–El asilo contra la opresión it’s going to be called –Liliana explains– refuge from oppression, as in the last line of the Chilean national anthem. Chileans who are not members of the Jewish community will be interviewing Holocaust survivors who arrived and made their home here. It will be Chile’s tribute to the victims of the Holocaust. And we thought of you because we felt the idea would interest you, and we think you could do something very nice with it. We even know who we’d like you to interview.

–Of course, I reply, I’d be glad to accept the assignment. But there is a problem: I am leaving for New York at the end of the month and won’t be in Chile for the interview when she needs me to do it.

Silence at the other end of the phone line. A silence that lasts several moments.

–What if we do the interview for you?– Liliana suddenly proposes.

–What?

–You’d write the text. You’d put it all together. You see, we just think that you are the absolute perfect person to write about Agnes. What do you think?

What do I think? I think they’re crazy. To talk to this woman without talking to her? Interview her without interviewing her? It’s impossible, which is probably why I accept.

 Four months later, like a trafficker delivering a package of illegal substances, Liliana arrives at the Malibu Diner on West 23rd Street at the agreed-upon time and deposits in my hands a manila envelope containing a set of audio cassettes. We sit and talk for a while, so that she can tell me about some of Agnes’ identifying characteristics, so that when I write up the story I can pretend that I was actually with her.

–She’s very pretty, very charming, like a little girl. That’s why we picked her for you, because she has a sense of humor –explains Liliana, who actually did the work of interviewing Agnes in her house or was it an apartment? Which neighborhood was it? Las Condes? Vitacura? Providencia? I should ask, but I don’t.

As I start to listen to the recording, I imagine her in a large, comfortable, clean space, filled with tchotchkes, mementos, photographs, an abundance of silver pieces piled to overflowing on a large glass-topped table. I see light glinting off wine glasses and dinner plates, and little porcelain dolls poised just so on a special table reserved just for them. 

I envision all this because I was never there, and I have to envision something in order to situate myself and complete this strange assignment. I have to pretend that I was with her in her home, that I personally met Agnes Bineth, 90-year old Holocaust survivor, that this was a face-to-face meeting, though it is a nonexistent conversation that never happened and never will. In the tiny apartment on 24th Street where I live with my wife, on the 16th floor of a 20-story building, I look out of the window onto the Hudson River, and I have to transform the voice, barely audible to my ears, into a face-to-face interview and mentally eliminate the continent that lies between us now. Somehow, through her voice, I have to dream up a way to be there, with her, or spirit her to this place, to New York, where so many others came, running for their lives. How many people who survived the concentration camps ended up in this building, I wonder, how many of them stared as I do now, out the window at the boats traveling up and down the river. I think of Shadows on the Hudson, Isaac Bashevis Singer’s portrait of various lives rescued and resurrected from the concentration camps –exile, escape, Jews from Poland, Russia, Hungary, like Agnes Bineth, which seems to be pronounced, impossibly, something like “Weber,” according to Liliana.

“Charming,” “pretty,” “smiling.” I think of Liliana’s words as I focus on listening to the tiny tapes that contain Agnes’ voice in Spanish which, even after fifty years in Chile, still has a strong Central European accent. And so I have a hard time deciding whether or not I understand the things she says as she travels upstream through all the languages in which she has lived: German, Slovakian, Hungarian and odd bits of English.

“Six years we were Slovakia, six years we were Hungary,” she states, almost like a joke. That was how it was in Erzek-Yvár, on the frontier between Hungary and Slovakia: without moving an inch, their nationality would change but they would still be a peaceful, liberal Jewish family with a German governess, hired to ensure that the children would speak German, the lingua franca of Central European Jews of those years. 

“Whenever he went to Budapest, my father would buy me things, whatever I wanted. Sometimes I would dance by myself at night, in my house, without music, nobody could see me… and he would let me dance. They would tell him, how can you allow your daughter to dance alone like that in the house. But he did. The Jewish girls in our town didn’t do things like that.”

Her voice is like a lone candle, flickering through her memories, as if this were a large, darkened salon, with just enough light to illuminate a few corners: a window by the snow over there; the nuns from the convent school she attended despite coming from a home of observant Jews; the governesses; and José, her father’s factory foreman who would sometimes come home drunk and Agnes’ father would let him sleep in his bed. 

Where is Erzek-Yvár, I wonder? Google Maps has no idea. Is the name in Magyar, Slovakian, Yiddish? Gently, because she has done this already with so many other interviewees, Liliana asks about dates, what happened first, what happened next. Never pushy, never insistent, she never pries the information out of her as if this were an interrogation. But little Agnes wants to linger on her little girl games, the rewards and punishments of childhood, while the newspapers chronicle Hitler’s rise to power in faraway Germany, followed by the annexation of Austria, Poland, and Hungary.

“The Hungarians will never allow it, my father said,” Agnes says, repeating her father’s words, invoking his tone of voice now, because voices don’t remember. Voices imitate, voices go back to what they once were, in order to embody the past that, in Agnes’ case, is always present. That’s what a voice is, I think: several layers of voices, superimposed, preserved in little time capsules. And then a kind of bridge emerges in the architecture of her voice, suddenly accentuating the letter “r,” and transforming the “v” into a “w” and jumping over the “s,” as if to alert the listener that a new era is looming on the horizon, which it is. And a space suddenly opens up, a space that Liliana knows to respect so that Agnes may use it. Her voice strains now, almost giving out, because it wants to give out, but it rises nonetheless, continues marching onward across the ice that cracks beneath her feet.

“My poor father, they worked him to death. The Germans, they worked him until finally they opened the gates to the camp and ordered them all to march, ‘Walk!’ they told them. And so my poor father walked. His brother dragged him by the arm until he couldn’t bear the weight any more, and so he let him fall. We don’t know where. My uncle, so skinny, dragged him until he couldn’t any more, and so he let my father fall. That was the end for him…but where? Nobody knows.”

I hear Agnes inhale deeply; she is trying to catch her breath. Slowly, very slowly, her breathing becomes more regular, and her voice has now left behind any last traces of childhood amusements as she speaks directly into the recorder, to me, even though I can’t see her. I am still just this perfect and utter stranger who must guess at so many things, this stranger who she tells about her father’s body, left on a road somewhere. 

“But that was later,” she suddenly says, banishing the memory like Orestes’ cloud of flies. “I don’t want to confuse you. I don’t want to make this confusing because I told something in the wrong order. You understand? First, before my father, before…”

And she stops, apologizes. “Before, let’s betterstart before.” Agnes takes a sip of the tea Liliana poured for her at the start of the conversation. It must be cold by now.

“My father did everything he could to save us, but I didn’t want to. This is the truth, I really did not want to leave my house. Three times my father tried to save us. My father had a friend whose son was a soldier. This sweet young boy wanted to take me to Slovakia as his bride. My father even sent a detective to follow us, to protect me in case something should go wrong. They dressed me up, in a disguise, with eyeglasses and my hair swept up so that nobody would recognize me. When the train arrived, I saw it, filled with German soldiers and right then I saw another boy, he wasn’t Jewish, who recognized me on the platform. And with all those German soldiers there I begin to get frightened that the boy is going to turn me in. And so I get very nervous, I get too frightened and so I tell the soldier, ‘Please forgive me, but I can’t, please forgive me, I’m just too scared, I can’t do it.’ That was the first time.”

She puts the teacup back in its saucer. Without seeing her I see her hand, her eyebrows, the full and undivided attention of Liliana, who only wants to keep Agnes from growing distracted, lost, so that she can tell us about the second attempt.

“The second time, my father sent my brother to a family in the forest. My brother stayed there, one week, and then they sent him back. They couldn’t go through with it, they were too frightened. That was the second time.”

Agnes now knows that she will have to reach the end, and her voice grows colder, more monotonous than it was five minutes ago. The voice of fact.

“The third time my father rented a truck that would take us to Slovakia. He rented a huge truck and sent us to wait for him in the cemetery. It was me, my brother, my mother and my mother’s friend. We were all there, waiting for him, behind the graves, when the cemetery guard arrived, and said to us ‘What are you doing here?’ And he called the carabineros and we went to jail.”

The carabineros, Chile’s police, infiltrate this Hungarian tale, just like the word chiquillo, “sweet young boy,” that she used before. Of all her many languages, street Chilean Spanish is the most prominent one, maybe because the nights aren’t quite so cold there. Or perhaps it is my own Chileanness lost in this 20-story high rise, the Hudson River, my exile which isn’t really an exile, my immigration which isn’t really immigration, though it does feel like it. The language that you are happy in is the one that sticks, I think. Although maybe the others linger for more time. My own grandmother lost her Spanish, then her French, then her English, then the songs she sang until all that remained was a strange melody that she would hum to herself. 

“First we spent a week in jail and then they took us to the ghetto. Seven thousand Jews in a factory, one of those factories…wood…lumber…I don’t know how you call them in Spanish…”

“It doesn’t matter, Agnes darling, go on,” Liliana says soothingly.

I wonder about my eyes. Had I done this interview properly, in person, what would I have done with my eyes to avoid looking into hers? Would she have sensed my reluctance or is it the faceless voice that intimidates me? Would she have saved me with her smile, her pain, her face in front of my own? I don’t know. This always happens to me in interviews; when the person I’m interviewing speaks about something painful or uncomfortable, or too personal, I change the subject. And it is the interviewee who continues because what he or she has to say must be said.

“So there we were in that place, I don’t know how you call it, no food, no bed, nothing. We didn’t know when it was Pesach, Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur. Then they took everyone from the ghetto and they put us on a train, no water, no food, a horse train. It was awful. The people, they screamed, they cried, they complained. Two days it took us to get to Auschwitz. But since my mother and my brother and I were all together, we curled up like a little cocoon and we were safe. Plus, we were very well dressed for the winter. We even had gloves.”

Like a little cocoon, she said, like the butterfly larva that in Chile is called “cuncuna,” probably because it’s like a little crib, the cuna, in which the caterpillar soaks its wings. The actual word she uses, encuncunarse, to describe the little cocoon they created, curling up together, isn’t even a real word in Spanish, but Liliana and I understand perfectly. Once again, Chilean Spanish infiltrates all those other languages she spoke before Chile existed for her. It was another time, yes, but more than that it was another dimension of time, in which their bodies curled up together on the road to the place that, unbeknownst to them, would one day be called a concentration camp.

“After two days without food or water, the SS made us get off the train. They took us to a big room and got us all naked. They took our clothes, our jewelry, purses, passports, they took everything. My little brother was with my mother. He was twelve, he hadn’t been Bar Mitzvahed yet.”

Now her chest,  which struggles for air, struggles for words, struggles to keep from crying, moves backward like a horse on slippery ground that instinctively feels for another path in the mud, to keep from plunging into the rushing river where everything wants to make it slip and slide. Empiluchar, I write down. They got us naked. Another Chilean term. 

“After they finished shaving our heads I went to find my mother. I didn’t recognize her. None of us did, we were all different people with the same clothes and no hair. Some people they tattooed, not me. Then they put five hundred women in a barracks, each with a single rag to cover the body. Other people’s rags. ‘You, you go to the Czechoslovakian barracks!’ they yelled at me, who knows why. But that was later. That was later, I don’t want to confuse you…”

And her eyes that I cannot see, and her hand that I sense, and her body, all move closer to the tape recorder as she apologizes because she knows this is a professional project, a professional project that she and I must work on together from two different points in time and space, and she just wants to make sure that everything comes out right in this book where she will tell of her journey in Spanish for the first time. She wants the story to come out just right, and so she searches for the one thing that memories don’t have and never can have: the coherence that keeps things from getting lost and confused. And so she goes back to where she was before, precisely the place she would rather not be. But she must go back to the story and tell it as if she didn’t know how it ended, even though of course she knows. She must continue through the only continuity possible, which is the useless but vital pain she feels inside that apartment (or is it a house?), in Providencia, Las Condes or Vitacura.

“We were there for so long, so long in the Lager. How long, I don’t know. Weeks, months. There was no bed, no way to cover up. We were so scared, all of us. The stories I have, they are all so long, I have so many stories I would bore you if I told them to you. I have stories to fill a hundred books. So where was I? What was I telling you about?”

“The Lager, the countryside.” Liliana’s voice, soft as always, reminds her. Liliana has almost disappeared entirely from the recording, but I am reminded that she is still there, and I imagine her sitting, one leg folded over the other, leaning forward toward Agnes, hands in the air, directing the freight train of memories, or the words that drag the memories over the rusty rails of the years, and I imagine the continents suspended in her voice that doesn’t know how to start something that has no beginning and no end. And I imagine Liliana’s hands that demand nothing but nonetheless ask Agnes for more, pulling her reluctant words through the air, trying to help them locate a single and definitive way out. 

“Oh yes, the Czechoslovakian barracks…Suddenly they take five hundred of the youngest girls, I don’t know why, and at each window there is a little Polish girl, Jewish like us, as a warden. I start crying and the Polish girl says to me —can you imagine this? My first night in a camp, I don’t know anything—  ‘What are you crying for? I’ve been in Auschwitz two years,’ she says to me, angry, this Polish girl. ‘I’ve lost everything, everything, my family, all my things, I don’t cry anymore.’ And I say to her, ‘Well if you are made of wood, or steel, that is not my fault, I am still a human being. Maybe in time I will become like you. Maybe in time I won’t cry any more, like you, but for now I am still a human being, I have feelings, and I cry.’ But that was later, that happened later, I don’t want to confuse you…

“So many things happened, so many things, I don’t want to confuse you. You see, before that, they had separated us, my mother, my brother and me.”

No pallor, no handkerchiefs, no tears, I decide. I am not going to pretend that I was there, even though I do feel as if I am right there with her. I have the voice, just the voice, I mustn’t move from there. In her voice, she and I are together on the 16th floor of this high rise, a window on the Hudson, shadows on the Hudson, the place where people go when they have nowhere else to go. The voice, I tell myself. The voice, I decide.

“Right there, at the entrance to the camp, they would call out to us: ‘You come here, you go there, you over there. The German warden comes over and sees my brother hugging my mother. ‘Why is he hugging you, that child?’ she asks. ‘He’s my son,’ my mother says. ‘Come over here,’ says the German warden, and she pulls my brother from my mother’s heart and takes him to the chamber gas.”

Agnes’ voice wraps around itself as she switches the words around: “chamber gas.” And she stops, because now she cannot hold back the tears. I write down “chamber gas” so that I remember not to correct it when I edit the piece, so that it stays as is: “chamber gas,” which says everything that “gas chamber” no longer says, that simply can’t say. A kind of pain, a kind of reality that is more real than reality stays behind in this other language, this strange, halfway kind of language.

“‘My Georgi, they took him from my heart,’ my mother says to me, sobbing. And I say to her, ‘They took him from my heart, too.’ Then they separated us.” Agnes’ voice falters now.

“Darling,” Liliana says tentatively. But Agnes regains her composure and marches onward, for there is no turning back now. She resumes talking, but now her voice is different, or perhaps it is the same voice as before, that she has recovered after losing herself for a moment, fading away, when everything goes on and nothing can go on. For that is what this is, she must go on.

“They separated me from my mother then. They sent her off with some other people, they put her on another line, and they sent me with a group of five hundred women. All young, I don’t know why. Then suddenly, one day, I am looking out the window in the barracks and I don’t see a single girl standing out there. No soldier standing guard, either, on the street alongside the camp—it was a huge street, like a highway, one of those freeways, like they have in America. So I opened the window and jumped. I swear to God. He knows it’s true because He helped me do it. Without Him I couldn’t have done it. I jumped and started running down the highway. Running, running, running…no Germans, no dogs, nobody. And then I see my mother, and she sees me. She’s standing on a line. I tiptoe up to her, we say nothing, both of us are silent. Suddenly they start counting, eins, zwei, drei…counting, counting. And then they realize, they say, ‘How can there be 26 here? There should only be 25.’”

Agnes closed her eyes, praying not to be number 26. This, at least, is what I envision so many thousands of miles and weeks away from her. And I see her close her eyes, proud and ashamed all at once, in her house in Las Condes, Providencia or Vitacura, and in that place between Poland and nowhere, where the train came to a halt and they shaved her head and took her away from her family and she ran and ran down that freeway in the middle of nowhere and found her mother.

“But the Germans took the last girl in the line, and said ‘You, we don’t need you.’ And they took her away. I don’t know where. I am very sorry, but it was her or me. Nobody said anything. Not a word.”

She still doesn’t dare open her eyes, but a wave of relief washes over her, the relief of knowing that she will remain on the line of 25 women.

“They took us to Plaszow, in the south, on a passenger train. Then we had to walk for several hours. But it didn’t matter because we were together, my mother and me. We got to the camp and they put us to work. We had to carry a huge iron bar up to the fourth floor, and then carry it down, up and down, all day long. Four floors up, four floors down. What for, I have no idea. But we did it. We had to do it. We took this thing up the stairs, and we took it down, in this factory. None of us menstruated. I don’t know what they put in that soup, but nobody menstruated. They all had lice, too. I don’t know why but my mother and I never got lice. Me, my mother and another woman, married to a lawyer, we were the tidiest in the group.”

The voice of the pampered girl from Erzek-Yvár returns, shattered in a thousand pieces, but coming somehow in the words she speaks. I make a note of this, too. She always compares, competes, dances, vies for attention in a place where there is no attention to be given. She was the 25th of 26. Still the chosen one, the favorite.

“We were like animals, they treated us like animals. They wake us up at five in the morning and they give us a piece of bread. Nothing else for the rest of the day. In the afternoon, when we come back from work, they give us soup, but it’s practically all water, no meat or vegetable, all water. If we are lucky, a little potato, nothing more. My mother was so hungry, oh she had such a hunger, my poor mother. So hungry, so hungry, she would get inside the barrel they served the soup from, to see if she could find a little something. It made me so sad, but I couldn’t cry. I had no tears left.”

She had no tears left. The Polish girl who scolded her for crying was right. I make another mental note.

“There was a German girl assigned to look after us, she would bring me potatoes, pepper. Little gifts she would bring me. One day I asked her, ‘Why do you care so much for me?’ and she said, ‘You know why? For many years I worked for a Jewish family, and you remind me of one of the little girls I took care of.’ In me she saw this little girl. She loved this little girl, it seems. And more than once she saved me. One day, I am walking down one of the streets in the concentration camp, and another prisoner gives me a newspaper. I don’t know why, maybe to see the news, I don’t know, I am stupid and I accept this newspaper instead of throwing it on the ground. A German guard sees me and says what are you doing with that paper, and he grabs me, and pushes me upstairs with his rifle to the second floor. Full of Germans, all in uniforms, all with their guns. And me, I start to cry, and I say to them, ‘I don’t know what it says in the newspaper, I didn’t read it, I didn’t do anything.’

“And they say to me, ‘You should have thrown it out. We’re going to kill you.’ And they start preparing something, God knows what they were planning to do to me, when she comes in, my German protector. ‘What are you doing with this little girl?’ she asks them. ‘Don’t you dare touch her, she’s the hardest worker we have here, the cleanest, the most honest of all the women here.’ And she saved my life.”

A deep breath. The chosen one, I note again. It feels as if she is going to stop there, but she goes on.

“My mother, when we first arrived at Auschwitz, said to me there are people whose fate is to live and others, like us, whose fate is to die. But our fate was not death. I don’t know why, I still don’t know why, but that was what fate decided. I believe in fate, very much. And I believe in God, very much. This is what helps me to believe in God very much. This is my salvation, without it I could not go on.”

 “Of course, of course I know you believe in God, Agnes darling,” Liliana murmurs.

But Agnes is focused on the tape recorder, on the story, on my work and her work, on making sure that her story gets properly told, so that despite not seeing her I may be the eyes that gaze at her in another Lager alongside a group of Italians.

“One time, in the bathroom, one of those Italians, a fat man who had been a butcher in Italy —can you believe this?— passed me a slip of paper. These Italians, you see, they weren’t Jewish, I don’t think—they were there for political reasons, or something like that, I don’t know. The note was in French, and I couldn’t read it, so I passed it on to a girl who spoke French and she read it to me. It said something like, ‘It makes me so sad to see you, such a pretty girl, suffering so much. Please don’t be angry with me if I give you something to eat.’ And from then on, every day he would give me a little something, a piece of bread, this and that—and you know they barely had anything themselves, but they got more than we did. Another day, he sent me a note that said, ‘I’m in love with you and when we are free I want to go out with you.’ But when she found out, my mother told me, very firmly, ‘Agnes, you are not to receive one more thing from that man, even if we die of hunger. Nothing more!’

Pretty. Both the German girl and her father had said she was pretty.

“Pretty,” Liliana had told me when I had accepted the assignment. Charming and smiling and pretty, I remembered. That was the assignment.

“The next day I refused the gift from him, and the day after that, and the day after that, too, until he sent me another letter. He would pass them through a hole in the bathroom wall, just like in school. And in this letter he says to me, ‘I know you are hungry. If you don’t accept the gifts it’s because you are proud. I will not make you go away with me or marry me. I don’t want to force you to do anything, but if you are hungry you must do everything in your power to eat.’ Only then, finally, my mother accepted this, and I began to accept his gifts of food again. But the other girls got jealous. They would say to me, ‘We all have the right to eat. Next time switch places with Helena in the bathroom line.’ And so I said, yes, of course, I don’t want to take anything from anybody. I don’t want problems with anybody.

“So I put myself fifth in the line. But the butcher came over to me, anyway, and gave the package to me.”

At that, Agnes’ lips curl into a smile, or perhaps it is something that I hear as a smile, coming from deep within the cassette. Once again she has been selected, chosen by someone. That is the luxury. That is what love and indulgence are made of. That is what matters: that someone has sought you out, even if you’re fifth in line.

“How long?” Liliana presses her again. “How long were you in Plaszow?”

“I don’t know,” Agnes repeats. All she knows is that one day, the German girl, her protector, approaches her and says, 

“I want to kiss you goodbye. I love you very much, you know. You are a very good girl. The Russians are going to come to liberate you now. I have to go because they are going to kill me for everything we’ve done to you. They’re going to kill us. I just ask you one thing,” she said. “Please don’t tell anyone where I’m going. Good luck.”

“And then, one morning, just like that, there are no guards, no dogs, no rifles. We all walk out of the barracks and everybody takes whatever they can find. Food, blankets, boots, everything. But my mother sits down on her cot and I sit down next to her. And we sit there, starving hungry, watching the others eat everything they can find, like crazy people. ‘What are we doing, Mother?’ I asked her. ‘We will not steal,’ she says to me. ‘We will not be reduced to that.’ With our tummies growling like crazy.

“Then the Italian man comes over, and my mother grabs my arm, scratching me, and says ‘Careful!’ So I say to my mother, ‘How can I not thank this man for everything he has done for me?’ And she finds a pair of pants tossed on a bed and says to me, ‘Just give him this, and say thank you very much.’

“So I go downstairs with the pants and I say thank you. But he wants to take me with him. He makes little signs with his hands, because I don’t speak Italian and he doesn’t speak German, so we don’t understand each other. ‘No, no,’ I tell him with my hands. ‘No.’” And I picture her gesticulating with her hands in her apartment, or house. “And he shakes my hand and I give him the pants. He doesn’t want to take them, but finally he says yes, he nods yes and then he turns around and leaves. And my mother, upstairs from the second floor, is watching us the whole time.”

Her voice speeds up now, because she knows that what matters for our book, what I have to transcribe, what I have to tell, has been told. What comes next is hers and only hers: the arrival of the Russians to the camp, and the desperate women throwing themselves at them.

“The Russians, they hadn’t had women in a very long time, it seems. It was unbelievable. My mother and I said, ‘We have to leave.’ And so we left. We walked to the train. Don’t ask me how we arrived in my city. Asking, asking, asking. I don’t know how but I got a pair of socks with pompoms, and a dress that was too small for me. We had no money, nothing, but we made it back, we wanted so badly to get back that we did it.

“The town was empty. No factory, no furniture, none of the candelabra in our house. All of our things were gone. Except José. José, the man who had worked for my father, he was like a son to my father. He wasn’t Jewish so the Germans didn’t do anything to him. In secret he took all the machines from the factory, and some of the furniture from the house, and hid it all in the attic of his house, all those years. When we returned, he gave everything back to us. He was a good man, José, he loved us. And my mother put on her blue apron and began working, working, so that we could eat again.”

And now, back in the little girl’s voice from the beginning of her story, exactly sixty minutes ago on the first tape, Agnes describes how her hair grew back, how she found colored dresses, how she regained her spirit, and began to write letters to a friend of an aunt who lived a day’s train ride away, and he would send her boxes of roses long-distance, and letters, many letters.

“Emile, that was his name there. Emilio was his name here, he was a very good person. The best person in the world, my husband. He also had been in a work camp, but not so long.”

They went to live in Vienna, but their business did not flourish and some relatives of Emile, who eventually became Emilio, who lived in Santiago, told him that there were opportunities in Chile. They take the boat and arrive in Santiago. Agnes, pregnant with her first child, Emile trying to make himself understood with the locals in his basic Spanish. In Santiago, her mother opens the same kind of factory, making suitcases and handbags, that they left behind in Erzek-Yvár. And in time, her husband becomes, just as her father had been in his own town, so many years earlier, the leader of the Hungarian Jewish community in Santiago. 

And the children, and the days, and the sun. Problems, doubts, everyday anxieties that, compared to the other anxieties, are almost a gift.

“Emile always said to me he was afraid that he would die and leave me behind. And I always said to him, ‘How do you know I won’t go first?’ But he went first. I was stronger, possibly.”

For the last time her voice stops and then starts again to list the names of her children, her grandchildren, their occupations, their wives. For the last time it is the air of death in life, of life in death, that reveals the secret she doesn’t want to know but knows, nonetheless: she is stronger, stronger than Emile, stronger than so many others who, as fate had it, were the 26th in line.

But life goes on. That is the fortune, or misfortune, of it: life goes on, as do voices. Her life, so far away, in another language, another city, another continent, so far away that nobody and nothing reminds her of it. Until, suddenly, the son of a cousin gets married in London and the family insists on bringing Agnes to Europe, and to Erzek-Yvár, which I still cannot find on any map, even though I scan the entire border between Slovakia, Austria and Romania on Google Maps. 

“‘Let’s go to Hungary,’ my cousin says to me when we’re in London. ‘I take you,’ he tells me, almost forcing me.”

And they make it to Erzek-Yvár, to the cemetery where Agnes once waited for a truck to come and rescue her from the camps and the hunger, but the guard came between them. She walks through the cemetery waiting for something, someone, she doesn’t know what. She reads the names on the grave markers. Of her family, all that remains are a few dark tombs at the far end of the cemetery. Graves from before the war. Grandparents, great uncles, uncles, the last of her relatives who could claim a patch of land on which to die and the right to be buried there, in that place that once was but would never again be her town.

The graves of her grandparents. Her uncles and aunts. But not of her father, or Georg, neither of whom have a grave anywhere.

“If I had known it would be like that, I would never have returned to Hungary,” she says. And back to Santiago, to Spanish, a smile, a cup of tea and a final sigh that feels more like a toast.

“So much suffering, so much suffering…it’s hard to believe I am alive.”

Another sip of tea, and a smile that I cannot see but I hear it, or I want to, I need to hear it, to be able to finish the assignment.