Always Remember Your Name: A True Story of Family and Survival in Auschwitz

by Andra Bucci, Tatiana Bucci, Ann Goldstein (Translator)

Overview

*NOW WITH A DETAILED READING GROUP GUIDE*

A haunting WWII memoir of two sisters who survived Auschwitz that picks up where Anne Frank's Diary left off and gives voice to the children we lost.

On March 28, 1944, six-year-old Tati and her four-year-old sister Andra were roused from their sleep and arrested. Along with their mother, Mira, their aunt, and cousin Sergio, they were deported to Auschwitz.

Over 230,000 children were deported to the camp, where Josef Mengele, the Angel of Death, performed deadly experiments on them. Only a few dozen children survived, Tati and Andra among them.

Tati, Andra, and Sergio were separated from their mothers upon arrival. But Mira was determined to keep track of her girls. After being tattooed with their inmate numbers, she made them memorize her number and told them to “always remember your name.” In keeping this promise to their mother, the sisters were able to be reunited with their parents when WWII ended.

An unforgettable narrative of the power of sisterhood in the most extreme circumstances, and of how a mother’s love can overcome the most impossible odds, the Bucci sisters' memoir is a timely reminder that separating families is an inexcusable evil.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781662600715
Publisher:	Astra Publishing House
Publication date:	01/18/2022
Pages:	190
Sales rank:	266,154
Product dimensions:	5.80(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Andra (b. 1939) and Tatiana Bucci (b. 1937) were born in Fiume, the daughters of a Catholic father and Jewish mother. They were deported to Auschwitz along with their mother, grandmother, aunt and a cousin. When the camp was liberated in 1945 they were sent first to Czechoslovakia and later to the UK where their parents finally tracked them down. They were reunited with their parents in 1946. Today, they bear witness in schools and at the camps.

Table of Contents

Translator's Note Ann Goldstein ix

Foreword Ruth Franklin xix

Map xxvi

A Story That Comes From Far Away 1

The Normality of Horror 27

The Long Road of Return 65

Afterword: A Journey into the Past Century Umberto Gentiloni Silveri 151

Acknowledgments 163

About the Authors 165

About the Translator 167

Reading Group Guide 169

Editorial Reviews

"Always Remem­ber Your Name is a pow­er­ful, yet sim­ple, telling of a har­row­ing peri­od in two young girl’s lives. The Buc­ci sis­ters will stay with the read­er long after the book is closed."
—Rabbi Marc Katz, The Jewish Book Council

"Andra and Tatiana Bucci’s riveting memoir reveals the extraordinary courage of two little girls; their will to live, and the profound love of their mother, who was determined to keep them alive. Always Remember Your Name is heart-breaking and yet utterly uplifting, with the fierce bond of two sisters at its heart, who survived the Holocaust to bear witness, so that none of us will ever forget."
—Heather Morris, international bestselling author of The Tattooist of Auschwitz, Cilka’s Journey, and Three Sisters

"Written in the simple, direct language of witness and accompanied throughout by family photographs, this poignant story celebrates human resilience and warns readers living in an increasingly divided and chaotic world to beware the 'monsters' created by 'the sleep of reason.' Historically significant firsthand documentation from the 20th century’s darkest period."
— Kirkus

From the Publisher

08/01/2021

In March 1944, six-year-old Tati and her four-year-old sister, Andra, were deported from Italy to Auschwitz with their mother and their cousin, Sergio. They were among only a few dozen of 230,000-plus children who survived imprisonment there, uniting with their mother after the war because she made them memorize her tattoo number and told them to "always remember your name." To this day, they bear witness to the Holocaust in schools and at the camps. From promising new publisher Astra House, distributed by Penguin Random House.

Library Journal

2021-10-02
Two survivors of the Holocaust offer a dual-voiced account of their concentration camp experiences and their lives afterward.

The Bucci sisters spent their early lives in Fiume, an Italian city taken over by Croatia at the end of World War II. In this shared memoir, the authors bear witness to the nine months (April 1944 to January 1945) they spent at Auschwitz. They were 6 and 4 when they were first separated from their family. Their fate was unusual, since most children were killed on arrival. But as translator Goldstein speculates in her note, because they looked almost identical, they may have appealed to Josef Mengele, who experimented on twins. The Buccis attribute their survival in the camp to the unexpected kindness of an otherwise cruel female prison guard who gave them extra food and unexpected gifts. “We don’t know the reason,” write the authors, “but it’s precisely her care for us that later saved our lives.” After liberation, the two were sent for one year to Prague and then to a group home for child Holocaust survivors run by a woman who trained under child psychologist Anna Freud. The woman later found the girls’ parents, both of whom had survived imprisonment but in postwar years had been forced to move to Trieste to retain Italian citizenship. Their mother pushed them to “grow up as Catholics” to protect them from harm, but the girls held fast to Judaism. That decision formed the bedrock of the commitment they developed as older women to forgo forgetfulness of the past and tell their story. Written in the simple, direct language of witness and accompanied throughout by family photographs, this poignant story celebrates human resilience and warns readers living in an increasingly divided and chaotic world to beware the “monsters” created by “the sleep of reason.”

Historically significant firsthand documentation from the 20th century’s darkest period.

Kirkus Reviews