Holocaust survivor trains Italian teachers, voices anguish over AfD win and Gaza
Italian Holocaust survivor Tatiana Bucci trained teachers in Rome, sharing her Auschwitz experience and expressing pain over the AfD election win and Gaza children's suffering.
Rome, September 7, 2026 – One of Italy's last living Holocaust survivors met with teachers at Rome's Shoah Museum on Monday, offering her personal account of survival to help educators teach schoolchildren about the Nazi concentration camps.
Tatiana Bucci, who was sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau as a six-year-old along with her sister Andra and cousin Sergio, spoke during a training session for teachers. The Nazis mistakenly believed the young sisters were twins and placed them in the "Kinderblock" sector, where they were subjected to experiments by Josef Mengele. That error allowed them to survive, but their cousin Sergio died in another camp.
The sisters were liberated in 1945 and later reunited with their mother in Italy after a period in an orphanage. Their father and several other relatives did not survive.
In an interview, Bucci expressed her continuing grief over the loss of her cousin and family members. She also spoke of her distress at the recent electoral victory of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party in a state election. "It hurts, it hurts me a lot," she said, noting that she had hoped Germans had learned from their past.
Bucci also said that images of children in the Gaza Strip, playing amid the ruins of conflict, brought back painful memories of her own childhood in Birkenau, where she and her sister "played around the dead." She stressed the importance of remembering the Shoah, warning that once all survivors are gone, the memory must live on in the minds and hearts of the younger generations who have heard their testimony.