“Not too much,” Magda said. “I moved when I was nine.”

“What year was that?” Decker asked.

“It was 1928 or maybe 1929. Before ’33. We moved because my mother died.” She whispered, “You know about her?”

Decker nodded. “I know what happened to her, yes.”

She looked around nervously. “I don’t want to tell Hannah this.”

“I agree,” Decker said. “Too much for her.”

Magda went on. “Then in Budapest, my father met my stepmother and they get married. They have three children together. So with my sister and me, we are five. Only my sister and I survived. I was at Monowitz, you know. That was the goyish side of Auschwitz. All the rest of the family went to Birkenau. Only my sister Eva made it through. I still see her. She lives in New York. She married very well.”

“So did you,” Decker said.

“Yes, I did,” Magda confirmed. “I married the best!”

Rina smiled. It was wonderful how much her parents still loved each other.

“Is Eva a whole sister or half sister?” Decker asked.

“Half sister,” Rina said. “The middle of the three girls from Mama’s stepmother.”

“And Eva only survived because she was transferred back to Dachau—not to the main camp but to one of the smaller camps.” Magda’s face tightened. “There were many smaller camps—twenty, thirty in southern Bavaria—all of it Dachau. You know?”

Decker shook his head and looked at his wife.

“Satellite camps,” Rina said. “The entire complex was referred to as Dachau. It was very ironic. Hitler had succeeded in making Germany Judenrein—Jewish free—but then toward the end when things were falling apart, he became desperate for domestic labor. So he brought the Jews back into Germany to work in armament factories—slave labor. Most of these smaller camps produced weapons and armaments, but they were also death camps. We don’t have to talk about this, Mama. How about happier times, like earlier in your childhood?”

“They were not so happy. …”

“Before it happened,” Decker said. “What do you remember about your mother?”

“She was very, very beautiful.”

“So you must have looked like her.”

Magda’s smile was radiant at the compliment. “She made beautiful gowns. The most wunderbar fabrics.”

“Silks?”

“Ja, ja, seide—silk. In such beautiful colors.”

The woman was Hungarian, but when she spoke of her childhood, rudimentary German came back. Decker said, “Who’d she sew the gowns for? Who were her clientele?”

“The rich people—the aristocrats, the bourgeois.”

“You know, Peter and I just came back from Munich,” Rina told her.

Magda was quiet.

“We saw a lot of old Jewish Munich. You lived near Gartner-platz, right?”

She thought long and hard. “Nein, not the Isarvorstadt. That is for the Eastern Jews … the poor ones. My father was only a tailor, but my mother made money, enough for us to move. We were middle class. We even had a cleaning lady twice a week—an Austrian girl from Tirol. All the cleaning girls were Austrian.”

She searched the recesses of her memory.