Opinion | What It Took for Stella Levi to Talk About the Holocaust

There is something unique about the way cataclysms are preserved in oral histories. In his 1936 essay “The Storyteller,” Walter Benjamin draws a distinction between the printed novel and the oral tale, where experience is “passed from one mouth to the next.” The direct line of transmission is significant: The story you hear from a living witness embeds itself into the mechanisms of memory, as I’ve learned firsthand, like no other. And yet such a transmission poses certain challenging considerations. Is a human being defined by the worst, most tragic thing that happens in her life? Should it carry more importance than the periods that bracket it? What does it mean to be the person who shares this particular heirloom?

I have been haunted by these questions over the past seven years, after a chance encounter changed my life and, along with it, my understanding of the power and responsibility of memory. Late for a lecture one evening in the winter of 2015, I dropped into a chair next to an older, elegant woman who looked me over carefully before inquiring why I was in such a hurry.

I answered that my weekly French lesson had run long. She thought for a moment, then asked if I was interested in knowing how French served her in her life.

“Sure,” I answered.

“When I arrived in Auschwitz,” she said almost matter-of-factly, “they didn’t know what to do with us. What kind of Jews don’t speak Yiddish? We were Judeo-Spanish-speaking Sephardic Italian Jews from the island of Rhodes, I tried to explain. They asked us if we spoke German. No. Polish? No. French? ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘French, I speak.’

“Because we spoke French, at Auschwitz they put us with the French and Belgian women, who spoke French and Yiddish, a little German, too, enough so that they could translate and they could communicate. Since they understood what was going on, they managed to survive — and therefore so did we.”

This woman’s name was Stella Levi. The following morning, I received a call from a mutual friend who said that Stella was putting together a few thoughts about her youth in Rhodes and, as she was unsure of her written English, she wondered if I would be willing to help.

On that first of the 100 Saturdays that we would end up spending together, it didn’t take me very long to discover that Stella, now 99, has a memory that is incised with stories about the Juderia of Rhodes, the neighborhood (never a ghetto) where she grew up, as did her parents and grandparents before her and their ancestors before them, in theory going all the way back to the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492. The last born and now last living of seven children in her family, she is the repository of stories that she heard from her grandmothers, parents and older siblings, so that her storytelling contains memories that stretch beyond her lifetime, back into the 19th century.

In the world of Stella’s childhood, old women healed the ailing with remedies and superstitions, and people rode in horse-drawn carriages, baked their dishes in a communal oven and bathed before each Shabbat at the Turkish baths. Although the Jews lived in relative peace with, if in separate neighborhoods from, their Turkish and Greek neighbors, in the Juderia life was traditional and inward-turning and was commanded by the Jewish calendar. Preparations for Passover alone could stretch to two weeks, given that everyone whitewashed their homes, inside and out, top to bottom.

In the early 1910s and ’20s, after Italy conquered and effectively colonized the island, modernity began to disrupt these old customs and habits. This was particularly transformative for young people like Stella, who came of age in a milieu where they made friends with their Italian peers, went to the movies (Shirley Temple, the Marx Brothers), learned popular music (“Tornerai,” “Baciami Piccina”), read Freud and Proust and began to dream of wider possibilities in life — in Stella’s case, attending university in Italy.

I came to think of Stella as a modern-day Scheherazade who left me hanging, week to week, as she talked me through the story of her youth. She took me, eventually, to 1938, the year she and her fellow Jewish classmates were banished from school, an experience that made Stella feel, as she explained, like an animal. (“Animals don’t need to be educated, right?”) Yet, despite the story she told me when we were first seated next to each other, she initially refused to speak further about the nine months she spent in Auschwitz and half a dozen other concentration camps.

“I don’t want to be a storyteller of the Shoah, atrophied and with my ideas fixed and unevolving,” she said when I pressed her. “I don’t want to see myself as a victim.”

Stella and I spent months circling around this dilemma. What does it mean for the survivor to offer her story, when the fact of her survival classifies hers as a minority voice, the one that can narrate past, way past, the point where the voices of her parents, her uncles and aunts, her neighbors and friends were silenced? (This one bothered Stella a great deal.) Who was she to speak for, and about, this community and how it was extinguished?

I came to understand that Stella needed to ask herself these questions before she could tell me her story. Once she did, the inexorable chronology of her own life brought us to the moment when the Germans seized Rhodes from the Italians in the fall of 1943 and then deported the Jewish community, more than 1,700 people in all, in July of the following year.

Stella described to me the arduous, suffocating weeks spent traveling by boat and train to Auschwitz, where some 90 percent of her community, including her parents and other family members, were immediately murdered. She told me about the unrelenting fear (and surprising laughter, often at what she described as the Beckettian absurdity of the conditions in which they found themselves), along with the several critical instances of suerte, or luck, that allowed her and her sister Renée to survive. In the end, she shared her heirloom, a very bitter one indeed.

“The storyteller finds his material in experience: his own or what he has learned secondhand,” Mr. Benjamin wrote. “And the stories he tells, in turn, become experience for his audience.” In other words, we are what we hear? I know I am now, and I know that I’m now determined to tell Stella’s story to everyone who will listen.

Michael Frank is the author, most recently, of “One Hundred Saturdays: Stella Levi and the Search for a Lost World.”