“I have confidence in my cooking. My mother is an excellent cook.”

“So your mother is alive?”

“Both my parents. My mother is seventy-seven, my father is eighty-two.”

“Youngsters.”

“I’ll quote you on that.”

“Where were they born?”

“My mother was born in Germany; my father is Hungarian.” Rina paused. “Actually, my mother is way more Hungarian than German. She moved to Budapest when she was ten. Her mother died before the war in some kind of tragic accident. She doesn’t like to talk about it.”

“I don’t blame her.”

“Neither do I,” Rina said. “Still, it’s a shame. She has unique knowledge of family history that she’s not going to pass on. It’ll be lost forever.”

“Some things are better lost,” Oscar commented.

“I suppose.” But Rina’s facial expression belied her words.

“Why is the past so important?” Oscar said grumpily. “We say we learn from the past? We never learn from the past.”

“I don’t know if that’s totally true.”

“On good days, when my eyes can see, I read the paper. Then I wonder why I do it. The killing still goes on.”

“True.”

“The past…Hmmmph!” He waved twiggy fingers. “Nothing! Empty space.”

“That’s how my mother feels. But sometimes I think it eats away at her. Maybe if she faced it—”

“Nyaaah. She faces it. I know. It comes back in nightmares. Terrible, terrible dreams. Dreams you don’t talk away, dreams you don’t psychoanalyze away, dreams that aren’t helped by sleeping medicines. They are dreams that haunt forever. It’s terrible enough that it happens in sleep. Why do I have to think about it when I’m awake?”

Rina conceded that he was making valid points. Then she said, “I don’t know about you, Oscar, but maybe if my mother talked about them during the day, she wouldn’t have the nightmares.”

“No. You are wrong. Then she thinks about it in the day and has the bad dreams at night.” Oscar was breathing hard. “What camps were they in?”

Stated so matter-of-factly as if asking what state they were from. “Auschwitz. My father was at the Jewish side, but my Jewish mother was at the goyish side—Monowitz.”

Oscar looked blank.

“The labor part of the camp.” Rina bit her lip. “My mother has dark hair but light skin and blue eyes—”

“Your mother passed for one of them?”

“I think the Kommandant wanted her to pass. She was stunningly beautiful. He…liked her.”

“Oy.”