by Edith Eger
“When the war ends …” a guard says. He doesn’t finish the thought. This is the kind of future talk that Eric and I once entertained. After the wa… If I concentrate in just the right way, can I figure out if he still lives? I pretend that I’m waiting outside a train station where I will buy a ticket, but I have only one chance to figure out the city where I am to meet him. Prague? Vienna? Düsseldorf? Prešov? Paris? I reach into my pocket, feeling reflexively for my passport. Eric, my sweet love, I am on my way. A female border guard shouts at me and Magda in German and points us to a different line. I start to move. Magda stays still. The guard shouts again. Magda won’t move, won’t respond. Is she delirious? Why won’t she follow me? The guard yells in Magda’s face and Magda shakes her head.
“I don’t understand,” Magda says to the guard in Hungarian. Of course she understands. We’re both fluent in German.
“Yes, you do!” the guard shouts.
“I don’t understand,” Magda repeats. Her voice is completely neutral. Her shoulders are straight and tall. Am I missing something? Why is she pretending not to understand? There is nothing to be gained from defiance. Has she lost her mind? The two continue to argue. Except Magda isn’t arguing. She is only repeating, flatly, calmly, that she doesn’t understand, she doesn’t understand. The guard loses control. She smacks Magda’s face with the butt of her gun. She beats her again across the shoulders. She hits and hits until Magda topples over and the guard gestures to me and another girl to drag her away with us.
Magda is bruised and coughing, but her eyes shine. “I said, ‘No!’” she says. “I said, ‘No.’” For her, it is a marvelous beating. It is proof of her power. She held her ground while the guard lost control. Magda’s civil disobedience makes her feel like the author of choice, not the victim of fate.
But the power Magda feels is short-lived. Soon we are marching again, toward a place worse than any we have yet seen.
We arrive at Mauthausen. It’s an all-male concentration camp at a quarry where prisoners are made to hack and carry granite that will be used to build Hitler’s fantasy city, a new capital for Germany, a new Berlin. I see nothing but stairs and bodies. The stairs are white stone and stretch up and up ahead of us, as though we could walk them to the sky. The bodies are everywhere, in heaps. Bodies crooked and splayed like pieces of broken fence. Bodies so skeletal and disfigured and tangled that they barely have a human shape. We stand in a line on the white stairs. The Stairs of Death, they are called. We are waiting on the stairs for another selection, we presume, that will point us to death or more work. Rumors shudder down the line. The inmates at Mauthausen, we learn, have to carry 110-pound blocks of stone from the quarry below up the 186 stairs, running in line. I picture my ancestors, the pharaoh’s slaves in Egypt, bent under the weight of stones. Here on the Stairs of Death, we’re told, when you’re carrying a stone, running up the stairs, and someone in front of you trips or collapses, you are the next to fall, and on, and on, until the whole line buckles into a heap. If you survive, it’s worse, we hear. You have to stand along a wall at the edge of a cliff. Fallschirmspringerwand, it’s called—the Parachutist’s Wall. At gunpoint, you choose: Will you be shot to death, or will you push the inmate beside you off the cliff?
“Just push me,” Magda says. “If it comes to that.”
“Me too,” I say. I would rather fall a thousand times than see my sister shot. We are too weak and starved to say this out of politeness. We say this out of love, but also out of self-preservation. Don’t give me another heavy thing to carry. Let me fall among the stones.
I weigh less, much less, than the rocks the inmates lift up the Stairs of Death. I am so light I could drift like a leaf or a feather. Down, down. I could fall now. I could just fall backward instead of taking the next step up. I think I am empty now. There is no heaviness to hold me to the earth. I am about to indulge this fantasy of weightlessness, of releasing the burden of being alive, when someone ahead of me in line breaks the spell.
“There’s the crematorium,” she says.
I look up. We have been away from the death camps for so many months that I have forgotten how matter-of-factly the chimneys rise. In a way, they are reassuring. To feel death’s proximity, death’s imminence, in the straight stack of brick—to see the chimney that is a bridge, that will house your passage from flesh to air—to consider yourself already dead—makes a certain kind of sense.
And yet, as long as that chimney produces smoke, I have something to fight against. I have a purpose. “We die in the morning,” the rumors announce. I can feel resignation tugging at me like gravity, an inevitable and constant force.
Night falls and we sleep on the stairs. Why have they waited so long to begin the selection? My courage wavers. We die in the morning. In the morning we die. Did my mother know what was about to happen when she joined the line of children and the elderly? When she saw Magda and me pointed a different way? Did she fight death? Did she accept it? Did she remain oblivious until the end? Does it matter, when you go, if you are aware that you are dying? We die in the morning. In the morning we die. I hear the rumor, the certainty, repeat as though it is echoing off the quarry rock. Have we really been marched these many hundreds of miles only to vanish?
I want to organize my mind. I don’t want my last thoughts to be cliché ones, or despondent ones. What’s the point? What has it all meant? I don’t want my last thoughts to be a replaying of the horrors we’ve seen. I want to feel alive. I want to savor what aliveness is. I think of Eric’s voice and his lips. I try to conjure thoughts that might still have the power to make me tingle. I’ll never forget your eyes. I’ll never forget your hands. That’s what I want to remember—warmth in my chest, a flush across my skin—though “remember” isn’t the right word. I want to enjoy my body while I still have one. An eternity ago, in Kassa, my mother forbade me to read Émile Zola’s Nana, but I snuck it into the bathroom and read it in secret. If I die tomorrow, I will die a virgin. Why have I had a body at all, never to know it completely? So much of my life has been a mystery. I remember the day I got my first period. I rode my bike home after school, and when I got there I saw blood streaks all over my white skirt. I was frightened. I ran to my mother, crying, asking her to help me locate the wound. She slapped me. I didn’t know it was a Hungarian tradition for a girl to be slapped upon her first period. I didn’t know about menstruation at all. No one, not my mother or sisters or teachers or coaches or friends, had ever explained anything about my anatomy. I knew there was something men had that women didn’t. I’d never seen my father naked, but I’d felt that part of Eric pressing against me when he held me. He had never asked me to touch it, had never acknowledged his body. I had liked the feeling that his body—and my own—were mysteries waiting to be uncovered, something that caused an energy to shoot between us when we touched.
Now it was a mystery I would never solve. I had experienced little stars of desire but would now never feel their fulfillment, the whole promised galaxy of light. I cry about it now, on the Stairs of Death. It is terrible to lose, to have lost, all the known things: mother, father, sister, boyfriend, country, home. Why do I have to lose the things I don’t know too? Why do I have to lose the future? My potential? The children I’ll never mother? The wedding dress my father will never make? I’m going to die a virgin. I don’t want this to be my last thought. I should think about God.
I try to picture an immovable power. Magda has lost her faith. She and many others. “I can’t believe in a God who would let this happen,” they say. I understand what they mean. And yet I’ve never found it difficult to see that it isn’t God who is killing us in gas chambers, in ditches, on cliff sides, on 186 white stairs. God doesn’t run the death camps. People do. But here is the horror again and I don’t want to indulge it. I picture God as being like a dancing child. Sprightly and innocent and curious. I must be also if I am to be close to God now. I want to keep alive the part of me that feels wonder, that wonders, until the very
end. I wonder if anyone knows that I am here, knows what’s going on, that there is such a place as an Auschwitz, a Mauthausen? I wonder if my parents can see me now. I wonder if Eric can. I wonder what a man looks like naked. There are men all around me. Men no longer living. It wouldn’t hurt their pride anymore for me to look. The worse transgression would be to relinquish my curiosity, I convince myself.
I leave Magda sleeping on the stairs and crawl to the muddy hillside where the corpses are piled. I won’t undress anyone still in clothes. I won’t tamper with the dead. But if a man has fallen, I will look.
I see a man, his legs askew. They don’t seem to belong to the same body, but I can make out the place where the legs are joined. I see hair like mine, dark, coarse, and a little appendage. It’s like a little mushroom, a tender thing that pushes out of the dirt. How strange that women’s parts are all tucked away and men’s are exposed, so vulnerable. I feel satisfied. I won’t die ignorant of the biology that made me.
At daybreak, the line starts to move. We don’t talk much. Some wail. Some pray. Mostly we are private in our dread or regret or resignation or relief. I don’t tell Magda what I saw the night before. This line is moving quickly. There won’t be much time. I try to remember the constellations I used to recognize in the night sky. I try to remember the taste of my mother’s bread.
“Dicuka,” Magda says, but it takes me a few hollow breaths to recognize my name. We’ve reached the top of the stairs. The selection officer is just ahead. Everyone is being sent in the same direction. This isn’t a selection line. It’s an ushering. It really is the end. They’ve waited until morning to send us all to death. Should we make a promise to each other? An apology? What is there that must be said? Five girls ahead of us now. What should I say to my sister? Two girls.
And then the line stops. We’re led toward a crowd of SS guards by a gate.
“If you try to run, you’ll be shot!” they shout at us. “If you fall behind, you’ll be shot.”
We have been saved again. Inexplicably.
We march.
This is the Death March, from Mauthausen to Gunskirchen. It is the shortest distance we have been forced to walk, but we are so weakened by then that only one hundred out of the two thousand of us will survive. Magda and I cling to each other, determined to stay together, to stay upright. Each hour, hundreds of girls fall into the ditches on either side of the road. Too weak or too ill to keep moving, they’re killed on the spot. We are like the head of a dandelion gone to seed and blown by the wind, only a few white tufts remaining. Hunger is my only name.
Every part of me is in pain; every part of me is numb. I can’t walk another step. I ache so badly I can’t feel myself move. I am just a circuitry of pain, a signal that feeds back on itself. I don’t know that I have stumbled until I feel the arms of Magda and the other girls lifting me. They have laced their fingers together to form a human chair.
“You shared your bread,” one of them says.
The words don’t mean anything to me. When have I ever tasted bread? But then a memory rises up. Our first night at Auschwitz. Mengele ordering the music and Mengele ordering me to dance. This body danced. This mind dreamt of the opera house. This body ate that bread. I am the one who had the thought that night and who thinks it again now: Mengele killed my mother; Mengele let me live. Now a girl who shared a crust with me nearly a year ago has recognized me. She uses her last strength to interlace her fingers with Magda’s and those of the other girls and lift me up into the air. In a way, Mengele allowed this moment to happen. He didn’t kill any of us that night or any night after. He gave us bread.
CHAPTER 6
To Choose a Blade of Grass
THERE IS ALWAYS a worse hell. That is our reward for living. When we stop marching, we are at Gunskirchen Lager. It’s a subcamp of Mauthausen, a few wooden buildings in a marshy forest near a village, a camp built to house a few hundred slave laborers, where eighteen thousand are crowded now. It is not a death camp. There are no gas chambers here, no crematoria. But there is no doubt that we have been sent here to die.
It is already hard to tell who is living and who is dead. Disease passes into and between our bodies. Typhus. Dysentery. White lice. Open sores. Flesh upon flesh. Living and rotting. A horse’s carcass half gnawed. Eat it raw. Who needs a knife to cut the flesh? Just gnaw it away from the bone. You sleep three deep, in the crowded wooden structures or on the bare ground. If someone below you dies, keep sleeping. No strength to haul the dead away. There’s a girl doubled over in hunger. There’s a foot, black, rotted through. We have been herded into the dank, thick woods to be killed in a giant blaze, all of us lit on fire. The whole place is rigged with dynamite. We wait for the explosion that will consume us in its flame. Until the big blast there are the other hazards: starvation, fever, disease. There is only one twenty-hole latrine for the entire camp. If you can’t wait your turn to defecate, they shoot you right there, where your waste has pooled. Trash fires smolder. The earth is a mud pit, and if you can find the strength to walk, your feet spin in a pulp that is part mud, part shit. It is five or six months since we left Auschwitz.
Magda flirts. That is her answer to death’s beckoning. She meets a Frenchman, a guy from Paris, who lived before the war on Rue de something, an address I tell myself I won’t ever forget. Even in the depths of this horror there is chemistry, person to person, that gallop in the throat, that brightening. I watch them talk as though they are seated at a summer café, little plates clinking between them. This is what the living do. We use our sacred pulse as a flint against fear. Don’t ruin your spirit. Send it up like a torch. Tell the Frenchman your name and tuck his address away, savor it, chew it slowly like bread.
In just a few days at Gunskirchen I become a person who cannot walk. Although I don’t know it yet, I have a broken back (even now I don’t know when the injury occurred, or how). I only sense that I have reached the end of my reserves. I lie out in the heavy air, my body entwined with strangers’ bodies, all of us in a heap, some already dead, some long dead, some, like me, barely alive. I see things I know aren’t real. I see them all mixed in with the things that are real but shouldn’t be. My mother reads to me. Scarlett cries, “I’ve loved something that doesn’t really exist.” My father throws me a petit four. Klara starts the Mendelssohn violin concerto. She plays by the window so that a passerby will notice her, lift a face toward her, so she can beckon for the attention she craves but can’t ask for outright. This is what the living do. We set strings vibrating with our needs.
Here in hell, I watch a man eat human flesh. Could I do it? For the sake of my own life, could I put my mouth around the skin left hanging on a dead person’s bones and chew? I have seen flesh defiled in unforgivable cruelty. A boy tied to a tree while the SS officers shot his foot, his hand, his arms, an ear—an innocent child used as target practice. Or the pregnant woman who somehow made it to Auschwitz without being killed outright. When she went into labor, the SS tied her legs together. I’ve never seen agony like hers. But it’s watching a starving person eat a dead person’s flesh that makes the bile rise in me, that makes my vision black. I cannot do it. And yet I must eat. I must eat or I will die. Out of the trampled mud grows grass. I stare at the blades, I see their different lengths and shades. I will eat grass. I will choose this blade of grass over that one. I will occupy my mind with the choice. This is what it means to choose. To eat or not eat. To eat grass or to eat flesh. To eat this blade or that one. Mostly we sleep. There is nothing to drink. I lose all sense of time. I am often asleep. Even when I am awake I struggle to remain conscious.
Once I see Magda crawling back to me with a can in her hand, a can that glints in the sun. A can of sardines. The Red Cross, in its neutrality, has been allowed to deliver aid to prisoners, and Magda has huddled in a line and been handed a can of sardines. But there’s no way to open it. It’s just a new flavor of cruelty. Even a good intention, a good deed, becomes futility. My sister is dying slowly of starvation
; my sister holds food in her hand. She clutches the tin the way she clutched her hair once, trying to hold on to herself. An unopenable can of fish is the most human part of her now. We are the dead and the near dead. I can’t tell which I am.
I am aware at the corners of my consciousness of day trading places with night. When I open my eyes, I don’t know if I have slept or fainted, or for how long. I don’t have the capacity to ask, How long? Sometimes I can feel that I am breathing. Sometimes I try to move my head to look for Magda. Sometimes I can’t think of her name.
Cries break me out of a sleep that resembles death. The cries must be death’s herald. I wait for the promised explosion, for the promised heat. I keep my eyes closed and wait to burn. But there’s no explosion. There’s no flame. I open my eyes, and I can see jeeps rolling slowly in through the pine forest that obscures the camp from the road and from the sky. “The Americans have arrived! The Americans are here!” This is what the feeble are shouting. The jeeps look wavy and blurry, as if I am watching them through water or in an intense heat. Could this be a collective hallucination? Someone is singing “When the Saints Go Marching In.” For more than seventy years these sensory impressions have stayed with me, indelible. But as they happen, I have no idea what they mean. I see men in fatigues. I see flags with stars and stripes—American flags, I realize. I see flags emblazoned with the number 71. I see an American handing cigarettes to inmates, who are so hungry they eat them, paper and all. I watch from a tangle of bodies. I can’t tell which legs are my legs. “Are there any living here?” the Americans call in German. “Raise your hand if you are alive.” I try to move my fingers to signal that I am alive. A soldier walks so near to me that I can see the streaks of mud on his pants. I can smell his sweat. Here I am, I want to call. I’m here. I have no voice. He scours the bodies. His eyes pass over me without recognition. He holds a piece of dirty cloth to his face. “Raise your hand if you can hear me,” he says. He barely moves the cloth away from his mouth when he speaks. I work to find my fingers. You’ll never get out of here alive, they’ve said: the kapo who ripped out my earrings, the SS officer with the tattoo gun who didn’t want to waste the ink, the forewoman in the thread factory, the SS who shot us down on the long, long march. This is how it feels for them to be right.