Escaping Extermination

Agi Jambor was born in 1909 in Budapest, Hungary, the Jewish daughter of a wealthy businessman and a prominent piano teacher. A piano prodigy, she was playing Mozart before she could read and at the age of twelve made her debut with a symphony orchestra. She studied under Zoltan Kodaly and was a pupil of Edwin Fischer at the Berlin University of the Arts. Arriving in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1947, she was widowed shortly thereafter. She became a professor of classical piano at Bryn Mawr College and was briefly married to the actor Claude Rains from 1959 to 1960. Agi's life in America was full of intellectual and musical abundance. She was active in opposing McCarthyism and fought against the Vietnam War, giving proceeds from concerts to her charity that bought food for Vietnamese children. She was much loved by students as a charming yet feisty role model. She died in 1997 in Baltimore.Frances Pinter, born of Hungarian parents in Venezuela, grew up in the United States. Only in her early teenage years did she meet her relative, Agi, who became her role model. Frances made a career in academic publishing in London. In the 1990s she worked for the Open Society Institute, supporting independent publishing all across the post-communist region.

Preface 1. Childhood and Adolescence 1924-1942 2. War-Deportations-Escape-Return 1942-1945 3. Bratislava After the War 1945-1956 4. From Oppression to Freedom and Back Again 1956-1969 5. Normalization and Emigration 1969-1978 6. Exile 1978-1990 7. Returns 1990-1995 What Happened Next Farewell to Agnesa Kalinova Appendix: Biographical Notes on Selected Individuals Mentioned Notes Index

"As survivors of the Holocaust reach the end of their lives, memoirs like Escaping Extermination extend their experiences into public memory. Agi Jambor's compelling story reminds us of the ingenuity and luck required to escape transport to the death camps, as well as the bravery and fortitude that allowed survivors to reinvent full and hopeful lives." --Jill Dolan, Annan Professor in English, Princeton University "The celebrated Hungarian concert pianist, Agi Jambor, grew up in the lap of central European artistic luxury and, along with her physicist husband, lived a terror-filled life during the war years, including (as one of her chapters refers to it) a 'peace almost worse than the war.' What truly distinguishes this elegantly straightforward memoir is that the thread of hope woven throughout is the love of music: the author's gifts as a pianist and the love of music that she shares with her rescuers on both sides of the Atlantic, and even, at times, with those who would have done her harm, were it not for the chance of having appreciated her talent at the piano." --Leonard Barkan, Class of 1943 University Professor, Princeton University "This memoir is an extraordinary work of counterpoint, which gracefully intertwines sweetness and horror, loss and redemption, the gross and the sublime. Jambor writes of the vilest things with a disarming freshness of vision. Her humor and integrity make this historical record into a stirring testament to the survival of curiosity, music, and love in a time of unfathomable darkness." --Rachel Polonsky, author of Molotov's Magic Lantern: Travels in Russian History