You tried to escape from jail and were sent to Auschwitz, where your indis- pensable, expert sewing saved your life. And to Birkenau, where you continued to sew, perhaps the uniforms of the guards, vestments for the officers, dresses for their wives - you never said. Three years of saving your life every moment. You, a Jew, hiding in a death camp, as a Pole who was caught with a Jew. Emerging to a gassed out, depleted world, to learn of your husband's death, which even now you cannot bear to speak.
Memory is a kind of wail.
You are our lived memory, our certain memory. Our living memory. You have remembered for us, generously, openly, without demands upon us. A model, teaching us to remember faithfully, yet still enjoy life's other colours. What questions I could bare to ask, bare to inflict, you answered with affection, with details, impressions, dailiness, events.