Italian sisters Andra and Tatiana Bucci were two of about 50 children under the age of 8 to survive the Auschwitz concentration camp complex where 1.1 million people were killed during the Holocaust."By all rights, this book should not exist."The words in the foreword of the sisters' book are a poignant reminder of the unlikelihood of their survival. The Bucci sisters want to make sure the systematic killing of Jews during World War II is remembered clearly so that history would not be repeated. KCRA 3 worked for five years to share the Bucci sisters' story in a documentary, with the same title as their book, "Always Remember Your Name." Watch our documentary here. See the trailer in the video above. Below is how the sisters described their experiences.Early life in ItalyAndra and Tatiana grew up in Fiume. At the time of their birth, it was controlled by Italy, but it is now an area that is part of Croatia. Their mother was Jewish and their father was from a Catholic family. Because of that, the sisters said their paternal grandmother did not accept the union. Their mother was a seamstress and their father was a cook on a ship. He would stay in contact with his family through letters. In his travels, he was captured at the beginning of the Second World War, when the Italian ship he was on was in Johannesburg. He worked in the kitchen of a prison camp until he was freed in 1945.In 1938, the sisters and their mother were baptized, in an attempt to protect themselves from growing hostility toward the Jewish community. Their uncles lost jobs and their cousin had to leave public school. But their situation was about to become worse.In 1943, Fiume was incorporated into the area administered by the Reich. For months, the family tried to hide or find a safe place to go, but months later the sisters and their mother were captured.The night the Nazis came for them"It was sometime in the last two weeks of March 1944 that the Nazis burst into our house," the sisters wrote. "The first memory we have of that night is the noise, the shouts and the uproar coming from the room next to the one where we sleep. Then Mamma enters our room, all out of breath, a clear image, carved into memory."Andra and Tatiana were only around the ages of 4 and 6. But some things are clear in their memory— a table set for a dinner that was never eaten, Andra recovering from chicken pox as they were forced out of their beds and their grandmother, Nonna Rosa, whom they had never seen cry, was on her knees weeping.Hours later, the sisters, along with their mother, grandmother, two aunts, uncle and cousin, were locked up in a cell in the Rice Mill of San Sabba. All eight of them were placed together in a narrow cell. "When we saw it again years later, it seemed impossible that the eight of us were locked in there," the sisters wrote.After a few days, the family was taken to the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration and extermination camp."The image of the train car that we are forced to board is very clear," the sisters wrote. "The people are motionless. We're all silent, there's no confusion but, rather, fear, the anxiety to know where we're going. It's a silence that isn't a silence."'Ghostly scene of chaos': Arriving at Auschwitz-BirkenauThe family's arrival at the death camp was a scene of "tremendous confusion." Officers were barking orders in German, families were split up and around them, the girls heard cries of fear.It's the last time they saw their Nonna Rosa and Aunt Sonia."Although children are generally killed right away, upon arrival, we escape the selection," the Bucci sisters wrote. "It's a crucial moment, destined to mark our young lives."They are not sure why they were spared the fate of most children—immediate death. One of their hypotheses is that officers might have thought they were twins, which were often the subject of experiments by the Nazis. The other possibility is the fact that they were children of mixed marriages and not "pure" Jews.With their mother, the girls were marched to what they call the 'Sauna.' There, they were stripped naked, their mother's head was shaved and they were disinfected. "We're standing with our feet wet, as if we're in a pool; people are crying because the disinfectant burns in the cuts left by shaving," the sisters wrote. "It's a true inferno of noises, of smells; you breathe fear in the air."Then, they received their tattoos. Andra was given the number 76483, while Tatiana was marked with the number 76484.They were then separated from their mother and taken to a barrack.'Normality of horror': Life in the death campThe sisters were kept in barracks for children, what they called a "kinderblock." Most of the children there were destined to be victims of experiments, Andra and Tatiana noted.The bunks had no sheets, a thin mattress and a rough blanket. The sisters said their experience was tempered by a sense of normality."It was a normality that was constructed only in our minds," they wrote. "Fear must have been inevitable. But in our memory, it was replaced by that sense of normality that children often create to defend themselves in the face of the most terrible events, the unexpected."They recalled only being given a watery broth to eat and constant cold.They also recalled some striking moments of terror."But fear erupts aggressively when, every so often, an adult wearing a white coat enters the barrack to take away some of us children," the sisters wrote. "All we saw was that some children went away and didn't come back. Those who were taken didn't return. That was very clear to us. And our fear became terror."The sisters also became very familiar with death."Death is everywhere around us. And yet, strangely, we're not afraid of it, and we quickly get used to this parallel reality," they wrote. "We are always seeing the corpses of adults. Bodies piled in a corner, heaped up in a barrack, transported by other prisoners. But to us it seems ordinary. We play around what Tati calls the 'pyramids of corpses': white, skeletal, striking."But through it all, they remembered their mother's love for them. They noted their mother risked a lot to keep track of them, in spite of the fact that adult prisoners had little to no freedom, sometimes called by the guards "corpses on vacation.""She would arrive, hug us, kiss us, and the first thing she did was repeat our names to us. She said: 'Remember, your name is Liliana Bucci.' 'Remember, your name is Andra Bucci.' She did it with a precise purpose," the sisters noted. "Our names were everything. Mamma wanted to keep us attached to our real life, the one outside of camp."In the case of Tatiana, her legal name was Liliana on documents, which her mother wanted to make sure she remembered in case they got separated. That came to pass one day when their mother told them she wouldn't be coming anymore. When she did not arrive the next evening, the sisters thought she had died. The sisters' cousin Sergio was also in the camp. One day, a "blockova," or the person in charge of supervising a barrack, warned the sisters that a German would ask the children if they wanted to see their mamma. The blockova told the girls not to put themselves forward. The sisters warned their cousin, but it was in vain. The next day, an official camp to the children and asked if any of them wanted to go and see their mamma. Sergio stepped forward. He and the other children who stepped forward were taken to a train car. It was the last time the sisters saw their cousin.It wasn't until the 1980s that two German journalists helped uncover what exactly happened to Sergio. He and the other children were the subject of experiments in Hamburg and later murdered by hanging in April 1945.The sisters were eventually liberated on Jan. 27, 1945. They noted the memory is not very clear, but they first became aware something unusual was happening due to the unusual uniforms the soldiers coming in were wearing and because the soldiers were smiling. "A type of Jeep stops in front of us. A soldier is sitting on the hood. He wears a beret with a red star," the sisters wrote. "He has a small wooden board on his knees, on which he's cutting a piece of salami. He looks at us, offers it to us. A spontaneous, natural gesture, unthinkable in Birkenau. It's the two of us, our small prison companions, and this Russian soldier who offers us some salami. That, for us, is liberation."'Always Remember Your Name'Andra and Tatiana Bucci went on to survive and thrive. The two ended up in an orphanage in the United Kingdom, where they were treated by psychologists specializing in child trauma. One of those psychologists included the daughter of Sigmund Freud. After a couple of years, they reunited with their mother, thanks to their parents' wedding photograph.The sisters share more details of their ordeal, reunion with their mother and father and lives in their book, "Always Remember Your Name."Andra and Tatiana Bucci, now women with full lives in their 80s, regularly return to Italy, telling their story over and over again in order to make sure the memory stays alive.Andra lives in the Sacramento area. See coverage of top California stories here | Download our app | Subscribe to our morning newsletter