“If It Isn’t Fun.” – Auschwitz Survivor
During our initial survey of the Seven Countries Study in Dalmatia in 1958, I learned that Agi, a member of our Yugoslavian team, was a survivor of Eichmann’s deportation of Jews from Hungary to Auschwitz in 1944-45. Her story is not as ghastly as some published eyewitness accounts, but for that reason, being so matter of fact, it is all the more powerful. I made notes as she told her story while our team sailed south in the Adriatic on the Budva, a happy little working craft, toward a distant chain of coastal communities. Soon after our survey was completed, Agi divorced her Yugoslav husband and emigrated to the United States, where she held positions in biochemistry at Cornell and then in Dallas. In retirement, she remarried and lives in Albuquerque. I have here reconstructed the story Agi told me, in a form very close to her own words.