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meant, Elise understood with a sudden flash of insight.
    Years in Auschwitz surrounded by corpses, medical experiments, starvation, torture; living when millions around her had died. A fourteen-year-old girl with no one to help her… Her Bubbee % own survival was living proof that a person could never predict with absolute certainty what was going to happen to them. No matter how horrible your situation seemed, there was always the chance that you would be the one to somehow, miraculously, come through it, living to see great-grandchildren and die peacefully in your bed. Like people who overcome a list of terrible medical complications, or people who walk to safety out of plane wrecks in snow-covered mountains. Or like her Bubbee ‘s three friends who went on from Auschwitz to found a cosmetics fortune, run a famous nightclub and over-throw a Communist regime… Living proof, she thought, listening to her grandmother’s soft voice whispering comfort and prayers, that no matter what Jon and liana were faced with, there was still hope. No matter how bad it looked, they could be the ones… the ones who survive.
    “Thank you, Bubbee” she whispered.
    She didn’t feel alone anymore.

Chapter Eight

    Beverly Hills, California
Monday, May 6, 2002
11:20 A.M.
    “T HE VIDEOGRAPHER IS just changing to a new tape,” the interviewer from the Shoah Foundation explained.
    “No hurry, darling. Take your time,” Esther Gold said graciously, dreading it. Tiny and imperious, she sat stiffly upright in her uncomfortable antique Louis XIV chair, queen of a vast estate whose circular driveway, manicured lawns, and beautiful, generous rooms framed her with the exqui-site simplicity and beauty of a diamond circle pin.
    Nervously, she fidgeted with the stunning string of perfectly matched black pearls around her neck and straightened the skirt of her chic gray suit. As she moved her arms, the interviewer’s eyes couldn’t help being drawn to the shocking tattoo of blue numbers that flashed out through the row of fashionable gold bangles that laddered up her arm.
    As the head of a huge cosmetics firm, Esther Gold was used to interviews. In fact, she loved to talk about her rags-to-riches story as a new immigrant, never tiring of the tale of how she had gotten a cousin with the run-down hair pomade lab in the Bronx to make up a batch of her mother’s face cream recipe; and how she had sold it customer to customer in beauty parlors, and then at Hadassah conventions, until finally convincing the big department stores to take it on. How she’d met her husband, Solly, a Dachau survivor, who was supposed to cater her wedding, and married him instead of the American groom… She’d told these stories a mil-lion times, and loved every minute. Even the first tape for the foundationhad been all right, all the good times, before the war. No w the real torture would begin; opening the coffins, dragging out all the decayed corpses of those obscene memories she had spent all these years trying to put behind her; telling all those things she had never shared with anyone, especially not her family.
    Think about the party afterward, she told herself, the celebration, whe n all four tapes are finally done. Ho w lovely it will be to see everyone, to meet all the children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren, gathered together for the first time from the four corners of the earth. To see what it all came to, this will to live through the worst of times. And this was the time to do it. Before heart conditions, diabetes, or breast cancer snuffed out the possibility. They were all going in one direction, and it was irreversible.
    What about making it in the Beverly Wilshire? she mused. O r why not here, in the backyard, in the tropical garden? There was plenty of room in the house to accommodate everyone for a few days… weeks… even months! Maria’s grandson, who’ d recently graduated film school and was making documentaries, would have a great