Auschwitz enters the account as both the destination of Oskar’s deportation and one of the camps associated with the deaths of the Landauer family’s Jewish relatives. Though the references are brief, together they place a personal disappearance within a wider history of persecution and loss.

Oskar’s Deportation

Hana recalls that the Gestapo took her and Oskar away during a night raid. She never saw him again. After the war, she learned that he had been sent to Theresienstadt, where he remained for about a year before being placed on a transport to Auschwitz in January 1943. Her knowledge ends there: the account does not specify what happened to him after the transport.

Oskar had been much older than Hana. She says she had betrayed him repeatedly, yet describes him as the only man she ever loved. Recalling his fate, she gives his name twice and reflects that, had he survived, he would by then have been over eighty. The destination of the transport thus marks the boundary between what Hana knows and the loss she cannot resolve.

The Landauer Family’s Loss

In a later family conversation, Mrs Landor explains that her husband’s relatives were Jewish and had died in camps, naming Auschwitz alongside Sobibor and Treblinka. The family had heard that a woman had been arrested and deported in 1942, while they were in Cuba, but the confusion after the war made it impossible to learn what had happened to her. The Iron Curtain then deepened that separation from news of home.

The later discovery that the woman was alive does not undo the deaths in the family or the years of uncertainty. Auschwitz appears in Mrs Landor’s account not as a place she describes directly, but as one name in the family’s knowledge of relatives lost in the camps. Beside Hana’s account of Oskar’s deportation, the reference shows how the camp’s significance reaches the narrative through separated people trying to understand who survived and who did not.