Is it happening again?

“It’s happening again,” she said, looking up at me from her cloudy, mousey brown eyes that had seen 75 years of multiple continents, family drama, frightening illnesses, intense academics and many days unremembered, like fresh snow that the rain melts while you are inside at work.

What did she think was happening again? This was about a year after Sept. 11, 2001, and I had moved with my husband and 1-year-old to Pittsburgh, not knowing anyone except my in-laws’ oldest friends from “the old country” — Edith and Egon Balas, who had immigrated here from Romania via Canada in the 1960s. So in the early 2000s, at a fancy dinner party, in a fancy neighborhood, the fancy university professor hostess was telling me that after a 40-year hiatus, she began to have nightmares again about the time she was a slave in Auschwitz at age 14.

Years have passed since that moment, and in the summer of 2024, Edith’s older daughter asked me to come to the house to go through her belongings. A pretty, enfeebled of mind and body 95-year-old Edith was moving to Florida to live close to her younger daughter. (Egon died more than five years earlier.) My heart thudded as I climbed the flagstone steps to the Balas house.

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I had not done enough for Edith. Why didn’t I do more? I made excuses — mainly a busy family life with three children and a spouse who works many nights and weekends. But the real reason was that I felt guilty that my life was easier. Nothing in my American experience could compare to that of a person who was stuffed into a train car with 100 others for several days, without food or water, to ride to Auschwitz. I ignored her. I was not brave. I was not selfless. I avoided a lonely, sickly, esteemed professor and de-facto godparent of my husband. Why?

Because it was hard.

Inside, her daughter and I went through Edith’s walk-in bedroom closet.

“Would any of these shoes fit you?” Edith’s daughter asked. “I remember these sandals! My mother and I bought them together when we were in Italy. I bought really plain ones, but she wanted these.” They were three colors, strappy, exquisite Italian leatherwork, and surprisingly, fit me well. I went home that day with a big bag of shoes to delight my 20-something daughters: Ferragamo, Bruno Magli, Bally — brands I never before touched.

Another day, she asked me to go through her mother’s basement cavernous cedar closet. Despite the cedar, many items were full of moths and mold. There had been a flood there years ago and remediation efforts were not entirely effective. Why had her daughters not cleaned this up on one of their many visits? I can only imagine that it was too heartbreaking a task to even look at the racks and racks of brightly colored couture because they were so much a part of their mother’s special spark, which had dulled. Would getting rid of this collection be admitting the life she built was gone? I made multiple trips back and forth with about 20 trash bags of sequined, beaded, silk, taffeta, linen and wool garments — some which Edith designed and had professionally tailored. Maybe that’s why her daughters didn’t touch this room. This room was an art collection.

After washing about 40 loads of dry-clean-only items with Borax and vinegar, as well as backbreaking ironing, I was facing my own inner garbage. Why did I take on this project? Guilt was at the top of the list. Yet, I continued to avoid Edith. She was still alive, and I was spending more time with her dresses than with her. Does saving, preserving and finding a new life for the beauty she valued matter? If Edith’s prized collection was thrown away, it would be a shame. She’d feel erased.

As I worked to revive Edith’s fashion testament, I wondered if the value of the magnificent, striking and meticulously stitched pieces was reclamation, redemption or retribution. By amassing the likes of Carolina Herrera and Emilio Pucci was Edith taking back the joy, innocence, confidence and peace stolen from her by the Nazis and later by the communist regime in Romania? Were beautiful clothes therapy to a woman who walked through the memories of hell every day for 80 years, always wondering if it could happen again? Indeed, it was surprising that she could thrive after all she had undergone — like witnessing from a crack in her Auschwitz barrack wall the Roma community being liquidated to the gas chambers, or when a bucket of human waste spilled on her from the barrack rafters where it had been placed because every inch of the dirt floor was taken up by another woman. Was art solace, comfort, medication? Was building a brilliant career in art history an escape from her own history?

A couple weird and wonderful things happened as I found homes for Edith’s dresses.

I sold a few items on eBay. One was a dress designed by one of the first Black designers of 1970s New York City, who died at 52, Scott Barrie. The woman who purchased it said she had a family connection to fashion of that time and place, so collecting things like this made her feel closer to her past.

I had another successful rehoming with Edith’s older daughter’s 40-year-old wedding dress. This daughter had since divorced but could not bear the thought of this dress going to just anyone. I looked up the designer, and found she was local to Pittsburgh, Nan Evans. She is no longer alive, but I got the names of her three children from her obituary, and via internet sleuthing, I contacted them to ask if they were interested in the outfit. They responded enthusiastically, “Yup, that’s Nan’s design! Thanks so much for making the effort to find us!” her son wrote. One of her daughters wrote back, “The outfit is just spectacular and fits me well. Thank you for helping me reconnect with my mother through her design.” This dress will now be a hug from mother to daughter.

But getting back to “It’s happening again”: Edith wasn’t just talking about the return of her nightmares — she meant the return of the dark times she and her husband barely survived. Is it happening again? Has the world always been as bad, but we are just more aware now because of better and faster access to information?

Soon after Edith made that haunting statement to me, she had a small stroke. Over the years, she had endured breast cancer five times and broken her neck, but this was the first time something threatened her ability to write. She recovered and decided it was time to compose her autobiography. Egon also had also done so, chronicling living under a false identity, suffering solitary confinement, multiyear imprisonments with beatings. Overall, it’s a miracle that neither was internally destroyed by what they lived through.

And so, after making several trips to the house for forgotten tasks— returning the Comcast equipment to Xfinity, shipping the contents of a hidden drawer full of tax papers —I shut the door behind me to an empty Balas household after their 60 years in Pittsburgh. I hope I honored Edith by preserving some of the beauty she loved and needed.

And I fully expect to be finding sequins from her dresses around my home for decades. PJC

Robin Hammer works in project and data management in Pittsburgh. She wrote the first draft of this piece on Nov. 16. That night, Edith Balas passed away in her sleep.