On Nov. 9, 1943, 22-year-old Teresa Mattei watched a train full of fellow Florentines pull out of Santa Maria Novella Station, bound for Auschwitz. On the train was Teresa’s former classmate Lascan, who was arrested with her family, and another friend Uzielli, who, Teresa recalled, “had a voice like an angel.” Few could have imagined the grim reality of where the people on the train were going — but even the worst that Teresa and others at the time could fathom was horrific enough.

Teresa’s maternal grandmother had escaped a pogrom in Lithuania and moved to Italy decades earlier. In 1913, Teresa’s mother Clara married Ugo, who was not Jewish, and together they had seven children. Under Mussolini’s “Racial Laws” — which were modeled after Hitler’s and were instituted beginning in 1938 — her immediate family was considered Catholic and not Jewish.