We want so much to understand the truth. We want to be accountable for our mistakes, honest about our lives. We want reasons, explanations. We want our lives to make sense. But to ask why? is to stay in the past, to keep company with our guilt and regret. We can’t control other people, and we can’t control the past.
At some point during their first year of loss, Renée and Greg came to see me less and less frequently, and after a while their visits tapered off altogether. I didn’t hear from them for many months. The spring that Jeremy would have graduated from high school, I was happy and surprised to get a call from Greg. He told me he was worried about Renée and asked if they could come in.
I was struck by the changes in their appearance. They had both aged, but in different ways. Greg had put on weight. His black hair was flecked with silver. Renée didn’t look run-down, as Greg’s concern for her had led me to believe she might. Her face was smooth, her blouse crisp, her hair freshly straightened. She smiled. She made pleasantries. She said she felt well. But her brown eyes held no light.
Greg, who had so often been silent in their sessions, spoke now, with urgency. “I have something to say,” he said. He told me that the previous weekend he and Renée had attended a high school graduation party for their friend’s son. It was a fraught event for them, full of land mines, devastating reminders of what the other couples had that they didn’t have, of Jeremy’s absence, of the seeming eternity of grief, every day a new host of moments that they would never experience with their son. But they forced themselves into nice clothes and went to the party. At some point during the evening, Greg told me, he realized that he was having a good time. The music the DJ played made him think of Jeremy, and the old R&B albums his son had taken an interest in, playing them on the stereo in his room when he did homework or hung out with friends. Greg turned to Renée in her elegant blue dress and was struck by how clearly he could see Jeremy in the slope of her cheeks, the shape of her mouth. He felt swept away by love—for Renée, for their son, for the simple pleasure of eating good food under a white tent on a warm evening. He asked Renée to dance. She refused, got up, and left him alone at the table.
Greg cried as he recounted this. “I’m losing you too,” he said to his wife.
Renée’s face darkened, her eyes looked blacked out. We waited for her to speak.
“How dare you,” she finally said. “Jeremy doesn’t get to dance. Why should you? I can’t turn my back on him so easily.”
Her tone was hostile. Venomous. I expected Greg to wince. He shrugged instead. I realized this wasn’t the first time that Renée had perceived his experience of happiness as a desecration of their son’s memory. I thought of my mother. Of all the times I had seen my father try to nuzzle her, kiss her, and how she would rebuff his affection. She was so stuck in the early loss of her own mother that she hid herself in a shroud of melancholy. Her eyes would sometimes light up when she heard Klara play the violin. But she never gave herself permission to laugh from the belly, to flirt, to joke, to rejoice.
“Renée, honey,” I said. “Who’s dead? Jeremy? Or you?”
She didn’t answer me.
“It doesn’t do Jeremy any good if you become dead too,” I told Renée. “It doesn’t do you any good either.”
Renée wasn’t in hiding from her pain, as I had once been. She had made it her husband. In marrying herself to her loss, she was in hiding from her life.
I asked her to tell me how much space she was allowing for grief in her daily life.
“Greg goes to work. I go to the cemetery,” she said.
“How often?”
She looked insulted by my question.
“She goes every day,” Greg said.
“And that’s a bad thing?” Renée snapped. “To be devoted to my son?”
“Mourning is important,” I said. “But when it goes on and on, it can be a way of avoiding grief.” Mourning rites and rituals can be an extremely important component of grief work. I think that’s why religious and cultural practices include clear mourning rituals—there’s a protected space and structure within which to begin to experience the feelings of loss. But the mourning period also has a clear end. From that point on, the loss isn’t a separate dimension of life—the loss is integrated into life. If we stay in a state of perpetual mourning, we are choosing a victim’s mentality, believing I’m never going to get over it. If we stay stuck in mourning, it is as though our lives are over too. Renée’s mourning, though it was painful, had also become a kind of shield, something that fenced her off from her present life. In the rituals of her loss she could protect herself from having to accept it. “Are you spending more time and emotional energy with the son who is dead, or with the daughter who is alive?” I asked.
Renée looked troubled. “I’m a good mother,” she said, “but I’m not going to pretend I’m not in pain.”
“You don’t have to pretend anything. But you are the only person who can stop your husband and your daughter from losing you too.” I remembered my mother talking to her mother’s picture above the piano, crying, “My God, my God, give me strength.” Her wailing frightened me. Her fixation on her loss was like a trapdoor she would lift and fall through, an escape. I was like the child of an alcoholic, on guard against her disappearance, unable to rescue her from the void but feeling that it was somehow my job.
“I used to think that if I let grief in, I would drown,” I told Renée. “But it’s like Moses and the Red Sea. Somehow the waters part. You walk through them.”
I asked Renée to try something new to shift her mourning into grief. “Put a picture of Jeremy in the living room. Don’t go to the cemetery to mourn his loss. Find a way to connect with him right there in your house. Set aside fifteen or twenty minutes every day to sit with him. You can touch his face, tell him what you’re doing. Talk to him. And then give him a kiss and go on about your day.”
“I’m so scared of abandoning him again.”
“He didn’t kill himself because of you.”
“You don’t know that.”
“There are an infinite number of things you could have done differently in your life. Those choices are done, the past is gone, nothing can change that. For reasons we will never know, Jeremy chose to end his life. You don’t get to choose for him.”
“I don’t know how to live with that.”
“Acceptance isn’t going to happen overnight. And you’re never going to be glad that he’s dead. But you get to choose a way forward. You get to discover that living a full life is the best way to honor him.”
Last year I received a Christmas card from Renée and Greg. It shows them standing by the Christmas tree with their daughter, a beautiful girl in a red dress. Greg embraces his daughter in one arm, his wife in the other. Over Renée’s shoulder, a picture of Jeremy sits on the mantel. It’s his last school picture, he wears a blue shirt, his smile larger than life. He isn’t the void in the family. He isn’t the shrine. He is present, he is always with them.
* * *
My mother’s mother’s portrait now lives in Magda’s house in Baltimore, above her piano, where she still gives lessons, where she guides her students with logic and heart. When Magda had surgery recently, she asked her daughter, Ilona, to bring our mother’s picture to the hospital so that Magda could do what our mother taught us: to call on the dead for strength, to let the dead live on in our hearts, to let our suffering and our fear lead us back to our love.
“Do you still have nightmares?” I asked Magda the other day.
“Yes. Always. Don’t you?”
“Yes,” I told my sister. “I do.”
I went back to Auschwitz and released the past, forgave myself. I went home and thought, “I’m done!” But closure is temporary. It’s not over till it’s over.
Despite—no, because of—our past, Magda and I have found meaning and purpose in different ways in the more than seventy years since liberation. I have discovered the healing arts. Magda has remained
a devoted pianist and piano teacher, and she has discovered new passions: bridge and gospel music. Gospel, because it sounds like crying—it is the strength of all the emotion let out. And bridge, because there’s strategy and control—a way to win. She is a reigning bridge champion; she hangs her framed awards on the wall in her house opposite our grandmother’s portrait.
Both of my sisters have protected and inspired me, have taught me to survive. Klara became a violinist in the Sydney Symphony Orchestra. Until the day she died—in her early eighties, of Alzheimer’s—she called me “little one.” More so than Magda or I did, Klara remained immersed in Jewish Hungarian immigrant culture. Béla and I loved to visit her and Csicsi, to enjoy the food, the language, the culture of our youth. We weren’t able to be together, all of us survivors, very often, but we did our best to gather up for major events—more celebrations our parents would not be present to witness. In the early 1980s, we met in Sydney for Klara’s daughter’s wedding. The three of us sisters had awaited this reunion with happy anticipation, and when we were finally together again, we went into a frenzy of embraces as emotional as the ones we shared in Košice when we found one another alive after the war.
No matter that we were now middle-aged women, no matter how far we had come in our lives, once in one another’s company it was funny how quickly we fell into the old patterns of our youth. Klara was in the spotlight, bossing us around, smothering us with attention; Magda was competitive and rebellious; I was the peacemaker, hustling between my sisters, soothing their conflicts, hiding my own thoughts. How easily we can make even the warmth and safety of family into a kind of prison. We rely on our old coping mechanisms. We become the person we think we need to be to please others. It takes willpower and choice not to step back into the confining roles we mistakenly believe will keep us safe and protected.
The night before the wedding, Magda and I came upon Klara alone in her daughter’s childhood bedroom, playing with her daughter’s old dolls. What we witnessed was more than a mother’s nostalgia over her grown child. Klara was caught up in her make-believe game. She was playing as a child would. My sister had never had a childhood, I realized. She was always the violin prodigy. She never got to be a little girl. When she wasn’t performing onstage, she performed for me and Magda, becoming our caretaker, our little mother. Now, as a middle-aged woman, she was trying to give herself the childhood she had never been allowed. Embarrassed to have been discovered with the dolls, Klara lashed out at us. “It’s too bad I wasn’t at Auschwitz,” she said. “If I’d been there, our mother would have lived.”
It was terrible to hear her say it. I felt all my old survivor’s guilt rushing back, the horror of the word I spoke that first day of Auschwitz, the horror of remembering it, of confronting that old, long-buried belief, however erroneous, that I had sent our mother to her death.
But I wasn’t a prisoner anymore. I could see my sister’s prison at work, hear her guilt and grief clawing through the blame she threw at me and Magda. And I could choose my own freedom. I could name my own feelings, of rage, worthlessness, sorrow, regret, I could let them swirl, let them rise and fall, let them pass. And I could risk letting go of the need to punish myself for having lived. I could release my guilt and reclaim my whole pure self.
There is the wound. And there is what comes out of it. I went back to Auschwitz searching for the feel of death so that I could finally exorcise it. What I found was my inner truth, the self I wanted to reclaim, my strength and my innocence.
CHAPTER 23
Liberation Day
In the summer of 2010, I was invited to Fort Carson, Colorado, to address an Army unit returning from combat in Afghanistan, a unit with a high suicide rate. I was there to talk about my own trauma—how I survived it, how I survived the return to everyday life, how I chose to be free—so the soldiers might also adjust more easefully to life after war. As I climbed up to the podium, I experienced a few brief internal skirmishes of discomfort, the old habits of being hard on myself, of wondering what a little Hungarian ballet student has to offer men and women of war. I reminded myself that I was there to share the most important truth I know, that the biggest prison is in your own mind, and in your pocket you already hold the key: the willingness to take absolute responsibility for your life; the willingness to risk; the willingness to release yourself from judgment and reclaim your innocence, accepting and loving yourself for who you really are—human, imperfect, and whole.
I called on my parents for strength, and my children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren too. Everything they’ve taught me, everything they’ve compelled me to discover. “My mama told me something I will never forget,” I began. “She said, ‘We don’t know where we’re going, we don’t know what’s going to happen, but no one can take away from you what you put in your own mind.’ ”
I have said these words countless times, to Navy SEALs and crisis first responders, to POWs and their advocates at the Department of Veterans Affairs, to oncologists and people living with cancer, to Righteous Gentiles, to parents and children, to Christians and Muslims and Buddhists and Jews, to law students and at-risk youth, to people grieving the loss of a loved one, to people preparing to die, and sometimes I spin when I say them, with gratitude, with sorrow. This time as I said the words, I almost fell from the stage. I was overcome by sensations, by sense memories I’ve stored deep inside: the smell of muddy grass, the fierce sweet taste of M&M’s. It took me a long moment to understand what was triggering the flashback. But then I realized: flanking the room were flags and insignias, and everywhere I saw an emblem I hadn’t thought about consciously for many, many years, but one that is as significant to me as the letters that spell my own name: the insignia the GI who liberated me on May 4, 1945, wore on his sleeve: a red circle with a jagged blue 71 in the center. I had been brought to Fort Carson to address the Seventy-first Infantry, the unit that sixty-five years ago had liberated me. I was bringing my story of freedom to the survivors of war who once brought freedom to me.
I used to ask, Why me? Why did I survive? I have learned to ask a different question: Why not me? Standing on a stage surrounded by the next generation of freedom fighters, I could see in my conscious awareness something that is often elusive, often invisible: that to run away from the past or to fight against our present pain is to imprison ourselves. Freedom is in accepting what is and forgiving ourselves, in opening our hearts to discover the miracles that exist now.
I laughed and wept on the stage. I was so full of joyful adrenaline that I could barely get out the words: “Thank you,” I told the soldiers. “Your sacrifice, your suffering, have meaning—and when you can discover that truth within, you will be free.” I ended my speech the way I always do, the way I always will, as long as my body will let me: with a high kick. Here I am! my kick says. I made it!
And here you are. Here you are! In the sacred present. I can’t heal you—or anyone—but I can celebrate your choice to dismantle the prison in your mind, brick by brick. You can’t change what happened, you can’t change what you did or what was done to you. But you can choose how you live now.
My precious, you can choose to be free.
Acknowledgments
I believe that people don’t come to me—they are sent to me. I offer my eternal gratitude to the many extraordinary people who have been sent to me, without whom my life wouldn’t be what it is, and without whom this book wouldn’t exist:
First and foremost, my precious sister Magda Gilbert—who is ninety-five years old and still blossoming, who kept me alive in Auschwitz—and her devoted daughter Ilona Shillman, who fights for the family like no other.
Klara Korda—who was larger than life, who truly became my second mom, who made every visit to Sydney a honeymoon, who created Friday night dinners like our mother’s, everything artfully done by hand—and Jeanie and Charlotte, the women following in her line. (Remember the Hungarian song? No, no, we’re not going away until you kick us out!) My patients, the u
nique and one-of-a-kind humans who have taught me that healing isn’t about recovery; it’s about discovery. Discovering hope in hopelessness, discovering an answer where there doesn’t seem to be one, discovering that it’s not what happens that matters—it’s what you do with it.
My wonderful teachers and mentors: Professor Whitworth; John Haddox, who introduced me to the existentialists and phenomenologists; Ed Leonard; Carl Rogers; Richard Farson; and especially Viktor Frankl, whose book gave me the verbal capacity to share my secret, whose letters showed me I didn’t have to run away anymore, and whose guidance helped me discover not only that I survived, but how I could help others to survive.
My amazing colleagues and friends in the healing arts: Dr. Harold Kolmer, Dr. Sid Zisook, Dr. Saul Levine, Steven Smith, Michael Curd, David Woehr, Bob Kaufman (my “adopted son”), Charlie Hogue, Patty Heffernan, and especially Phil Zimbardo, my “baby brother,” who wouldn’t rest until he’d helped find this book a publishing home.
The many people who have invited me to bring my story to audiences around the world, including: Howard and Henriette Peckett of YPO; Dr. Jim Henry; Dr. Sean Daneshmand and his wife, Marjan, of The Miracle Circle; Mike Hoge of Wingmen Ministries; and the International Conference of Logotherapy.
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