by Edith Eger
During the several hours’ train ride from Wels to Vienna, through Russian-occupied Austria, I scratch at the rash, from lice or rubella, that still covers my body. Home. We are going home. In two more days we will be home! And yet it is impossible to feel the joy of our homecoming uncoupled from the devastation of loss. I know my mother and grandparents are dead, and surely my father too. They have been dead for more than a year. To go home without them is to lose them again. Maybe Klara, I allow myself to hope. Maybe Eric.
In the seat next to ours, two brothers sit. They are survivors too. Orphans. From Kassa, like us! Lester and Imre, they are called. Later we will learn that their father was shot in the back as he walked between them on the Death March. Soon we will understand that out of more than fifteen thousand deportees from our hometown, we are among the only seventy who have survived the war.
“We have one another,” they say now. “We are lucky, lucky.”
Lester and Imre, Magda and me. We are the anomalies. The Nazis didn’t just murder millions of people. They murdered families. And now, beside the incomprehensible roster of the missing and the dead, our lives go on. Later we will hear stories from the displaced persons camps all over Europe. Reunions. Weddings. Births. We will hear of the special rations tickets issued to couples to obtain wedding clothes. We, too, will scour the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration newspapers and hold our breath, hoping to see familiar names among the list of survivors scattered over the Continent. But for now we do nothing but stare out the windows of the train, looking at empty fields, broken bridges, and, in some places, the fragile beginnings of crops. The Allied occupation of Austria will last another ten years. The mood in the towns we pass through isn’t of relief or celebration—it’s a teeth-clenched atmosphere of uncertainty and hunger. The war is over, but it’s not over.
“Do I have ugly lips?” Magda asks as we near the outskirts of Vienna. She is studying her reflection in the window glass, superimposed over the landscape.
“Why, are you planning to use them?” I joke with her, I try to coax out that relentlessly teasing part of her. I try to tamp my own impossible fantasies, that Eric is alive somewhere, that soon I will be a postwar bride under a makeshift veil. That I will be together with my beloved forever, never alone.
“I’m serious,” she says. “Tell me the truth.”
Her anxiety reminds me of our first day at Auschwitz when she stood naked with her shaved head, gripping strands of her hair. Maybe she condenses the huge global fears about what will happen next into more specific and personal fears—the fear that she is not attractive enough to find a man, the fear that her lips are ugly. Or maybe her questions are tangled up in deeper uncertainty—about her essential worth.
“What’s wrong with your lips?” I ask.
“Mama hated them. Someone on the street complimented my eyes once and she said, ‘Yes, she’s got beautiful eyes, but look at her thick lips.’”
Survival is black and white, no “buts” can intrude when you are fighting for your life. Now the “buts” come rushing in. We have bread to eat. Yes, but we are penniless. You are gaining weight. Yes, but my heart is heavy. You are alive. Yes, but my mother is dead.
Lester and Imre decide to stay on in Vienna for a few days; they promise to look for us at home. Magda and I board another train that will carry us eight hours northwest to Prague. A man blocks the entrance to the train car. “Nasa lude,” he sneers. Our people. He is Slovak. The Jews must ride on top of the train car.
“The Nazis lost,” Magda mutters, “but it’s the same as before.”
There is no other way to get home. We climb to the top of the train car, joining ranks with the other displaced persons. We hold hands. Magda sits beside a young man named Laci Gladstein. He caresses Magda’s fingers with his own, his fingers barely more than bones. We do not ask one another where we have been. Our bodies and our haunted eyes say everything there is to know. Magda leans against Laci’s thin chest, searching for warmth. I am jealous of the solace they seem to find in each other, the attraction, the belonging. I am too committed to my love for Eric, to my hope that I will find him again, to seek a man’s arms to hold me now. Even if I didn’t carry Eric’s voice with me still, I think I would be too afraid to look for comfort, for intimacy. I am skin and bones. I am covered in bugs and sores. Who would want me? Better not to risk connection and be denied, better not to have my damage confirmed. And besides, who would provide the best shelter now? Someone who knows what I have endured, a fellow survivor? Or someone who doesn’t, who can help me forget? Someone who knew me before I went through hell, who can help me back to my former self? Or someone who can look at me now without always seeing what’s been destroyed? I’ll never forget your eyes, Eric told me. I’ll never forget your hands. For more than a year I have held on to these words like a map that could lead me to freedom. But what if Eric can’t face what I have become? What if we find each other and build a life, only to find that our children are the children of ghosts?
I huddle against Magda. She and Laci talk about the future.
“I’m going to be a doctor,” he says.
It’s noble, a young man who, like me, was little more than dead only a month or two ago. He has lived, he will heal, he will heal others. His ambition reassures me. And it startles. He has come out of the death camps with dreams. It seems an unnecessary risk. Even now that I have known starvation and atrocity, I remember the pain of lesser hurts, of a dream ruined by prejudice, of the way my coach spoke to me when she cut me from the Olympic training team. I remember my grandfather, how he retired from the Singer Sewing Machine Company and waited for his pension check. How he waited and waited, how he talked of little else. Finally he received his first check. A week later we were evacuated to the brick factory. A few weeks later, he was dead. I don’t want to dream the wrong thing.
“I have an uncle in America,” Laci continues. “In Texas. I’ll go there, work, save up for school.”
“Maybe we’ll go to America too,” Magda says. She must be thinking of Aunt Matilda, in the Bronx. All around us on the top of the train car there is talk of America, of Palestine. Why keep living in the ashes of our loss? Why keep scratching for survival in a place where we’re not wanted? Soon we will learn of the restrictive immigration limits in America and Palestine. There is no haven free of limitation, of prejudice. Wherever we go, life might always be like this. Trying to ignore the fear that any minute we’ll be bombed, shot, tossed in a ditch. Or at best forced to ride on top of the train. Holding hands against the wind.
In Prague we are to change trains again. We say goodbye to Laci. Magda gives him our old address, Kossuth Lajos Utca #6. He promises to keep in touch. There’s time before the next departure, time to stretch our legs, sit in the sun and the quiet to eat our bread. I want to find a park. I want to see green growth, flowers. I close my eyes every few steps and take in the smells of a city, the streets and sidewalks and civilian bustle. Bakeries, car exhaust, perfume. It’s hard to believe that all of this existed while we were in our hell. I gaze in shop windows. It doesn’t matter that I am penniless. It will matter, of course. In Košice food won’t be given out for free. But at this moment I feel completely full just seeing that there are dresses and stockings to buy, jewelry, pipes, stationery. Life and commerce go on. A woman fingers the weight of a summer dress. A man admires a necklace. Things aren’t important, but beauty is. Here is a city full of people who have not lost the capacity to imagine, make, and admire beautiful things. I will be a resident again—a resident of somewhere. I will run errands and buy gifts. I will stand in line at the post office. I will eat bread that I have baked. I will wear fine couture in honor of my father. I will go to the opera in honor of my mother, of how she would sit at the edge of her chair listening to Wagner, how she would weep. I will go to the symphony. And for Klara, I’ll seek out every performance of Mendelssohn’s violin concerto. That longing and wistfulness. The urgency as the line climbs, and t
hen the rippling cadenza, the crashing, rising chords. And then the more sinister theme in the strings, threatening the solo violin’s rising dreams. Standing on the sidewalk, I’ve closed my eyes so I can hear the echo of my sister’s violin. Magda startles me.
“Wake up, Dicu!”
And when I open my eyes, right here in the thick of the city, near the entrance to the park, there’s a concert poster advertising a performance with a solo violinist.
The picture on the poster is my sister’s.
There on the paper my Klarie sits, holding her violin.
CHAPTER 8
In Through a Window
WE STEP OFF the train in Košice. Our hometown is no longer in Hungary. It is part of Czechoslovakia again. We blink into the June sun. We have no money for a taxi, no money for anything, no idea if our family’s old apartment is occupied, no idea how we will find a way to live. But we are home. We are ready to search for Klara. Klara, who gave a concert in Prague only weeks ago. Klara who, somewhere, is alive.
We walk through Mestský Park, toward the center of town. People sit at outdoor tables, on benches. Children gather around the fountains. There’s the clock where we watched the boys gather to meet Magda. There’s the balcony of our father’s shop, the gold medals blazing from the railing. He’s here! I am so certain of it that I smell his tobacco, feel his mustache on my cheek. But the windows of the shop are dark. We walk toward our apartment at Kossuth Lajos Utca #6, and here on the sidewalk near the place where the wagon parked before it carried us to the brick factory, a miracle occurs. Klara materializes, walking out the front door. Her hair is braided and coiled like our mother’s. She carries her violin. When she sees me, she drops the violin case on the sidewalk and runs to me. She’s moaning. “Dicuka, Dicuka!” she cries. She picks me up like a baby, her arms a cradle.
“Don’t hug us!” Magda shrieks. “We’re covered in bugs and sores!”
I think what she means is, Dear sister, we’re scarred. She means, Don’t let what we’ve seen hurt you. Don’t make it worse. Don’t ask us what happened. Don’t vanish into thin air.
Klara rocks me and rocks me. “This is my little one!” she calls to a passing stranger. From this moment on she becomes my mother. She has already seen in our faces that the position is empty and must be filled.
It has been at least a year and a half since we have seen her. She is on her way to the radio station to give a concert. We are desperate not to have her out of sight, out of touch. “Stay, stay,” we beg. But she is already late. “If I don’t play, we don’t eat,” she says. “Hurry, follow me inside.” Maybe it is a blessing that there is no time to talk now. We wouldn’t know how to begin. Though it must shock Klara to see us so physically ravaged, maybe that is a blessing too. There is something concrete Klara can do to express her love and relief, to point us in the direction of healing. It will take more than rest. Perhaps we will never recover. But there is something she can do right now. She brings us inside and strips off our dirty clothes. She helps us stretch out on the white sheets in the bed where our parents used to sleep. She rubs calamine lotion into the rash that covers our bodies. The rash that makes us itch and itch, that passes instantly from our bodies to hers so she can barely play her concert for the burning all over her skin. Our reunion is physical.
Magda and I spend at least a week in bed, naked, bodies doused in calamine. Klara doesn’t ask us questions. She doesn’t ask us where our mother and father are. She talks so that we don’t have to. She talks so that she doesn’t have to hear. Everything she tells us is phrased like a miracle. And it is miraculous. Here we are together. We are the lucky ones. There are few reunions like ours. Our aunt and uncle—our mother’s siblings—were thrown off a bridge and drowned in the Danube, Klara tells us, blunt, matter-of-fact, but when the last remaining Jews in Hungary were rounded up, she escaped detection. She lived in her professor’s house, disguised as a gentile. “One day my professor said, ‘You have to learn the Bible tomorrow, you are going to start teaching it, you are going to live in a nunnery.’ It seemed like the best way to keep me hidden. The convent was nearly two hundred miles from Budapest. I wore a habit. But one day a girl from the academy recognized me, and I snuck away on a train back to Budapest.”
Sometime in the summer, she got a letter from our parents. It was the letter they had written while we were in the brick factory, telling Klara where we were imprisoned, that we were together, safe, that we thought we would be transferred to a work camp called Kenyérmező. I remember seeing my mother drop the letter onto the street during our evacuation from the brick factory, since there was no way to mail it. At the time I thought she had dropped it in resignation. But listening to Klara tell her story of survival, I see things differently. In releasing the letter, my mother wasn’t relinquishing hope—she was kindling it. Either way, whether she dropped the letter in defeat or in hope, she took a risk. The letter pointed a finger at my sister, a blond-haired Jew hiding in Budapest. It gave her address. While we trundled in the dark toward Auschwitz, someone, a stranger, held that letter in his hand. He could have opened it, he could have turned Klara in to the nyilas. He could have thrown the letter away in the trash, or left it in the street. But this stranger put a stamp on it and mailed it to Klara in Budapest. This is as unbelievable to me as my sister’s reappearance, it’s a magic trick, evidence of a lifeline that runs between us, evidence, too, that kindness still existed in the world even then. Through the dirt kicked up by three thousand pairs of feet, many of them headed straight for a chimney in Poland, our mother’s letter flew. A blond-haired girl set her violin down to rip open the seal.
Klara tells another story with a happy ending. With the knowledge that we’d been evacuated to the brick factory, that we expected any day to get shipped away, to Kenyérmező or who knows where, she went to the German consulate in Budapest to demand to be sent to wherever we were. At the consulate, the doorman told her, “Little girl, go away. Don’t come in here.” She wasn’t going to be told no. She tried to sneak back in the building. The doorman saw her and beat her up, punching her shoulders, her arms, her stomach, her face. “Get out of here,” he said again.
“He beat me up and saved my life,” she tells us.
Near the end of the war when the Russians surrounded Budapest, the Nazis became even more determined to rid the city of Jews. “We had to carry identification cards with our name, religion, picture. They were checking these cards all the time on the streets, and if they saw you were a Jew they might kill you. I did not want to carry my card, but I was afraid I would need something to prove who I was after the war. So I decided to give mine to a girlfriend to keep for me. She lived across the harbor, so I had to cross the bridge to get there, and when I got to the bridge the soldiers were checking identification. They said, ‘Please show me who you are.’ I said I had nothing, and somehow, I don’t know how, they let me go across. My blond hair and blue eyes must have convinced them. I never went back to my friend’s house to retrieve the card.”
When you can’t go in through a door, go in through a window, our mother used to say. There is no door for survival. Or recovery either. It’s all windows. Latches you can’t reach easily, panes too small, spaces where a body shouldn’t fit. But you can’t stand where you are. You must find a way.
After the German surrender, while Magda and I were recovering in Wels, Klara went to a consulate again, this time the Russian consulate, because Budapest had been liberated from Nazi control by the Red Army, and tried to learn what had become of us. They had no information about our family, but in exchange for a free concert, they offered to help her get home to Košice. “When I played, two hundred Russians attended, and then I was brought home on top of a train. They watched over me when we stopped and slept.” When she opened the door to our old apartment, everything was in disarray, our furniture and possessions looted. The rooms had been used as a stable and the floors were covered in horse manure. While we were learning to eat, walk, write our na
mes in Wels, Klara began playing concerts for money and scrubbing the floors.
And now we’ve come. When our rashes are healed, we take turns leaving the apartment. There is only one good pair of shoes among the three of us. When it’s my turn to wear the shoes, I walk slowly on the sidewalk, back and forth, still too weak to go far. A neighbor recognizes me. “I’m surprised to see you made it,” he says. “You were always such a skinny little kid.” I could feel triumph. Against all odds, a happy ending! But I feel guilt. Why me? Why did I make it? There is no explanation. It’s a fluke. Or a mistake.
People can be sorted two ways: survived; didn’t. The latter are not here to tell their tale. The portrait of our mother’s mother still hangs on the wall. Her dark hair is parted down the middle and pulled back in a tight bun. A few curly strands feather across her smooth forehead. She doesn’t smile in the picture, but her eyes are more sincere than severe. She watches us, knowing and no-nonsense. Magda talks to her portrait as our mother used to do. Sometimes she asks for help. Sometimes she mutters and rants. “Those Nazi bastard … The fucking nyilas …” The piano that lived against the wall under her portrait is gone. The piano was so present in our daily lives that it was almost invisible, like breath. Now its absence dominates the room. Magda rages at the empty space. With the piano gone, something in her is missing too. A piece of her identity. An outlet for her self-expression. In its absence, she finds anger. Vibrant, full voiced, willful. I admire her for it. My anger turns inward and congeals in my lungs.