When concentration camps were liberated, the entire world saw what was going on behind the wired fence. At the sight of so much hatred and death, many people around the world chose to remain silent. Many reasons prompted people to avoid talking about what happened in places like Auschwitz, Dachau, or Bergen Belsen. In some cases, people were unable to comprehend and process what they had experienced and survived. As a result, they were incapable of sharing this with other people, even if they were relatives or friends. In other cases, people were deliberately trying to forget, move on, and assimilate to the new places they were now living in, such as the US or other countries they had travelled to after liberation. And in perhaps other cases, survivors were scared or unsure that people would not believe them because some societies had become skeptic, especially at the time of Holocaust deniers.[1] All of these reasons, and maybe even others, made silence reign, and what happened to 6 million Jews, as well as other communities such as the gypsies and disabled people, was not spoken about.

In Paraguay, the first two Holocaust survivors who arrived were Sonia Tauber and her sister Ester Brom.[2] With the assistance of the Paraguayan consul in Paris, Sonia and Ester were able to migrate to Paraguay and bring with them the memory of what they had endured in Auschwitz. For the Jewish Paraguayan community, their arrival awakened the possibility of reunions between family members who had been separated before the war started, or who had been unable to obtain the necessary documents to migrate. Recognizing the importance of memory, Sonia told her children stories about the Holocaust and how she and her sister Ester had managed to survive the concentration camp. Through these stories of suffering and injustice, Sonia made sure that her children did not forget. Flora Tauber, one of Sonia´s daughter, recognized the importance of keeping memory alive and to take on the responsibility of being the voice for the Jewish community.[3] As such, she has become an active speaker for the cause, and through her is that we know the story of how Mengele was recognized by Sonia Tauber in Asunción.

After having settled in Asunción, Sonia Tauber and her husband opened a jewelry shop to make a living. One morning, Sonia was called to the front of the store because there was a foreigner who wanted to purchase something but could not communicate properly in Spanish. Sonia proceeded to the front desk and asked the foreigner what he wanted to buy. When he asked to see a watch, Sonia extended her arm beneath the glass, leaving her tattoo exposed: 29458. At the sight of her tattooed number, the foreigner became visibly uncomfortable and said he forgot his wallet in his car. This discomfort made Sonia remember and, pointing at the door, she screamed Josef Mengele´s name.[4] After this encounter, and possibly due to other reasons such as Eichmann´s trial, Mengele left the country. However, this encounter portrayed the reality of the Jews in Paraguay. They were simultaneously living in a country that had welcomed and sheltered them, as well as the Nazi officials who had caused their suffering. As Flora Tauber expressed: “Right there, in her new homeland and in her own city, in her own store, trying to buy watches, as if nothing had happened.”[5]

Sonia´s story lives through her children who have bravely told her story to raise awareness about the remembrance of the Holocaust; but they are not the only ones. In a short novel, Susana Gertopán tells the story of Barrio Palestina, a Jewish neighborhood that housed various immigrant communities who migrated from Europe. This story recreates the painful and challenging reality that many families encountered in the 1930s, when migrating seemed like the best option in the face of rising antisemitism in Europe. The themes of the book range from the struggles within the family, to missing and worrying about family and friends left behind, to hope and bonding in their new homeland, to facing the reality of the Holocaust.[6] In the short novel, the character of uncle Iosel is the one who brings the news about the Holocaust and the news about what happened to their loved ones who had stayed behind. With phrases like “it is not possible to tell everything we went through,” and “what happened there I cannot tell, I still cannot believe how we could live inside so much madness, thousands and thousands of people were murdered in cold blood every day…,”[7] we find out about these first encounters were collective memory was kept alive through literature.