KCRA 3’s new documentary “Always Remember Your Name” follows one of the world's youngest Holocaust survivors, Andra Bucci, as she travels around the world to share her story with new generations of students.Andra and her sister Tatiana were 4 and 6 years old when the Nazis and Italian Fascists came to their home in Fiume, in what was then a northern Italian province, and took them, their mother, aunt, grandmother and cousin. They were loaded onto a cattle car and taken by train to the Auschwitz concentration camp complex in Poland. Andra Bucci now lives in the Sacramento area. Watch our documentary “Always Remember Your Name” here.According to Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center, 7,680 out of 44,500 Italian Jews were killed in the Holocaust. Shira Klein, chair of the history department at Chapman University, said there is a popular misconception about Italy’s treatment of the Jews during World War II. That "good Italian" myth, which she said is illustrated by the hit 1997 Italian movie “Life Is Beautiful,” is that Jews were “treated really well.”“Italians are shown as jolly and jovial,” she said. “Things weren’t all that rosy.” The reality is that Fascists, from Italian police to some everyday Italians, along with Nazi Germany bear some responsibility for the arrest and removal of Jews, Romani, Russians, gays and other people from Italy.Here is more to know about Italy’s role in the Holocaust. Italy passed a series of race laws before being invaded by Germany. Most Jews lived in ghettos until the late 19th century, but a “side effect” of unification that led to Italy becoming a nation was that Jews were granted equal rights, Klein said. On the eve of World War II, Jews made up a tenth of the population.Still, antisemitism still existed with “various tropes circulating that Jews were out to take over the world or too rich or too powerful or too liberal or too secular or too Bolshevik. All over Europe, you see the rise of modern anti-Semitism,” Klein said. “So when the racial laws kicked in it wasn’t such a huge leap of the imagination for Italians to join in and participate in the persecution of Jews,” she said. Benito Mussolini came to power in 1922 and his regime had racial theorists who would put together laws that aimed at Jews. The laws started in 1938 and were inspired by Germany’s Nuremberg race laws from three years earlier, Klein said. A racial census noting Jews’ names, addresses and family members was an early action taken by the Fascist regime. It would later play a role in rounding up community members in Italy. More race laws meant that Jews couldn’t go to the seaside, marry non-Jewish Italians, serve in public office or work in certain professions like banking, attend public schools and they were told what sized property they could own. The restrictions also included not being able to serve in the armed forces or employ non-Jewish workers. “By 1940, Jews could do very little in Italy,” Klein said. “They were really, really shocked.” In 1940, Fascist Italy joined the war on the side of the Axis and began to intern Jews in camps. More than 6,000 foreign Jews and 400 Italian Jews were put in concentration camps in Italy. The camps weren’t “an instrument of death, but it was yet another step along the way of persecuting the Jews before the Germans arrived” in 1943, Klein said.“The race laws and detention of thousands of foreign Jews and sending Jews to forced labor and denouncing Jews, all of those things happened by Italy with no German presence,” she said. Propaganda ramped up that depicted Jews as less than human. Jews would write in memoirs instances of being slapped in the street and their children being bullied, Klein said. Another phenomenon that happened was ordinary Italians making denunciations of their Jewish neighbors or co-workers by reporting a purported violation of a race law to the police. At the same time, outside of Italy, the government did protect Jews in Italian-controlled parts of France, Greece and Croatia from deportation. The silence of the VaticanAfter the Allies invaded Sicily in July 1943, Italy’s king ousted Mussolini and then agreed to an armistice on Sept. 3. That same day Germany invaded northern Italy and installed Mussolini as the head of the Italian Social Republic. Most Jews lived in Rome and northward, which was under the control of Nazi Germany. Upon arrival, Germany began to round up Jews, Klein said.On Oct. 16, 1943, German troops rounded more than 1,000 Jews from the Roman ghetto and deported them to Auschwitz. Only 16 survived. Noemi Di Segni is the president of the Union of Italian Jewish Communities. She said that Jews from the ghetto were brought into a military building before they were deported that was 100 steps from the Vatican. “Every family in Rome has a very clear remembrance of what happened on that day,” she said. “For two days the pope didn't say anything or ask to save the Jews. That's the silence of the church.”In 2020, Pope Francis opened up the archives of the pope at the time, Pius XII. According to the Vatican, more than 4,200 Jews were hidden in convents and monasteries and 160 in Vatican City during the war.The Associated Press reported that David Kertzer, an Italian Studies professor at Brown University, said the archives show the Vatican did work behind the scenes to save some Jews. However, officials were focused on those who had converted to Catholicism or were children of mixed-faith marriages. Of the 1,259 people arrested in the Roman ghetto raid, 250 were saved from deportation.Italians and Nazi Germans worked together to round up Jews Italians went on to serve a key role in the deportation of Jews to Nazi concentration and death camps.On Nov. 30, 1943, the Fascist regime issued Police Order No. 5, which put Italian police in charge of rounding up Jews, seizing their possessions and delivering the Jews to the Germans, Klein said. Germany's role was then to deport them to Auschwitz. “Italian police had an advantage because they had the census records and knew where they may try to escape from,” Klein said. Why Italy had a relatively high survival rate among its Jewish populationAccording to Yad Vashem, the fact that the Allies were already in parts of Italy and were advancing toward victory probably played a role in many Jews being able to find shelter with Italians. The Holocaust Remembrance Center has recognized hundreds of Italians as being “righteous among the nations.” Klein finds fault in the “founding myth of post-war Italy” being resistance and the "myth of the good Italian."“Italy was basically in a civil war,” she said.She argued that among the reasons Italy had a fairly high survival rate for Jews was because the chaos of the wartime allowed for some anonymity for Jews to hide. Another reason was that Switzerland, a neutral country, and the Alps were nearby. In contrast, Jews in Poland had no neutral country they could go to, she said. “I think there is still a tendency in Italy and really in the rest of the world to pin it all on the Germans,” Klein said. “To say the Germans were the ones who invented race laws in the first place, the Germans were the ones who deported Jews.” Di Segni agrees part of the blame and responsibility for the Holocaust is not just the collaboration between the Germans and the Fascists, but also the Italians who were “indifferent.”Italy has yet to apologize for its role in the Holocaust During a visit to the Jewish Ghetto in Krakow, Tatiana Bucci confronted the Italian minister of education for not taking responsibility. “Italy needs to admit that they were on the wrong side and she’s hoping that before she dies Italy would apologize to her and tell them we were on the wrong side,” said Sonia Edwards, translating for her aunt Tatiana. When asked if she thinks she will ever get that apology, she replied, “I don’t...I don’t know. I hope, but it’s very difficult to…I don’t know.” Bucci said she would like to get that apology before she dies.