It was more than just luck that saved Annie Gabor Arancio and her family from the Holocaust.
It was action, said Arancio, a Hungarian survivor of the Holocaust and Oakland resident who was profiled in a book by East Bay author Betty Iverson, “A Time to Flee: Unseen Women of Courage.” The book tells the stories of four women’s experiences during World War II — women all from different countries and backgrounds.
Arancio’s is the only Holocaust story in the book. Her family’s escape from Nazi forces caught Iverson’s attention when the two met through a friend.
This book, as well as Iverson’s first, both examine women in World War II. Iverson, a retired nurse who lives in Moraga, started writing when she heard the story of a woman at her church, a former nurse in the German army who would become the subject of her book, “Tabea’s Story.”
“I was really kind of awakened into how many World War II stories there were out there, and then I got into writing women’s stories,” Iverson said.
She said she writes about women because they are “behind the scenes.”
Arancio’s mother, a dressmaker in Budapest, arranged for her and her two daughters to go into hiding separately when she suspected their home was unsafe, after it was labeled with a Jewish star.
In March of 1943, when German troops invaded the city, her mother warned the entire family, Arancio said.
“She had instinctively and very intelligently foreseen what was happening and acted. Acting is the most important,” she said of her mother.
By June of that year, all of Arancio’s family members had been deported to Auschwitz and other camps, and only her aunts later survived.
Arancio was caught with her mother and sister by Nazi soldiers but narrowly escaped by fleeing in the confusion of an air raid from Russian troops. The three then hid in a villa and a neighboring wine cave until the invasion was complete.
Like all of the women profiled in Iverson’s book, Arancio came to the United States a few years after the war and attended a university. Arancio graduated from U.C. Berkeley and worked as a social worker and later an art dealer promoting contemporary Hungarian artists.
Her survival story has been recorded in San Francisco’s Holocaust Oral History Project and in a 22-minute film made three years ago by Hungarian Jewish high school students.
Arancio said she is not haunted by her wartime experiences, but that telling her story as she did for Iverson’s book “re-created” the feelings she had first experienced.
“It’s not easy to kind of go back and relive the past, and so we had several sessions,” she said.
The four women she profiled in the book fell into her lap, Iverson said, but fit together well because they all had strong mothers who had to act cleverly and decisively under pressure to save others.
“They’re true stories of real people. They’re just humble people and yet they’re very inspiring,” Iverson said.
Arancio said she was intrigued by Iverson’s interest in her story. “She is the other side, she is the rest of the world.”
“A Time to Flee: Unseen Women of Courage” by Betty J. Iverson (342 pages, Author House, $14.50).