Renting a house in the Italian countryside and eating loads of pasta is about as blissful a vacation as they come. For the three Anati brothers, however, such a trip is a reminder of the horrors of the Holocaust. Yet the brothers — Bubi, 77; Andrea, 85; and Emmanuel, 88 — did just that in 2013, precisely with the aim of reconnecting with their past.

The Anatis were raised in an upper-class family in Florence. In 1942, just before the deportations of Florentine Jews to Auschwitz began, the family escaped the city. They fled from village to village and eventually settled in a forest near Villa a Sesta, a town some 50 miles from Florence. With the help of locals, their father dug a cave — and the family lived underground, literally, for several months during the winter of 1944 until the end of the war.