The fate of Hungary's Jews during the Holocaust stands out as particularly tragic. I characterize it as such, knowing that there were millions of Jewish tragedies throughout Hitler's Europe, simply because, for so much of the war, Hungary's Jews had an odd, protected status, albeit through a confluence of quirks, both historic and haphazard. But following the German defeat at...

NOCARA, Italy — During the 1970s and '80s, my parents spent considerable chunks of time in southern Italy, documenting local life in Nocara, a wind-swept Calabrian village that clings to the crest of a half-mile-high hill overlooking the Gulf of Taranto. My father, Jacob W. Gruber, was an anthropologist at Temple University, and was there to carry out an ethnographic...