The Choice

by Edith Eger

  Klara and Csicsi marry in the spring of 1947, and Béla and I drive to Košice in his green Opel Adam for the ceremony. It’s another momentous occasion that our parents miss, another happy day made less so by their absence. But I am pregnant and my life is full and I will not let sorrow pull me down. Magda plays the family piano. She sings the tunes our father used to sing. Béla struggles with competing notions: to sweep me up in a dance or to make me sit and rest my feet. My sisters lay their hands on my belly. This new life inside me belongs to all of us. It’s our new beginning. A piece of our parents, and grandparents, that will continue on and out into the future.

  That is the topic of conversation as we take a break from the music, as the men light up cigars. The future. Csicsi’s brother Imre will leave soon for Sydney. Our family group is already so small. I don’t like the thought of us dispersing. Prešov already feels so far away from my sisters. Before the night is through, before Béla and I drive home, Klara pulls me and Magda into the bedroom.

  “I have to tell you something, little one,” she says.

  I can tell from Magda’s frown that she already knows what Klara is about to say.

  “If Imre goes to Sydney,” Klara says, “we will go there too.”

  Australia. Among our friends in Prešov, because of the Communist takeover under way in Czechoslovakia, there is also talk of immigrating, maybe to Israel, maybe to America, but the immigration policies are looser in Australia. Ava and her husband have mentioned Sydney too. But it is so far away. “What about your career?” I ask Klara.

  “There are orchestras in Sydney.”

  “You don’t speak English.” I am throwing every excuse at her. As if these are objections she hasn’t already thought of herself.

  “Csicsi made a promise,” she says. “Just before he died, Csicsi’s father told him to take care of his brother. If Imre goes, we go.”

  “So you’re both abandoning me,” Magda says. “After all that work to survive, I thought we’d stick together.”

  I remember the April night, only two years ago, when I worried that Magda might die, when I risked a beating or worse to scale a wall and pick her fresh carrots. We survived a haunting ordeal—we each survived because we had the other for protection, and because we each held the other as something to live for. I have my sister to thank for my very life.

  “You’ll be married soon,” I reassure her. “You’ll see. No one is sexier than you.”

  I don’t yet understand that my sister’s pain has less to do with loneliness and more to do with the belief that she is undeserving of love. But where she sees pain, hell, deficit, damage, I see something else. I see her courage. I see her triumph and her strength. It is like our first day at Auschwitz, when the absence of her hair revealed to me with new clarity the beauty of her eyes.

  “Are you interested in anyone?” I ask her. I want to gossip as we did when we were girls. Magda always offers scintillating information, or funny impersonations—she can make even heavy things feel light. I want her to dream.

  Magda shakes her head. “I’m not thinking about a person,” she says. “I’m thinking about a place.” She points to a postcard she has tucked in the frame of the mirror on her dresser. The picture shows a barren desert, a bridge. El Paso, the script across the image reads. It’s from Laci. “He got away,” Magda says. “So can I.”

  To me, El Paso looks like the end of the Earth. “Has Laci asked you to join him?”

  “Dicuka, my life is no fairy tale. I’m not counting on a man to rescue me.” She drums her fingers in her lap as though she is playing piano. There is more she wants to say. “Do you remember what Mama had in her pocket the day she died?”

  “Klarie’s caul.”

  “And a dollar bill. A dollar Aunt Matilda had sent sometime, from America.”

  Why don’t I know this? There were so many little things our mother did to signal hope. Not just the dollar bill, which I don’t remember, and the caul, which I do, but the schmaltz, the chicken fat she packed along for cooking in the brick factory, the letter to Klara. Magda seems to mirror our mother’s practicality, and also her hope.

  “Laci’s not going to marry me,” she says. “But somehow, I’m getting to America.” She has written to Aunt Matilda, asking her to send an affidavit of support sponsoring her immigration.

  Australia. America. While the next generation stirs inside me, my sisters threaten to float out of reach. I was the first to choose a new life after the war. Now they are choosing. I am glad for them. Yet I think of the day during the war when I was too sick to work, when Magda went to the ammunition factory without me and it was bombed, when Magda could have run free but chose to return to the barracks to rescue me. I have found a good and lucky life. There is no need for her to see to my survival now. But if there is one small piece of hell I miss, it is the part that made me understand that survival is a matter of interdependence, that survival isn’t possible alone. In choosing different directions, my sisters and I, are we in danger of breaking the spell?

  Béla is out of town when I feel the first contractions early one September morning. They cinch and cinch, strong enough to snap me. I call Klara. By the time she arrives two hours later, the doctor still isn’t there. I labor in the same room that Béla was born in, the same bed. When I buckle against the pain, I feel a connection to his mother, a woman I never had the chance to meet. This baby I’m working to get into the world will have no grandparents. The doctor still hasn’t come. Klara hovers near me, offering me water, wiping my face. “Get away!” I yell at her. “I can’t stand your smell.” I can’t be the baby and birth a baby. I have to inhabit myself and she is distracting me. Out of the razor-sharp haziness of labor comes the memory of the pregnant woman in Auschwitz who labored in agony with her tied-together legs. I can’t stop her face, her voice from coming into the room with me now. She haunts me. She inspires me. Every impulse in her body, her heart, pointing to life, while she and her baby were both consigned to an unspeakably cruel death. The sorrow breaks across me. I am a landslide. I will break myself open on the sharp edge of her torment. I will accept this pain because she didn’t have a choice. I will accept my pain so that it might erase hers, might erase every memory, because if this pain doesn’t destroy me, memory might. The doctor finally comes. My waters burst and I feel the baby shoot out of me. “It’s a little girl!” Klara yells. For a moment I feel complete. I am here. My baby girl is here. All is well and right.

  I want to name her Anna-Marie, a romantic name, a French-sounding name, but the Communists keep a roster of the permissible names, and Anna-Marie isn’t allowed. So we choose the inversion: Marianne, a tribute to Béla’s cousin Marianna, the one who still calls me a dumb goose for having broken up the engagement between Béla and her friend, the friend who is now dead. Béla hands out cigars. He won’t bow to the tradition of passing out cigars only for sons. His daughter will be celebrated by every ritual, every act of pride. He brings me a jeweler’s box. Inside is a gold bracelet of linked squares the size of postage stamps, made of two kinds of gold. It looks heavy, but it’s light.

  “To the future,” Béla says, and clasps it around my wrist.

  He says it and I know the direction of my life. This is what I will stand for: this child. My commitment to her will be as complete and unified as the gold circle around my wrist. I can see my purpose. I will live to ensure that she will never experience what I did. The continuity, from me to her, will grow out of our shared roots, making a new branch, a limb that climbs toward hope and joy.

  Still, we take precautions. We christen her. For safety’s sake. The same reason our friends Marta and Bandi use a Hungarian last name, Vadasz, meaning “hunter,” instead of their Jewish name.

  But what control do we really have? Marta’s baby is born dead.

  Marianne weighs ten pounds at birth. She takes up the whole carriage.

  “Do I breast-feed?” I ask the German pediatrician.

  “What do you think your t
its are for?” she says.

  My milk is an abundance. I have more than enough to feed Marianne and also my friend Ava’s baby girl. I can feed every hunger. I stand for plenty. I lean down into her when I nurse so that she never has to strain for my body, her source. I give her every drop. When she empties me, I feel the most full.

  Marianne is so protected and cuddled and cared for and bundled up that when, in November 1948, she is fourteen months old and falls ill, I don’t believe it at first. I know how to read her fussiness. She’s hungry, I think. She’s tired. But when I go to her again in the night, a fever rages. She is coal-hot. Her eyes are glassy. Her body complains; cries come out. But she is too sick to register my presence. Or I make no difference. She doesn’t want to nurse. My arms are no comfort. Every few minutes a deep throttling cough seizes up her chest. I wake the household. Béla calls the doctor, the doctor who delivered him, who delivered Marianne, and paces the room where he was born.

  The doctor is stern with me. She has pneumonia. “This is life or death,” he says. He sounds angry, as if the illness is my fault, as if he can’t let me forget that from the very beginning Marianne’s life has been founded on risk, on my foolish audacity. Now see what has come to pass. But maybe what sounds like anger is just weariness. He lives to heal. How often his labor must end in loss.

  “What do we do?” Béla asks. “Tell us what to do.”

  “You’ve heard of penicillin?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “Get your baby penicillin. And fast.”

  Béla stares at him, dumbfounded, as the doctor buttons his coat. “You’re the doctor. Where’s the penicillin?” he demands.

  “Mr. Eger, there is no penicillin in this country. None that you can buy legally. Good night. Good luck.”

  “I’ll pay any price!”

  “Yes,” the doctor says. “You must make your own arrangements.”

  “The Communists?” I suggest when the doctor has left. They liberated Slovakia from Nazi occupation. They have been courting Béla, courting his wealth and influence. They have offered him a position as minister of agriculture if he will join the party.

  Béla shakes his head. “Black market sellers will have more direct access,” he says.

  Marianne has fallen back into a fitful sleep. I must keep her hydrated, but she won’t accept water or milk. “Get me the cash,” I say, “and tell me where to go.”

  Black market dealers run business alongside the legal sellers at the market in the center of town. Béla will be recognized, but I can preserve my anonymity. I am to visit the butcher and say a coded message, and then go to the baker and say another code, and then someone will seek me out. The dealer intercepts me near the flower vendor.

  “Penicillin,” I say. “Enough for a sick child.”

  He laughs at the impossibility of my request. “There’s no penicillin here,” he says. “I’ll have to fly to London. I can leave today. Return tomorrow. It’ll cost.” The price he names is twice the amount Béla has wrapped in newspaper and put in my purse.

  I don’t waver. I say what I will pay him. I say the exact amount I carry. “It must be done. If you don’t go, I’ll find someone else.” I think of the guard the day we left Auschwitz, my cartwheel, his wink. I have to speak to the part of this man that will cooperate with me. “You see this bracelet?” I pull up my sleeve to reveal the gold bracelet that I have worn every day since Marianne’s birth.

  He nods. Maybe he imagines how it will look on his wife or girlfriend’s wrist. Maybe he is mentally calculating the price he can get for it.

  “My husband gave this to me when our daughter was born. Now I am giving you the opportunity to save our daughter’s life.”

  I see his eyes flicker with something bigger than greed. “Give me the money,” he says. “Keep the bracelet.”

  The doctor comes again the next night to help administer the first dose of penicillin. He stays until Marianne’s fever breaks and she accepts my breast.

  “I knew you’d find a way,” he says.

  By morning, Marianne is well enough to smile. She falls asleep suckling. Béla kisses her forehead, kisses my cheeks.

  Marianne is better, but other threats simmer. Béla passes up the minister of agriculture post—“Yesterday’s Nazis become today’s Communists,” he says—and his Opel Adam convertible is driven off the road one day. Béla isn’t hurt, but the driver suffers some minor injuries. Béla goes to his house to bring supplies and good wishes for his recovery. The driver cracks the door but won’t open it all the way. His wife calls from another room. “Don’t let him in,” she says. Béla forces the door open and sees one of his mother’s finest tablecloths on their table.

  He comes home and checks the cabinet where the good linens are stored. Many items are missing. I expect him to be angry, to fire the driver, maybe other employees. He shrugs. “Always use your beautiful things,” he tells me. “You never know when they’ll be gone.”

  I think of my family’s apartment caked in manure, our piano sitting in the coffeehouse down the road, the way the big political moments—power changing hands, borders rewritten—are always personal too. Košice becomes Kassa and then Košice again.

  “I can’t do it anymore,” I tell Béla. “I can’t live with a target on my back. My daughter is not going to lose her parents.”

  “No,” he agrees.

  I think of Aunt Matilda. Magda has received her affidavit and is waiting for a visa. I am on the cusp of suggesting to Béla that we try to follow Magda to America, but then I remember that Magda has been warned that it could take years to get the visa, because even with sponsorship, immigration is subject to quota restrictions. We can’t rely on a years-long process to protect us from the Communists. We need a swifter exit.

  On December 31, 1948, Marta and Bandi come to our house to welcome the New Year. They are ardent Zionists. They toast the health of the new state of Israel, drink after drink.

  “We could go there,” Béla says. “We could start a business.”

  It’s not the first time I have pictured myself in Palestine. In high school, I was a Zionist, and Eric and I had imagined living in Palestine together after the war. In the midst of prejudice and uncertainty, we couldn’t stop our classmates from spitting on us, or the Nazis from overtaking our streets, but we could advocate for a future home, we could build a place of safety.

  I can’t tell if I should greet Béla’s suggestion as the fulfillment of my old deferred dream or worry that we are relying on an illusion, an expectation that will lead to disappointment. Israel is such a new state that it has yet to hold its first elections, and it is already at war with its Arab neighbors. Furthermore, there is not yet a Law of Return, the legislation that several years later will grant any Jew, from any country, the ability to immigrate and settle in Israel. We will have to get there illegally, relying on Bricha, the underground organization that helped Jews flee Europe during the war, to arrange our passage on a ship. Bricha is still underground, and still helping people—refugees, the dispossessed, the homeless and stateless—to a new life. But even if we can secure seats on a boat, our plan isn’t a sure bet. Only a year ago, the Exodus, carrying forty-five hundred Jewish immigrants seeking asylum and resettlement in Israel, was sent back to Europe.

  But it is New Year’s Eve. We are hopeful. We feel brave. In the final hours of 1948, our plan for the future takes shape. We will use the Eger fortune to buy all the equipment we need to start a business in Israel. In the following weeks, after much research, Béla will decide that a macaroni factory is the wisest investment, and we will pack a boxcar with all of our belongings, with enough to sustain us through the first years in our new home.

  We Hungarians can’t end a night of drinking without eating sauerkraut soup. Mariska brings steaming bowls of it.

  “Next year in Jerusalem,” we say.

  In the coming months, Béla buys the boxcar that will carry the Eger fortune to Italy and then on to Haifa by ship. He buys
the essential equipment for the macaroni factory. I see to the packing of the silver, the china with gold initials. I buy clothes for Marianne, enough for the next five years, and sew jewels into the pockets and hems.

  We send the boxcar ahead and plan to follow, as soon as Bricha helps us find a way.

  One late winter day when Béla is away on business, a certified letter comes for him from Prague, a letter I sign for, a letter I don’t wait for him to read. Before the war, the letter says, Czechoslovakian citizens who had already immigrated to America were allowed to register any family members still in Europe, under a law that would allow people suffering persecution to apply for visas to come to America without being subject to the quota restrictions that limited the number of people who could find refuge in the United States. Béla’s great-uncle Albert, who had been in Chicago since the early 1900s, had registered the Eger family. We are now one of two Czech families registered before the war invited to seek refuge in America. Béla must report right away to the American consulate in Prague for our documents.

  Our boxcar is already en route to Israel. A new life is already on the horizon. We have already arranged everything. We have already chosen. But my heart races at this news, at this unexpected opportunity. We could go to America like Magda, but without the wait. Béla returns from his trip, and I beg him to go to Prague for the documents. “Just in case,” I urge him. “Just as a precaution.” Grudgingly, he goes. I put the papers in the top drawer of my dresser, with my underwear. Just in case.

  CHAPTER 10

  Flight

  I COME HOME from the park with Marianne on May 19, 1949, and Mariska is weeping.

  “They arrested Mr. Eger!” she whimpers. “He’s gone!”

  For months we have recognized that our days of freedom were numbered. In addition to running Béla off the road the previous year, the Communists have by now seized Béla’s business, confiscated our car, bugged our telephone. Our fortune safe in the boxcar on its way to Israel, we have stayed on, waiting for our travel arrangements from Bricha. We have stayed because we couldn’t imagine leaving yet. And now I risk raising my daughter without her father. I will not accept it. I will not. First I must turn off the worry and fear that gather in me. I must shut off the possibility that Béla is being tortured or that he is already dead. I must become like my mother the morning we were evicted from our apartment and sent to the brick factory. I must become an agent of resourcefulness and hope. I must move like a person who has a plan.