The Choice

by Edith Eva Eger

  It’s … springtime for Hitler, and Germany! he sings. It’s from Mel Brooks’s The Producers Deutschland is happy and gay!

  He does a tap-dance routine in front of the window, he holds a pretend cane in his hands. We saw The Producers together when it opened in 1968, the year before our divorce. I sat in a movie theater with a hundred laughing people, Béla laughing loudest of all. I couldn’t even crack a smile. Intellectually, I understood the purpose of the satire. I knew that laughter can lift, that it can carry us over and through difficult times. I knew that laughter can heal. But to hear this song now, in this place, it is too much. I am furious at Béla, less for his absence of tact, more for his ability to move so quickly and successfully out of anguish. I have to get away.

  I head out alone for a walk. Just outside the hotel lobby is a path that leads to the Berghof, the Eagle’s Nest, Hitler’s old residence. I will not choose that path. I will not give Hitler the satisfaction of acknowledging his home, his existence. I am not stranded in the past. I follow a different trail instead, to a different peak, toward the open sky.

  And then I stop myself. Here I am, forever giving a dead person the power to cut off my own discovery. Isn’t this why I have come to Germany? To get closer to the discomfort? To see what the past still has to teach me?

  I slide along the gravel path toward the unassuming remains of Hitler’s once grand estate, perched at the edge of a cliff. Now all that exists of the house is an old retaining wall covered in moss, pieces of rubble and pipes poking out of the ground. I look out over the valley as Hitler must have done. Hitler’s house is gone—American GIs burned it to the ground in the last days of the war, but not before raiding Hitler’s stores of wine and cognac. They sat on the terrace and raised their glasses, behind them his house obscured by smoke and flames. The house is gone, but what of Hitler? Can I still feel his presence here? I test my gut for nausea, my spine for chills. I listen for his voice. I listen for the echoing register of his hate, for the relentless call of evil. But it’s quiet here today. I gaze up the mountain, I see wildflowers fed by the first cold trickles of melting snow from the surrounding peaks. I am walking on the same steps that Hitler once took, but he isn’t here now, I am. It is springtime, though not for Hitler. For me. The thick crust of silent snow has melted; dead quiet winter has yielded to the burst of new leaves and the jolting rush of fast water. Within the layers of the terrible sorrow I carry in me always, another feeling shoots through. It is the first melting trickle of long-frozen snow. Pulsing down the mountainside, the water speaks, the chambers of my heart speak. I am alive, the bubbling stream says. I made it. A song of triumph is filling me, pushing its way out of my heart, out through my mouth to the sky up above and the valley below.

  “I release you!” I shout to that old sorrow. “I release you!”

  * * *

  “Tempora mutantur, et nos mutamur in illis,” I say to the chaplains when I give my keynote address the next morning. “It’s a Latin phrase I learned as a girl. Times are changing and we are changing with them. We are always in the process of becoming.” I ask them to travel back with me forty years, to the same mountain village where we sit right now, maybe to this very room, when fifteen highly educated people contemplated how many of their fellow humans they could incinerate in an oven at one time. “In human history, there is war,” I say. “There is cruelty, there is violence, there is hate. But never in the history of humankind has there ever been a more scientific and systematic annihilation of people. I survived Hitler’s horrific death camps. Last night I slept in Joseph Goebbels’s bed. People ask me, how did you learn to overcome the past? Overcome? Overcome? I haven’t overcome anything. Every beating, bombing, and selection line, every death, every column of smoke pushing skyward, every moment of terror when I thought it was the end—these live on in me, in my memories and my nightmares. The past isn’t gone. It isn’t transcended or excised. It lives on in me. But so does the perspective it has afforded me: that I lived to see liberation because I kept hope alive in my heart. That I lived to see freedom because I learned to forgive.”

  Forgiveness isn’t easy, I tell them. It is easier to hold grudges, to seek revenge. I tell of my fellow survivors, the courageous men and women I met in Israel, who looked pained when I mentioned forgiveness, who insisted that to forgive is to condone or to forget. Why forgive? Doesn’t that let Hitler off the hook for what he did?

  I tell of my dear friend Laci Gladstein—Larry Gladstone—and the single time in the decades since the war when he spoke to me explicitly about the past. It was during my divorce, when he knew money was a struggle for me. He called to say that he knew of a lawyer representing survivors in reparations cases, he encouraged me to step forward as a survivor, to claim my due. That was the right choice for many, but not for me. It felt like blood money. As if one could put a price on my parents’ heads. A way to stay chained to those who had tried to destroy us.

  It is too easy to make a prison out of our pain, out of the past. At best, revenge is useless. It can’t alter what was done to us, it can’t erase the wrongs we’ve suffered, it can’t bring back the dead. At worst, revenge perpetuates the cycle of hate. It keeps the hate circling on and on. When we seek revenge, even nonviolent revenge, we are revolving, not evolving.

  I even thought when I arrived yesterday that my presence here is a healthy kind of revenge, a comeuppance, a settling of the scores. And then I stood overlooking the cliff at the Berghof, and it came to me that revenge doesn’t make you free. So I stood on the site of Hitler’s former home and forgave him. This had nothing to do with Hitler. It was something I did for me. I was letting go, releasing the part of myself that had spent most of my life exerting the mental and spiritual energy to keep Hitler in chains. As long as I was holding on to that rage, I was in chains with him, locked in the damaging past, locked in my grief. To forgive is to grieve—for what happened, for what didn’t happen—and to give up the need for a different past. To accept life as it was and as it is. I do not of course mean that it was acceptable for Hitler to murder six million people. Just that it happened, and I do not want that fact to destroy the life that I clung to and fought for against all odds.

  The chaplains rise to their feet. They shower me in warm applause. I stand in the light on the stage, thinking that I will never feel so elated, so free. I don’t know that forgiving Hitler isn’t the hardest thing I’ll ever do. The hardest person to forgive is someone I’ve still to confront: myself.

  * * *

  Our last night in Berchtesgaden, I can’t sleep. I lie awake in Goebbels’s bed. A crack of light breaks in from under the door and I can see the pattern of vines on the old wallpaper, the way they intertwine, the way they rise. Tempora mutantur, et nos mutamur in illis. If I am changing, what am I in the process of becoming?

  I rest in the wakeful uncertainty. I try to open myself, to let my intuition speak. For some reason I think of a story I heard of a very talented Jewish boy, an artist. He was told to go to Vienna to art school, but he didn’t have any money for the journey. He walked from Czechoslovakia to Vienna, only to be denied a seat at the exams because he was Jewish. He begged. He had come so far, he had walked the whole way, could he at least take the test, could he be allowed that much? They let him sit for the exam, and he passed. He was so talented that he was offered a spot at the school despite his ancestry. Sitting beside him at the exam was a boy named Adolf Hitler, who was not accepted at the school. But the Jewish boy was. And all his life, this man, who had left Europe and lived in Los Angeles, had felt guilty, because if Hitler hadn’t suffered this loss, if he hadn’t lost to a Jew, he might not have felt the need to scapegoat Jews. The Holocaust might not have happened. Like children who have been abused, or whose parents divorce, we find a way to blame ourselves.

  The self-blame hurts others, too, not just ourselves. I remember a former patient, a man and his family I treated briefly a year or so ago. They sat before me like abandoned pieces from different puzzles
: the intimidating colonel in his decorated uniform; the silent blonde wife, her collarbones jutting out from her white blouse; their teenage daughter, her dyed black hair ratted and sprayed into a wild nest, her eyes ringed in black eyeliner; a quiet son, eight years old, studying a comic book in his lap.

  The colonel pointed at his daughter. “Look at her. She’s promiscuous. She’s a drug addict. She won’t respect our rules. She mouths off to her mother. She doesn’t come home when she’s told. It’s becoming impossible to live with her.”

  “We’ve heard your version,” I said. “Let’s hear from Leah.”

  As if taunting him by reading from a script that would confirm every one of her father’s claims, Leah launched into a story about her weekend. She’d had sex with her boyfriend at a party, where there’d been underage drinking and where she’d also dropped acid. She’d stayed out all night. She seemed to take pleasure in listing the details.

  Her mother blinked and picked at her manicured nails. Her father’s face flushed red. He rose from his seat next to hers. He towered over her, shaking his fist. “You see what I have to put up with?” he roared. His daughter saw his anger, but I saw a man on his way to a heart attack.

  “You see what I have to put up with?” Leah said, rolling her eyes. “He doesn’t even try to understand me. He never listens to me. He just tells me what to do.”

  Her brother stared harder at his comic book, as if force of will could take him out of the war zone his family life had become and put him in the fantasy world of his book, where the lines between good and evil were clearly drawn, where the good guys would win, eventually. He had said the least of anyone in the family, and yet I had a hunch that he was the one with the most important things to say.

  I told the parents I would spend the next part of the session with them, without their children in the room, and I took Leah and her brother into my adjoining office, where I gave them drawing paper and markers. I gave them an assignment, something I thought might help them let off steam after the tense minutes with their parents. I asked them each to draw a portrait of their family but without using people.

  I returned to the parents. The colonel was yelling at his wife. She appeared to be wasting away, disappearing, and I was concerned she might be in the early stages of an eating disorder. If I asked her a question directly, she deferred to her husband. Each family member was in his or her own stockade. I could see the evidence of their inner pain in the ways they accused one another and hid themselves. But in trying to get them closer to the sources of their pain, I only seemed to be inviting them to open fire or recede even further.

  “We’ve talked about what you see going on with your children,” I said, interrupting the colonel. “What about what’s going on with you?”

  Leah’s mother blinked at me. Her father gave me a cold stare.

  “What do you wish to achieve, as parents?”

  “To teach them how to be strong in the world,” the colonel said.

  “And how are you doing with that?”

  “My daughter’s a slut and my son’s a sissy. How do you think?”

  “I can see that your daughter’s behaviors are scaring you. What about your son? How is he disappointing you?”

  “He’s weak. He’s always backing down.”

  “Can you give me an example?”

  “When we play basketball together, he’s a sore loser. He doesn’t even try to win. He just walks away.”

  “He’s a boy. He’s much smaller than you. What happens if you let him win?”

  “What would that teach him? That the world bends over for you if you’re soft?”

  “There are ways to teach kids to go farther, to stretch their capacities, with a gentle push, not a kick in the ass,” I said.

  The colonel grunted.

  “How do you want your children to see you?”

  “Like I’m in charge.”

  “A hero? A leader?”

  He nodded.

  “How do you think your children actually see you?”

  “They think I’m a goddamn pussy.”

  Later in the session I brought the family back together, and I asked the kids to share their family portraits. Leah had drawn only one object: an enormous bomb detonating in the middle of the page. Her brother had drawn a ferocious lion and three cowering mice.

  The colonel’s face turned red again. His wife looked down at her lap. He stammered and stared at the ceiling.

  “Tell me what’s going on for you right now.”

  “I fucked up this family, didn’t I?”

  I half expected that I would never see the colonel or his family again. But he called the following week to schedule a private session. I asked him to tell me more about how he felt when his children had showed us their pictures.

  “If my kids are afraid of me, how are they supposed to handle themselves in the world?”

  “What leads you to believe they can’t protect themselves?”

  “Leah can’t say no to boys or drugs. Robbie can’t say no to bullies.”

  “What about you? Can you protect yourself?”

  He puffed out his chest so his medals glinted in the sunlight. “You’re looking at the proof.”

  “I don’t mean on the battlefield. I mean in your home.”

  “I don’t think you understand the pressure I’m under.”

  “What would it take for you to feel safe?”

  “Safety isn’t the issue. If I’m not in control, people die.”

  “Is that what safety would feel like to you? Freedom from the fear that people are going to get hurt on your watch?”

  “It’s not just a fear.”

  “Take me where you are. What are you thinking of?”

  “I don’t think you want to hear this.”

  “You don’t have to worry about me.”

  “You won’t understand.”

  “You’re right, no one can ever understand someone else completely. But I can tell you that I was once a prisoner of war. Whatever it is you want to tell me, I’ve probably heard—and seen—worse.”

  “In the military, it’s kill or be killed. So when I got the order, I didn’t question it.”

  “Where are you when you get this order?”

  “Vietnam.”

  “Are you inside? Outside?”

  “In my office at the air base.”

  I watched his body language as he took me into the past. I watched his energy, his level of agitation, so that I could be attuned to any distress that signaled we were going too far too fast. He had closed his eyes. He seemed to be sinking into a trance.

  “Are you sitting or standing?”

  “I’m sitting when I get the call. But I stand up right away.”

  “Who’s calling you?”

  “My commanding officer.”

  “What does he say?”

  “That he’s putting my men on a rescue mission in the bush.”

  “Why do you stand up when you hear the order?”

  “I feel hot. My chest is tight.”

  “What are you thinking?”

  “That it isn’t safe. That we’re going to be attacked. That we need more air support if we’re heading to that part of the bush. And they’re not giving it to us.”

  “Are you mad about that?”

  His eyes snapped open. “Of course I’m mad. They send us in there, they feed us a bunch of bullshit about America being the strongest army in the world, that the gooks don’t stand a chance.”

  “The war wasn’t what you expected.”

  “They lied to us.”

  “You feel betrayed.”

  “Hell yes, I feel betrayed.”

  “What happened the day you got the order to send your troops on the rescue mission?”

  “It was night.”

  “What happened that night?”

  “I’ll tell you what happened. It was an ambush.”

  “Your men got hurt?”

  “Do I have to spell it out? The
y died. They all died that night. And I’m the one who sent them in there. They trusted me, and I sent them in there to die.”

  “War means people die.”

  “You know what I think? Dying is easy. I have to live every day thinking about all those parents burying their sons.”

  “You were following an order.”

  “But I knew it was the wrong decision. I knew those boys needed more air support. And I didn’t have the balls to demand it.”

  “What did you give up to become a colonel?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You made a choice to become a soldier and a military leader. What did you have to give up to get here?”

  “I had to be away from my family a lot.”

  “What else?”

  “When you have six thousand men relying on you for their lives, you don’t have the luxury of being afraid.”

  “You’ve had to give up your feelings. To give up letting others see them.”

  He nodded.

  “You said before that dying is easy. Do you ever wish you were dead?”

  “All the fucking time.”

  “What’s stopping you?”

  “My kids.” His face contorted in anguish. “But they think I’m a monster. They’d be better off without me.”

  “Do you want to know how I see it? I think your children would be very much better off with you. With you, the man I am coming to know and admire. The man who can risk talking about his fear. The man who has the guts to forgive and accept himself.”

  He was silent. Perhaps this was the first moment he had encountered the possibility of freeing himself from the guilt he felt over the past.

  “I can’t help you go back in time to save your troops. I can’t guarantee your children’s safety. But I can help you protect one person: yourself.”