In the story of my emigration and of my interview at the American Consulate in Rome, my aunt Anca appears above all as support from afar: the relative in New York who sent me money, wrote to me, advised me and tried, as best she could, to make the waiting more bearable. Yet behind that particular role lay a much broader biography, connected with our family, Târgu Mureș, Bucharest, Auschwitz, Cleveland and New York. That is why I felt the need for this separate page.
Anca, one of our own
My aunt Anca was my mother's first cousin: the youngest daughter of Ițu, my maternal grandmother's younger sister, and of Ioan Tundrea, a physician and the Romanian translator of Dante's Divine Comedy. For this branch of the family, readers may return to the page about Ițu and her family.
My earliest memories bring her back as a tall young brunette, with a thick ponytail hanging freely down her back, athletic, full of life and a good companion. I remember her as energetic and direct, with a simple, warm manner and no unnecessary complications.
After her father's death in 1947, Anca, newly graduated from the Italian department of the Faculty of Philology at the University of Bucharest, also had to consider the family's practical survival. To help her mother through a time of severe hardship, she devoted herself to sport, which in those years could provide some income. Sport was officially amateur, but high-level athletes received substantial benefits, including a salary.
Anca played basketball and volleyball for Locomotiva Bucharest, a team that at one point became national champion. She travelled throughout the country for tournaments and competitions. She was not merely beautiful and athletic; she also possessed that direct, uncomplicated, intensely alive energy of people who know how to manage and how to transform life's difficulties into movement.
A basketball game in Târgu Mureș
Tiberiu — Tibi to everyone who knew him — came from another world. He was an Auschwitz survivor, a recent medical graduate and an assistant lecturer at the university in Târgu Mureș. One day, being interested in sport, he went to watch a game, and there, on the court, he saw Anca. As people say, he fell in love.
My family did not easily accept the relationship. A Jew — and one who had survived a concentration camp, with all that this could mean in the eyes of ordinary people in 1950s Transylvania — seemed to some a difficult choice. Anca persisted. “The deed was done,” she used to say later, with her particular sense of humour. They married for love in 1956, against the prevailing current.
What was never said
The deportation of the Jews of Târgu Mureș began on 27 May 1944, immediately after they had been confined in the ghetto at the Brick Factory. The first train convoys leaving Târgu Mureș station were loaded with Jews on 26–27 May 1944, and between 27 May and 8 June approximately 7,500–7,700 people from the city and nearby localities were deported. Most were sent to the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp.
Tibi was nineteen in 1944 and his sister Bebi only fourteen when they were deported from Hungarian-ruled Northern Transylvania to Auschwitz-Birkenau — he, his sister and their parents. Their mother did not return. Tibi and Bebi survived, separated in the camp, each without knowing whether the other was still alive.
Tibi never opened a discussion about what had happened there. In all the years I knew him, during all the evenings spent in their home, he did not say a word. Nor did Bebi, whom I knew well and could have asked many questions, give me any details. It was a dense silence, with thick walls, maintained by both of them with a consistency that said more than any account could have done.
The testimony Olga left near the end of her life allowed me to understand her journey more accurately. After Auschwitz-Birkenau she was transferred to Auschwitz, then to Bergen-Belsen and finally to an aircraft factory, where forced labour increased her chances of survival. In April 1945, together with approximately 1,500 prisoners, she was forced on a sixteen-day march toward Theresienstadt. After Germany's surrender, she fled toward Prague with several older friends. A farmer hid them in his cart and took them to a convent, where the nuns fed them and helped them begin the journey home. Olga first stayed with relatives in Brașov, believing that her father and brother had died. Only several months later was she reunited with them in Târgu Mureș; liberated from Dachau, they had been searching for her through the Red Cross.
The doctor at the Ministry of Internal Affairs
After returning to Romania, Tibi studied medicine and became a pathologist. For approximately sixteen years he worked for the Ministry of Internal Affairs at its headquarters on Șoseaua Ștefan cel Mare in Bucharest. In the Romania of those years, such a position involved a form of accommodation with power — a reality survivors knew well: the compromises sometimes imposed by the desire to live, to work and to protect one's life.
To me, Tibi was a good man and a good physician. I never knew precisely what that position involved, nor did I feel the need to ask him. The rest remains in the realm of those discreet compromises through which people tried to live in a world that offered them few untainted choices.
Games around the table and the family gathered together
What I do know for certain is what happened in their Bucharest flat. Over the years, Tibi and Anca had the rare gift of bringing people together — relatives, friends and neighbours — around games of rummy, backgammon and sometimes poker. Those evenings had their own rhythm, a distinctive warmth and a cheerfulness one recognises immediately when living it and longs for after it disappears. In summer, tables were set outside beneath a huge cherry-plum tree from which electric bulbs hung, making the garden as bright as day.
People talked, laughed, wagered a little and commented a great deal. It was not a solemn world, but a living one gathered around the table. Tibi and my father — who had been born in Budapest — spoke Hungarian together, with the complicity of people who share a language the others around them cannot understand. Their friendship was unspoken but solid. They became close friends. In the morning they walked to work together down Izvor Street, separating at Mihai Vodă.
In the afternoon, after returning from work, Tibi made a habit of lying down for twenty minutes — no more, no less. He kept this habit throughout his life. At around four o'clock my father would report for “duty” — usually backgammon — and, if he did not find him awake, would tap gently on the bedroom window: “Bibicule, it's late, let's get to work!”
Anca had no children. Perhaps for that very reason she put so much heart into building an extended family around herself, a warm circle in which everyone felt welcome. Even before my father's death, Anca and their home at 29 Puișor Street were a point of reference for me. I went there only rarely in the evening, when many people gathered, but in the mornings, when my classes began in the afternoon, I was always there.
I would arrive at eleven, Anca's waking hour, attend the coffee ritual and then watch her small daily tasks. She had taken up dressmaking, and the house was full of patterns for dresses, blouses and women's trousers. While she cut fabric or worked at the sewing machine, Aunt Ițu sat beside us crocheting, and we discussed the latest developments in popular music, theatre and cinema. At noon I would return home, a few houses farther away, eat and hurry off to high school or university. We got along splendidly, despite the twenty-year age difference.
Their departure would later leave a void whose full extent I understood only after that small universe had dispersed. Some things seem ordinary while they last and acquire their true weight only after they vanish.
1963 — the sister who left
In 1963, Bebi left Romania with her husband Wili and their two children, Susie and Peter. The family had initially considered Israel, but relatives already settled in the United States persuaded them to choose Cleveland. They arrived there on 23 August 1963, a date Olga always believed worthy of celebration because it changed their lives.
The beginning was not easy. Wili tried several occupations, then noticed that many immigrants needed transportation to the factories where they worked and founded the Cleveland Heights Express service. Later he developed a painting business that grew to employ approximately forty people. Olga worked in a medical laboratory while also helping him with the bookkeeping. Together they bought apartment properties and built a stable life, which also enabled them to help Tibi reach America.
As for Bebi, during her first years she worked in the clinical laboratory of a Cleveland hospital. One story I later learned from our long conversations has remained with me, because it says everything about the way war continues to live within people: whenever an elderly patient appeared in the hospital, especially one with red hair, Bebi would hurry to see her. Part of her continued to hope, because she had not witnessed her mother's death. She had been told that her mother died at Auschwitz, but something in Bebi — the fifteen-year- old girl who had crossed a continent shattered by war — could not finally relinquish hope. A deeply religious person, she dreamed that a miracle might have saved her mother from the gas chambers and, year after year, in the hospital corridors, she searched for a face framed by the red hair she could now only dream of.
Late in life, Bebi decided to visit Cleveland schools and speak. She told something of the camp and of what it means to be a fifteen-year-old child and survive. It was her way of ensuring that the past she had previously wished to forget would not disappear for others.
Olga's testimony
Susie, Olga's daughter, a delightful person, sent me the volume devoted to her mother as part of the Holocaust Survivor Legacy Project, created by the Jewish Family Service Association of Cleveland with the support of the Jewish Federation of Cleveland. The book is based on an interview Olga gave six to eight months before her death and was designed for use in schools.
Its fifty-eight pages follow her childhood in Târgu Mureș, the deportation of May 1944, the separation of the family at Auschwitz-Birkenau, the camps and forced march she endured, her return home, her student years and the beginning of her marriage, her departure from Romania and the life she built in Cleveland. The family photographs and documents reproduced in the volume give faces and precise reference points to a history about which Bebi had spoken very little in our conversations.
The volume also changes the meaning of the silence I had observed in Tibi and Bebi. It was not forgetting, but a way of making life possible. After decades in which she did not speak publicly about her experience, Olga ultimately chose to transform it into testimony for children and young people, convinced that hatred and denial can be opposed only by preserving the truth.
1972 — the departure
In 1972, Tibi and Anca followed the same path of emigration, taking Aunt Ițu with them. They applied to leave and were, as people said at the time, “bought” by relatives in America — in fact by Wili and Bebi — through the mechanism by which Romanian Jews could be ransomed for foreign currency by relatives abroad or by international organisations. Their application was approved relatively quickly. They first reached Cleveland, where Bebi's family had already built a life. There Tibi had his medical degree recognised and qualified as a family physician, after which Anca and Tibi moved to New York. With a substantial mortgage, they bought an apartment and rented a medical office in Manhattan.
Their departure broke apart something that was never reassembled. The evenings of rummy, backgammon and poker ceased. The family scattered into its more ordinary ritual, less warm and less gathered together. There are things one does not fully grasp while they are happening; one understands them only later, when searching for that feeling and finding it nowhere.
With them there, America was no longer an abstraction for me. It had Anca's face, her voice, her letters and messages, and the way she took an interest in everyone at home. It was not merely a distant country, but the place where someone close to me lived, someone who belonged to my emotional biography.
New York, 1989 and 1992
After moving to New York, Anca and Tibi began returning to Bucharest every September. We saw one another every day and told each other what had happened since our previous meeting. Anca tried to persuade me to come to the United States, but without success. After Alexandru was born, she insisted on becoming his godmother, which she did in September 1980 at the Boteanu Church in Bucharest.
During the rest of the year we communicated by letter. Because I feared the Securitate, my letters had no return address and their contents were “coded”: I signed myself Norocel, my son was Alti (Alexandru Tiberiu, his baptismal names), and important messages were encoded in the first character of each line on the second page, read from top to bottom.
When I remained in Italy in August 1989, Anca went into action from a distance. She sent me money. She advised me to approach the Jewish organisations in Rome — especially HIAS — knowing that they helped anyone fleeing the East, regardless of origin. She encouraged and supported me with all the warmth of someone who, almost two decades earlier, had herself followed a similar path toward freedom.
Yet at my interview at the United States Consulate in Rome on 13 February 1990, she could do nothing. Her American citizenship gave her no leverage. No one had imagined that I might be rejected — until then, the general impression was that the Americans accepted everyone who came from the East. In my case, however, things turned out differently.
I wrote separately about that attempt to emigrate to the United States in the chapter America Deferred.
I finally reached America in 1992, under entirely different circumstances: not as an emigrant, but as an author who had come to approve the cover of a book about to appear at Prentice Hall. I did not travel alone, but with my son, Anca and Tibi's godson. We stayed with Anca in their Manhattan apartment; I saw Tibi's medical office, visited the city she had adopted with her characteristic natural ease, and went to the opera at the Metropolitan. It was a short, peaceful visit, without files or waiting. The exact opposite of what I had endured in Rome in 1989.
Reunions
Around June 1990, Anca asked Bebi and Wili, who were travelling in Italy with their grandson Rony, to contact me and arrange a meeting. In this way she hoped to obtain more reliable news than the rumours reaching her from Bucharest. Later she came to Rome with Tibi, on their way to Bucharest, to see how I had settled and what state of mind I was in.
I coordinated their visits to Romania with my own journeys from Italy. During the rest of the year we spoke by telephone: every Sunday, over her morning coffee, she received a call from me.
Beginning in 2000, every five years I travelled to New York in October for her birthday. At weekends they took me to play tennis somewhere in the Bronx. They tried to put a racket in my hand, but I refused out of embarrassment — I had not played tennis for many years. I preferred to watch them, at the age of eighty, running across the entire court.
My last visit was in 2015, when Anca celebrated her ninetieth birthday. Tibi was ill and living in a nursing home. On the evening of Anca's celebration at a Romanian restaurant, he was brought out for several hours so that he could be present, then taken back. I remember Anca joining Bebi on the dance floor for a Transylvanian folk dance. They were both happy to have Tibi there at the table.
I shall write more about these visits to New York in a chapter devoted to the city.
The end
Even after the age of eighty-five, Anca and Tibi still played tennis every week on a court they rented in the Bronx. Tibi was the first to give way, because one knee no longer obeyed him and, more seriously, caused him pain. He decided to undergo surgery at the neighbourhood hospital where he admitted his patients. Unfortunately, the operation was unsuccessful and the knee became infected. A period of decline lasting several years followed.
Tibi died first. Anca survived him by six years, alone in their fourteenth-floor apartment in the heart of Manhattan. She was over ninety-five — she was ninety-six — yet gave the impression that she would live forever. Her mind remained clear; she completed crossword puzzles in Rebus every day, telephoned all of us each week and made plans for her next visit to Romania. She was one of those rare people who know how to keep the world around them united, with an energy and will to live that many young people might have envied.
Maria, a Greek woman who had worked for her for many years, was at her side and had come to live practically full-time in the apartment, caring for her day and night. When Maria left for two weeks in Greece, Anca grew anxious and asked her nephew Peter to stay with her. Maria's return was delayed, however, and Peter had to return to his own life. Anca immediately sensed this uncertainty. For the first time, the support on which she had grown accustomed to rely seemed unstable.
Those days were difficult. She cried easily, was agitated and, above all, deeply distressed because Peter could not send through Western Union the one thousand dollars she transferred each month to Finica in Bucharest, the disabled girl she had raised from childhood during her years there and had never ceased to support. Usually Maria sent the money, as she handled Eastern European names much better. Now Maria was away, and Peter could not give the agency the beneficiary's full name, only the form in which Anca knew it, which differed from the name on her identity document.
During those two fateful days, I spoke with her by telephone from Rome after each new failure by Peter. She was desperate, and I tried to calm her, telling her that nothing irreparable had happened and that matters would eventually be resolved. After the third unsuccessful attempt, her fear had reached its limit. Suspecting the cause, I asked Peter to come to the telephone and explained, step by step, what he had to do, making him write down, “by my spelling,” the three names unfamiliar to an American ear. At last the money reached Bucharest. It seemed that things had returned to their normal course.
The next morning Peter was due to leave. He waited for Anca to wake at her usual hour so that he could say goodbye. More than half an hour passed; he knocked on the bedroom door and received no answer. He entered and found her collapsed in the bathroom. The ambulance diagnosed a stroke, with paralysis of the right side and loss of speech. It was decided not to take her to hospital because her condition was considered too severe. I could do nothing for her; I was myself in hospital at the time, recovering from surgery. Anca died in her own bed after six days suspended between life and death. For me, watching everything from Rome, such an end remained difficult to accept. I was also left with the painful impression that, within an American medical system in which she had very good insurance, the response after the stroke amounted in practice to palliative care and sedatives.
I insisted that her coffin be brought back to Romania and, in accordance with her wishes, placed it in one of the niches of the structure built above the old family vault, which she herself had prepared with six niches for herself and her relatives.
Anca remains in my memory as one of those rare beings who bring warmth, security, continuity and the feeling of belonging somewhere to everyone around them. In a family scattered by history, emigration and time, she was for many years one of our centres of connection.
Bebi, her sister-in-law and companion through so many years, died on 30 July 2025 at the age of ninety-five. Only seventeen days earlier she had been photographed beside her great-grandson Noah, celebrating his twenty-first birthday. Susie lives in Cleveland and Peter in Colorado.
What remains is a story about Târgu Mureș and a basketball game, about a marriage against the current and a stubborn search for freedom. What remains, too, is the more painful story of a silence that lasted a lifetime, of a dark period and of a woman who searched the corridors of an Ohio hospital for her mother's face.
It is also the story of people who moved between worlds and carried with them, wherever they went, something of the warmth of family gatherings and games around the table in Bucharest.
They left behind memories and faces, and through Olga's testimony they also left a story that future generations will be able to hear.