In the story of my emigration and my interview at the American Consulate in Rome, my aunt Anca appears chiefly as a source of 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 life story, connected with our family, Târgu Mureș, Bucharest, Auschwitz, Cleveland and New York. That is why I felt the need to give her a 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 doctor and the Romanian translator of Dante’s Divine Comedy. More about this branch of the family can be found on the page about Ițu and her family.
In my earliest memories she is 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 died 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 in a situation of desperate hardship, she devoted herself to sport, which at the time could bring in some money. Sport was officially amateur, but talented athletes received considerable 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 sporting competitions. She was not only beautiful and athletic; she also possessed the direct, simple vitality of people who know how to manage and turn the hardships of life 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 a teaching assistant 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. It was, as people say, love at first sight.
My family did not readily accept the relationship. A Jew — and one who had been through a concentration camp, with all that this might mean in the eyes of ordinary people in 1950s Transylvania — seemed to some a difficult choice to accept. Anca persisted. “The deed is done,” she would later say 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 1944 approximately 7,500–7,700 people from the city and the surrounding communities 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 Transylvania to Auschwitz-Birkenau — he, his sister and their parents. Their mother did not return. Tibi and Bebi survived, separated inside the camp, each unaware whether the other was still alive.
Tibi never spoke about what had happened there. In all the years I knew him, through all the evenings spent in their home, he never said a word. Nor did Bebi, whom I knew well and could have asked so many things, ever 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 path more precisely. 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 about 1,500 prisoners, she was forced to set out on a sixteen-day march towards Theresienstadt. After Germany’s surrender, she escaped towards Prague with several older friends. A peasant 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 searched for her through the Red Cross.
The Doctor at the Ministry of Internal Affairs
Back in Romania, Tibi studied medicine and became a pathologist. For about sixteen years he worked at the Ministry of Internal Affairs, at its headquarters on Șoseaua Ștefan cel Mare in Bucharest. In the Romania of those years, such a position implied a form of accommodation with power — a reality survivors knew well: the compromises sometimes imposed by the desire to live, work and protect one’s life.
To me, Tibi was a good man and a good doctor. I never knew precisely what that position entailed in practice, nor did I feel the need to ask him. The rest belongs to the realm of those discreet compromises through which people tried to live in a world that offered them few untainted choices.
The Game Tables and the Family Gathered Around Them
What I know for certain is what took place in their Bucharest flat. Over the years, Tibi and Anca had acquired the rare art of bringing people — relatives, friends and neighbours — together around the game tables: rummy, backgammon, sometimes poker. Those evenings had their own rhythm, a distinctive warmth and a cheerfulness you recognise as soon as you experience it and long for once it has vanished. In summer, tables were set outside beneath a huge cherry-plum tree, with electric bulbs hanging from its branches and making the night as bright as day.
People talked and laughed, wagered 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 those who share a language the others around them do not understand. Their friendship was solid and unspoken. They had become good friends. In the mornings they walked to work together down Strada Izvor, parting at Mihai Vodă.
In the afternoon, after returning from work, Tibi habitually lay down for twenty minutes, neither more nor less. He maintained this habit throughout his life. Around four o’clock my father would report for “duty” — usually backgammon — and, if Tibi was not yet awake, would tap gently on his bedroom window: “Bibi, it’s getting late. Let’s get to work!”
Anca had no children. Perhaps that was precisely why she put so much heart into building an extended family around her, 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 rarely went there in the evening, when many people gathered, but I was always there in the morning whenever my classes began in the afternoon.
I would arrive at eleven, when Anca got up, watch the ritual of her coffee and then 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, with Aunt Ițu beside us crocheting, we talked about the latest popular music, theatre or cinema. At noon I went home, a few houses away, to eat and then dash off to school or university. We got on splendidly, despite the twenty-year difference in our ages.
Their departure would later leave a void that I understood fully only after that small universe had scattered. Some things seem ordinary while they last and acquire their true weight only after they disappear.
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 considered worth celebrating because it had changed their lives.
The beginning was not easy. Wili tried several occupations, then noticed that many immigrants needed transport to the factories where they worked and established the Cleveland Heights Express service. Later he developed a painting business that eventually employed about forty people. Olga worked in a medical laboratory and also helped him with the accounts. Together they bought residential properties and built a stable life that also enabled them to help Tibi reach America.
In her early years there, Bebi worked in a hospital laboratory in Cleveland. One episode that I learned much later during our long conversations has stayed with me, because it says everything about the way war continues to live inside people: whenever an elderly patient appeared in the hospital, particularly one with red hair, Bebi hurried to see her. A part of her continued to hope, because she had not witnessed her mother’s death with her own eyes. She had been told that her mother had died at Auschwitz, but something in Bebi — the fifteen-year-old girl who had crossed a continent shattered by war on her own — could not finally abandon hope. Deeply religious, she dreamed that a miracle might have saved her mother from the gas chambers and, year after year, searched hospital corridors for a face framed by the mass of reddish hair that she could now only dream of.
Late in life, Bebi decided to visit schools in Cleveland and tell her story: something about the camp and about what it means to be a fifteen-year-old child and survive. It was her way of ensuring that the past she had previously wanted 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, produced 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 family’s separation at Auschwitz-Birkenau, the camps and forced march she endured, her return home, her student years and early married life, her departure from Romania and the life she built in Cleveland. The family photographs and documents reproduced in the volume give faces and precise landmarks to a history of which Bebi had said very little in our conversations.
The volume also changes the meaning of the silence I had observed in Tibi and Bebi. It had not been forgetfulness, but a way of carrying on with life. After decades in which she did not speak publicly about her experience, Olga ultimately chose to turn it into testimony for children and young people, convinced that hatred and denial can be fought only by preserving the truth.
1972 — Departure
In 1972, Tibi and Anca followed the same path of emigration, taking Aunt Ițu with them. They applied for permission to leave and were, as people said at the time, “bought” by their relatives in America — in fact, Wili and Bebi — through the mechanism by which Romanian Jews could be ransomed for foreign currency by relatives abroad or international organisations. Their application was approved relatively quickly. They first reached Cleveland, where Bebi’s family had already built a life. There, Tibi obtained recognition of his qualifications and was licensed as a family doctor. Anca and Tibi then moved to New York, where, with a substantial mortgage, they bought a flat and rented a medical office in Manhattan.
Their departure broke apart something that was never put back together. The rummy, backgammon and poker games stopped. The family dispersed into its usual, less warm, less close-knit routine. Some things are not fully understood as they happen; you understand them only later, when you search for that feeling and can no longer find it anywhere.
With them there, their America was no longer an abstraction to me. It had Anca’s face and voice, her letters and messages, and her way of enquiring about everyone at home. It was not merely a distant country, but the place where someone close to me lived, someone who was part of my emotional biography.
Between Rome and New York, 1989–1992
After moving to New York, Anca and Tibi began returning to Bucharest every September. We saw each other every day and told one another what had happened since our last meeting. Anca tried to persuade me to come to the States, without success. After Alexandru was born, Anca insisted on becoming his godmother, and the baptism took place in September 1980 at Boteanu Church in Bucharest.
During the rest of the year we communicated by letter. For fear of the Securitate, my letters bore no return address and their contents were “encoded”: I signed myself Norocel, my son was Alti (Alexandru Tiberiu, his baptismal name), and important messages were encoded in the first letter 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 afar. She sent me money. She advised me to approach the Jewish organisations in Rome — HIAS in particular — knowing that they helped anyone fleeing the East, regardless of origin. She encouraged and supported me with all the warmth of someone who had travelled a similar road to freedom almost two decades earlier.
But 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. Nobody had imagined that I might be refused — until then, the general assumption had been that the Americans accepted everyone arriving from the East. Yet in my case things turned out differently.
I wrote separately about that attempt to emigrate to the United States in the chapter America Deferred.
In the spring of that year, after the Americans had refused me a visa, Anca asked Bebi and Wili, who were touring Italy with their grandson Rony, to contact me and arrange a meeting. She wanted to know what sort of waters I was swimming in, probably alarmed by the reports from my mother, who had visited me in March.
In June 1990, Anca and Tibi themselves stopped in Rome on their way to Bucharest, to see with their own eyes how I had settled in. They stayed for three days at a hotel in the city centre. It was not their first time in Rome. We took long walks through the city and ate together.
During that visit, Anca and Tibi also made a point of visiting Giovanni M. and thanking him personally for the help he had given me.
I 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 soon to be published by Prentice Hall. I did not travel alone, but with my son, Anca and Tibi’s godson. We stayed with Anca in their Manhattan flat, saw Tibi’s medical office, explored the city she had adopted with her characteristic ease, and attended 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
We coordinated their visits to Romania with my own trips from Italy. The rest of the time we spoke by telephone: every Sunday, over her morning coffee, she received a call from me.
Beginning in 2000, every five years I went to New York in October for her birthday. At weekends they took me with them to play tennis somewhere in the Bronx. They tried to put a racket in my hand, but I was embarrassed — I had not played tennis for many years — and refused. I preferred watching the two of them, at the age of eighty, running all over the 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, Tibi was allowed out for a few hours so that he could attend, after which he was taken back. I remember Anca joining Bebi on the dance floor in a Transylvanian folk dance. They were both happy to have Tibi with them at the table.
But I shall write more about these visits to New York in a chapter devoted to the city.
The End
Even past the age of eighty-five, Anca and Tibi still played tennis every week on a rented court in the Bronx. Tibi was the first to give in, because one knee no longer obeyed him and, worse, caused him pain. He decided to have surgery at the neighbourhood hospital where he admitted his own patients. Unfortunately, the operation was unsuccessful; moreover, an infection developed. A decline lasting several years followed.
Tibi died first. Anca outlived him by six years, alone in their fourteenth-floor flat in the heart of Manhattan. She was over ninety-five — she was ninety-six — but gave the impression that she would live for ever. 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 together, with an energy and will to live that many young people might have envied.
Maria was with her, a Greek woman who had worked for her for many years and had come to live in the flat, caring for her day and night. When Maria went to Greece for two weeks, Anca became anxious and asked her nephew Peter to stay with her. But Maria’s return was delayed and Peter had to go back to his own life. Anca sensed that uncertainty immediately. For the first time, the support on which she had grown accustomed to relying seemed unsteady.
Those days were difficult. She cried easily, was agitated, and was particularly distressed because Peter could not send through Western Union the one thousand dollars she sent every month to Finica in Bucharest, the disabled girl she had raised from an early age during her years there and had never ceased to help. Maria usually sent the money, because she was much better at handling Eastern European names. But Maria was away, and Peter could give the agency only the form of the recipient’s name that Anca knew, which differed from the full name on her identity card.
During those two fateful days I spoke to Anca by telephone from Rome after each of Peter’s failed attempts. She was desperate, and I tried to reassure 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 that sounded so unusual to an American ear. In the end, the money reached Bucharest. Things seemed to have returned to their normal course.
Peter was due to leave the next morning. He waited, however, for Anca to wake at her usual time so that he could say goodbye. When more than half an hour had passed, he knocked on her bedroom door. There was no answer. He went in and found her collapsed in the bathroom. The ambulance crew diagnosed a stroke, with paralysis of her right side and loss of speech. It was decided not to take her to hospital because her condition was considered too serious. I could do nothing for her; at the time I too was in hospital, recovering from surgery. Anca died in her own bed after six days of struggling between life and death. For me, watching everything from Rome, such an ending remained difficult to accept. I was also left with the painful feeling that, within the American medical system, despite her excellent insurance, the response once the stroke had occurred had effectively been reduced to palliative care and painkillers.
I insisted that her coffin be brought back to Romania and, in accordance with her wishes, placed it in one of the niches in the structure built above the old family vault, which she herself had prepared with six niches for herself and her family.
I remember Anca as one of those rare people who bring warmth, security, continuity and a sense of belonging to those around them. In a family scattered by history, emigration and time, she was for many years one of the centres that held us together.
Bebi, her sister-in-law and companion of so many years, died on 30 July 2025 at the age of ninety-five. Only seventeen days earlier she had been photographed with her great-grandson Noah, celebrating his twenty-first birthday. Susie lives in Cleveland and Peter in Colorado.
It is a story of Târgu Mureș and a basketball game, of a marriage against the prevailing current and a stubborn search for freedom. It is also the more painful story of a silence that lasted a lifetime, of a dark period and of a woman searching 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 the game tables 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.