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the hospital. When the plane dropped suddenly and made loud creaking noises, I closed my eyes and thought, “OK, I am afraid. Where do I go for strength? Do I take the hand of my big, strong son or of my weak, dying mother?” And there was no question that I would go to my mother for strength. I put my hand over hers.
    A t about the same time as that plane trip, I remember being anxious when my daughter, Tatiana, was about to give birth. It’s one thing when your son has a child, but for some reason, when your daughter has a child, you feel it in your own flesh. It is physical agony. I was frightened for my little girl, thinking of all the things that could go wrong. I called my mother, in tears, while driving to the hospital. She was very frail, but she summoned the strength to make me strong, though happily it turned out I didn’t need it. Antonia was born without any complication and Tatiana was fine. In yet another testament to herstrength, my mother clung to life so that she could see Tatiana’s baby. Though her body was almost nonexistent, her mind and her will were strong. So many times in her life she was ill and on the verge of dying, but her incredible strength and determination kept her alive.
    We had already welcomed her first great-grandchild, Talita, the daughter of Alexandre and his then wife, Alexandra Miller, and just as intense in my memory is the astonishing day when Alexandre brought the one-year-old Talita in her carriage to visit me and my mother in the Carlyle hotel in New York. It was Mother’s Day and Alexandre gallantly brought each of us a bouquet of flowers. All our eyes were on the adorable little girl who pulled herself upright, clinging to a chair, then suddenly launched off on her own and took her first steps! We all clapped and praised her, but then something unbelievable took place. I was watching my old mother, wrinkled and sick in her chair, looking at this little girl on the floor and that little girl looking back at her, when suddenly I saw a flash of something white, almost like lightning coming out of my mother and going into Talita. I believe that that day my mother’s energy and spirit transferred to my granddaughter. I saw it happen, that white flash going from my mother into Talita. I saw it.
    M y mother did not die peacefully. I think she was reliving the horrors of the camps and fighting giving in to death, as she had in Auschwitz. It was not the first time she’d relived those horrors. As much as she had tried to bury the past and concentrate on looking forward to life, she had had a breakdown twenty years before during a visit to Germany with Hans and some clients of his. My heart had nearly stopped when Hans called me in New York to tell me he’d woken up that morning in the hotel to find my mother missing. He’d finally found her hiding in the lobby of the hotel, underneath the concierge’sdesk, disoriented, speaking loudly and making little sense. “Why? What happened?” I’d asked him, in a panic myself. He thought it must have been the dinner they’d had the night before with his clients at a restaurant. It was very hot and the people at the tables around her were speaking loudly in German. I suspected that she and Hans had also had a fight, but whatever the reason, she’d completely come apart.
    Hans thought she might snap out of it if I talked to her and I tried to talk calmly to her over the phone, but all she could do was babble nonsensically. Hans drove her back to Switzerland and put her in the psychiatric ward of the hospital and we all flew to her side—my brother and I and even my father—but she remained very confused, laughing one minute, crying the next, raving and incoherent. She wouldn’t eat and she wouldn’t drink nor would she surrender the fur coat she insisted on wearing in her hospital bed. We thought we’d lost her. But she was a survivor through and through, and three weeks later she was well enough to leave the hospital to