Home at Last
“One day, our time at Lingfield ended. In
September or October, 1946, Alice Goldberger called us to her office and showed
us some photographs, one in particular. It was our parents’ wedding photo that
we had kissed every night before going to bed in Fiume. She asked each of us, ‘Do
you know them?’ We both answered, ‘Yes, it’s Mamma and Papa.’ And she said, ‘They’re
alive. They’ve found you.’ We were overjoyed.
“As we were later told, Mamma had been
transferred from Birkenau to a subcamp of Buchenwald. And as we later
reconstructed it, the British Red Cross knew about our parents for a while
before they told us. They had to make sure our family was able to guarantee a
decent future for us.
“We made our journey to Italy by train. Our
arrival in Rome was traumatic. Besides Mamma waiting for us, there was an
enormous crowd. The news of our arrival had spread. All of these people wanted
to ask us if we had seen their child perhaps. We were overwhelmed and really
couldn’t say anything to anyone. It was so sad. Fiume was now part of
Yugoslavia, so we settled in Trieste.”
The girls’ father was a cook aboard a ship
and had been interned in South Africa at the start of the war. The girls had
had two grandmothers. The Jewish one, whom they were told was very religious,
was gassed upon arrival at Birkenau. Their Christian one was not in the least
warm or loving. She was not nice to them, and it was clear she never approved
of her son marrying a Jew. Nevertheless, this grandmother stayed with them in
their apartment, and they had to be nice to her. Before they were
arrested, none of the father’s Christian family lifted a finger to hide them.
When Momma returned to Italy, nobody
believed her about the camps, and no one wanted to hear about it. As the girls
grew up, their mother, wanting to protect them, refused to discuss the war
years. She wanted to have them move on, so the subject was always avoided. They
were often asked if the number on their arms was their telephone number, and they
would say yes.
“During
the years of our adolescence and youth, Judaism remained present in our family
in celebrations of the holidays. Every so often, Momma would tell us that it
was this or that holiday and describe how Nonna Rosa would celebrate it. At
Passover, for example, we ate only matzah. Maybe, for Mamma, celebrating these
holidays weren’t a religious decision so much as a way of remembering her
mother who was no longer there.
“Although Momma had been baptized and had
had us baptized as well, and we were not involved in the Jewish community, when
she died, we decided to bury her in the Jewish cemetery. Towards the end of her
life, she rejected Christianity and recovered her Judaism. Also, the two of us
had found a relationship with our history and our culture of origin.”
Postscript
Both sisters identified as Jews but they
had no Jewish education or any exposure to the Jewish religion. They married
non-Jews, as had their mother. Yet they opened up to their husbands and later
to their children, and even later to their grandchildren about the Holocaust.
What changed for them was getting a call to come to London in 1978 for the
episode of ‘This Is Your Life’ about Alice Goldberger and Lingfield House.
That opened Tatiana’s memory, and she began
to want to talk about her experiences. Also, she read about a fellow child
survivor whom she remembered from the camp and got in touch with him. This
opened up a flood gate. Tatiana took her children to Auschwitz. She started
speaking in schools.
“We made our first trip back to Auschwitz
in April, 1996. Returning to Poland was a difficult experience. Now mothers and
grandmothers ourselves, we understood better what our mother must have felt,
her courage, her determination, her love for us.” In 2004, the sisters went
again to Auschwitz with students on what is called the Viaggio della Memoria organized by the city of Rome. Since then, they
have gone with groups of Italian students a number of times.
The sisters did make one visit to Israel.
Their connection to the religion is not there, but their feeling of being
Jewish has strengthened over the years. They end the book with this statement:
“We dedicate this book to all the children of Auschwitz – to the few who, like
us, survived, and to the many who did not.”
Final Thoughts
“There but for the grace of G-d go I.” Yes,
we are also survivors. We are the ones who have built our lives around Jewish
practices and beliefs, but these two little girls, now two elderly widows, are
our flesh and blood. Their family’s journey from the Pale of Settlement
led them to Italy, while ours kept on going to the New World. They have a spark
in them that connects them to the Jewish people, and they and their children
are Jews. Although their mother thought she was saving them by having them
baptized, they chose not to be Christians and, rather, proudly identify as
Jews. Their survival was a miracle, and they lived to embrace their
lineage. We don’t know what the generations may bring. Maybe someday, their
descendants will rediscover their religion also.
As we approach the holy Day of
Judgment, we remember that life and death are in
the hands of Hashem. Whether during the war years or in our time, the miracle of
survival is a mystery we cannot perceive. We can only pray that all be given
grace and live.
