09/10/2026
Never forget your names!
Auschwitz registered them as prisoners 76483 and 76484. They were four and six years old. Their mother risked her life to repeat to them a single phrase: "Never forget your names."
Back on April 4, 1944, two little girls named Andra and Tatiana Bucci were dragged into the nightmare of Auschwitz-Birkenau alongside their family. Originally from Fiume, the young sisters had just been rounded up in Italy and held at the Risiera di San Sabba transit camp before being packed onto deportation trains.
The moment they tumbled onto the train platform at Birkenau, N**i guards immediately began sorting people. It was a terrifying split-second decision between life and death. Overseeing this process was Josef Mengele, the notorious doctor who treated prisoners like human guinea pigs.
Normally, kids as young as Andra and Tatiana were sent straight to the gas chambers because they were too small to work. But a random coincidence saved them. They were wearing matching winter coats, which tricked the guards into thinking they were identical twins. Even though Tatiana was two years older than Andra, that simple misunderstanding kept them alive.
Tragically, their grandmother Rosa and aunt Sonia were killed almost right away. The girls were tossed into the children's barracks, where every single day was a blur of freezing cold, starvation, pure terror, and endless roll calls. Being so little, they didn't fully grasp the evil around them; to them, this brutal existence just felt like normal life.
Their mother, Mira, was held in a different section of the camp, but she refused to let the N**is erase her daughters' humanity.
Night after night, she crept through the shadows toward the children's block, facing ex*****on if she got caught. She couldn't bring them meals or warm clothes. All she had were her words.
"Never forget your names," Mira whispered to them in the dark. "Say them every night. Andra Bucci. Tatiana Bucci."
She kept repeating it over and over. In a horrific place designed to strip people down to a set of inked digits, clinging to their real names was the only way to stay human.
Months dragged on in the camp.
As 1944 was coming to an end, a kindly woman in the barracks pulled the sisters aside to give them a life-saving warning. She explained that guards would soon come around asking if any kids wanted to go see their mothers.
"No matter what they say, do not move an inch," she warned them.
Andra and Tatiana trusted her and stayed completely still. Their six-year-old cousin, Sergio, was also standing nearby. Excited by the thought of finding his mom, he stepped forward.
The sisters watched him walk away. It was the last time they ever saw him. Sergio was shipped off to Germany with twenty other children and eventually murdered in a cellar in Hamburg.
When liberation day finally arrived on January 27, 1945, the N**i guards fled and Soviet soldiers marched into the camp.
Even then, the girls' long road home was just beginning.
After the war ended, they were moved to a shelter in Prague before being sent to Lingfield House in England, a sanctuary set up for young Holocaust survivors. For the first time in years, people cared for them, gave them real food, and let them play with toys again.
Then came a miracle.
Caregivers showed the young girls a faded wedding photograph.
It was a photo of their parents.
Against all odds, both Mira and their father Giovanni had survived the camps. They had spent months frantically searching for their missing daughters through the Red Cross. By December 1946, the girls were back in Italy, holding their parents again.
Putting their family back together wasn't easy. The little girls had completely forgotten how to speak Italian, spoke a mix of other languages, and could barely remember what their mother looked like. It took years of patience to heal and rebuild their bond.
For nearly half a century, Andra and Tatiana kept their painful memories private. Eventually, they chose to break their silence, traveling back to Auschwitz time after time to tell their story to thousands of young students.
Today, they are among the few survivors who remember the camp as children. The numbers 76483 and 76484 are still visible on their arms, marked there by the N**is. But their true identity is in the names their mother kept alive during those dark times.
Andra Bucci, Tatiana Bucci. They have held onto these names ever since.
We Are Human Angels
Authors
Awakening the Human Spirit
We are the authors of 'We Are Human Angels,' the book that has spread a new vision of the human experience and has been spontaneously translated into 14 languages by the readers.
We hope our writing sparks something in you!
