"... Born in 1907, Laura Capon came from a family of upper-middle-class Italian Jews. They were living in Rome when Benito Mussolini came to power in 1922; and when she and Enrico married in 1928. Laura, who had been studying science, enjoyed following her husband’s work and related breakthroughs in physics. She helped my grandfather write his first textbook. Five years of forced wartime secrecy from 1940–1945 temporarily broke the flow of discourse between them. She shared more about those details in Atoms in the Family, but my grandmother doesn’t mention how Hitler’s Holocaust robbed her of her father Augusto Capon, an admiral in the Italian Navy. Because of his position, my great-grandfather didn’t believe he was in danger, even when the situation under Mussolini continued to deteriorate. The elderly Admiral Capon refused an offer from Enrico’s older sister Maria to take shelter at her home outside of Rome along with some other Jews."