The Choice

by Edith Eger

  “It’s a little late,” he says. That is his only comment.

  “You don’t think we should discuss this?”

  “What is there to discuss? Our fortune—our future—is in Israel.”

  He’s right. Half right. Our fortune is in Israel, probably baking in a boxcar in the desert. Our future isn’t. It doesn’t exist yet. Our future is the sum of an equation that is part intention and part circumstance. And our intentions could shift. Or split.

  When I finally lie down on the bed, Klara whispers to me across Marianne’s sleeping body. “Little one,” she says, “listen to me. You have to love what you are doing. Otherwise you shouldn’t do it. It isn’t worth it.” What is she telling me to do? To argue with Béla over something we have already decided? To leave him? She is the one I expected—maybe counted on—to defend my choices to me, the ones I have already made. I know she doesn’t want to go to Australia. But she will go to be with her husband. She of all people should understand why I am going to Israel even though I don’t want to. But for the first time in our lives she is telling me not to do as she does, not to follow her lead.

  In the morning, Béla leaves right away to procure the things we will need for our journey to Israel—suitcases, coats, clothes, other necessities provided for us refugees by the Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, the American charity that supports Rothschild. I go out in the city with Marianne, the documents from Prague tucked into my purse the way Magda used to hide away sweets—part temptation, part succor. What does it mean that we are the one Czech family allowed to immigrate? Who will go if we decline? No one? The Israel plan is a good one. It is the best we could do with what we had. But now there’s an opportunity that didn’t exist when we committed to the plan. Now we’ve been offered a new possibility, one that doesn’t involve living in tents in a war zone.

  I can’t stop myself. Without Béla’s permission, without his knowledge, I ask for directions to the U.S. consulate, I walk there with Marianne in my arms. I will at least satisfy the possibility that the papers are a mistake or a hoax.

  “Congratulations,” the officer says when I show him the documents, “you can go as soon as your visas are processed.” He gives me the paperwork for our visa applications.

  “How much will it cost?”

  “Nothing, ma’am. You’re refugees. You sail courtesy of your new country.”

  I feel dizzy. It’s the good kind of dizzy, the way I felt the night before when the train left Bratislava with my family still intact. I take the applications back to our room at Rothschild, I show them to Klara and Csicsi, I study the questions, looking for the catch. It doesn’t take long to find one: Have you ever had tuberculosis (TB)? Béla has. He hasn’t had symptoms since 1945, but it doesn’t matter how healthy he is now. You have to submit X-rays with the application. There are scars in his lungs. The damage is evident. And TB is never cured; like trauma, it could flare at any time.

  Israel, then. Tomorrow.

  Klara watches me put the applications under the mattress. “Remember when I was ten and I got accepted to Juilliard?” she says. “And Mama wouldn’t let me go? Go to America, Dicu. Mama would want you to.”

  “But the TB,” I say. I am trying to be loyal, not to the law but to Béla’s wishes, to my husband’s choice.

  “When you can’t go in through a door, go in through a window,” Klara reminds me.

  Night comes. Our second night, our last night in Vienna. I wait until Marianne is asleep, until Klara and Csicsi and the other families have gone to bed. I sit with Béla in two chairs by the door. Our knees touch. I try to memorize his face so that I can recite its contours to Marianne. His full forehead, the perfect arcs of his eyebrows, the kindness of his mouth.

  “Precious Béla,” I begin, “what I am about to say won’t be easy to hear. There is no way around how hard it will be. And there is no way to talk me out of what I will say.”

  His beautiful forehead creases. “What’s going on?”

  “If you meet Bandi and Marta to go to Israel tomorrow, as we planned, I won’t hold it against you. I won’t try to talk you out of it. But I have made my choice. I will not go with you. I am taking Marchuka to America.”

  PART III

  Freedom

  CHAPTER 11

  Immigration Day

  IMMIGRATION DAY, OCTOBER 28, 1949, was the most optimistic and promising day of my life. After living in the crowded room at the Rothschild Hospital for a month, and spending another five months in a tiny apartment in Vienna, waiting for our visas, we were on the threshold of our new home. A sunny blue sky lit the Atlantic as we stood on the deck of the USAT General R. L. Howze. Lady Liberty came into view, tiny in the distance like the little figurine in a music box. Then New York City became visible, a skyline emerging, intricate, where only horizon had been for weeks. I held Marianne up against the deck rail.

  “We’re in America,” I told her. “The land of the free.”

  And I thought we finally were free. We had taken the risk. Now safety and opportunity were our rewards. It seemed a just and simple equation. Thousands of miles of ocean separated us from barbed wire, police searches, camps for the condemned, camps for the displaced. I did not yet know that nightmares know no geography, that guilt and anxiety wander borderless. For twenty minutes on the upper deck of a passenger ship, standing in the October sun, my daughter in my arms, New York in sight, I believed the past couldn’t touch me here. Magda was already there. In July she had finally received her visa and sailed to New York, where she now lived with Aunt Matilda and her husband in the Bronx. She worked in a toy factory, putting the heads on little giraffes. It takes an Elefánt to make a giraffe, she had joked in a letter. In another hour, maybe two, I would embrace my sister, my brave sister, her jokes at the ready to transcend pain. As Marianne and I counted the whitecaps between the ship and solid land, as I counted my blessings, Béla came up from the tiny cabin where he was packing the last of our things.

  My heart swelled again with tenderness for my husband. In the weeks of travel, in the little cot in the room that rocked and bobbed across black water, through black air, I felt more passion for him than ever before in our three years together, more than on the train on our honeymoon when we conceived Marianne.

  Back in May, in Vienna, he had been unable to decide, unable to choose, up until the last minute. He stood behind a pillar at the train station where he was to meet Bandi and Marta, suitcase in hand. He saw our friends arrive, saw them searching the platform for us. He continued to hide. He saw the train pull in, heard the announcement that passengers should board. He saw people getting onto the train. He saw Bandi and Marta at the door of a train car, waiting for him. Then he heard the clerk on the loudspeaker calling his name. He wanted to join our friends, he wanted to board the train and meet the ship and rescue the boxcar holding his fortune. But he was frozen there behind the pillar. The rest of the passengers filed on board, Bandi and Marta too. When the train doors closed, he finally forced himself into action. Against his better judgment, against all the bets he had made for what he hoped would be a safe and financially secure future, he took the biggest risk of his life. He walked away.

  Now, minutes away from our new life in America, nothing seemed deeper or more profound than that we had made the same choice, to relinquish security in favor of opportunity for our daughter, to start over together from scratch. To have his commitment to our daughter, to this new venture, to me, touched me deeply.

  And yet. (This “and yet” closing like a latch.) I had been ready to forsake our marriage in order to take Marianne to America. However painfully, I had been willing to sacrifice our family, our partnership—the very things Béla had been unable to accept losing. And so we began our new life on an unequal footing. I could feel that though his devotion to us could be measured in all that he had given up, he was still dizzy from what he had lost. And where I felt relief and joy, he felt hurt. Happy as I was to greet our new life, I could already feel that Bé
la’s loss put a dangerous pressure on all the unknowns ahead.

  So there was sacrifice at the heart of our choice. And there was also a lie: the report from the medical examiner, the X-rays we had pressed inside a folder with our visa applications. We couldn’t allow the ghost of Béla’s old illness, his TB, to deter our future, so Csicsi had posed as Béla and gone with me to the medical examiner. We now carried pictures of Csicsi’s chest, clear as spring water. When the naturalization officers cleared Béla for immigration, it would be Csicsi’s body and medical history they legitimized, another man’s body they determined to be sound.

  I wanted to breathe easily. To cherish our safety and good fortune as miracles, not guard them close and warily. I wanted to teach my daughter confidence in where she stood. There she was, hair whipping around her head, cheeks red from the wind. “Liberty!” she called, pleased with her new word. On a whim I took the pacifier that hung on a ribbon around her neck and threw it into the sea.

  If I had turned around, I might have seen Béla caution me. But I wasn’t looking. “We’re Americans now. American children don’t use pacifiers,” I said, heady and improvising, tossing my daughter’s one token of security like it was parade confetti. I wanted Marianne to be what I wanted to be: someone who fits in, who isn’t plagued by the idea of being different, of being flawed, of playing catch-up forever in a relentless race away from the claws of the past.

  She didn’t complain. She was excited by the novelty of our adventure, amused by my strange act, accepting of my logic. In America we’d do as the Americans do (as if I knew a single thing about what Americans do). I wanted to trust my choice, our new life, so I denied any trace of sadness, any trace of fear. When I walked down the wooden ramp to our new homeland, I was already wearing a mask.

  I had escaped. But I wasn’t yet free.

  CHAPTER 12

  Greener

  NOVEMBER 1949. I board a city bus in Baltimore. Gray dawn. Wet streets. I am going to work, to the clothing factory, where I will spend all day cutting loose threads off the seams of little boys’ boxer shorts, paid 7¢ per dozen. The factory reminds me of the thread factory in Germany where Magda and I worked after we were taken from Auschwitz—dry, dusty air, cold concrete, machines clattering so loudly that when the forewoman speaks she must shout. “Minimize bathroom breaks!” she yells. But I hear the forewoman of the past, the one who told us we would be worked until we were all used up, and then killed. I work without stopping. To maximize my productivity, to maximize my meager pay. But also because to work without a break is an old necessity, a habit impossible to overthrow. And if I can keep the noise and the urgency around me at all times, I will not have to be alone for even a moment with my own thoughts. I work so hard that my hands shake and shake in the dark when I get home.

  Because Aunt Matilda and her husband didn’t have the space or resources to take in my family—Magda was already an extra mouth to feed—we have begun our new life not in the Bronx, as I had imagined, but in Baltimore, where we live with Béla’s brother George and his wife and two young daughters in a cramped walk-up apartment. George had been a well-known lawyer in Czechoslovakia, but in Chicago, where he first lived when he immigrated to America in the 1930s, he made a living as a Fuller Brush man, selling brushes and cleaning products door-to-door; now, in Baltimore, he sells insurance. Everything in George’s life is bitter, fear based, discouraged. He follows me through the rooms of the apartment, watching my every move, barking at me to close the coffee can more tightly. He is angry about the past—about having been attacked in Bratislava, and mugged in Chicago in his early immigrant days. And he’s angry about the present—he can’t forgive us for having arrived penniless, for having turned our backs on the Eger fortune. I feel so self-conscious in his presence that I can’t walk down the stairs without tripping.

  One day as I board the bus to work, my head is so full of my own discomfort—girding up for the rattling pace of the factory, stewing over George’s unpleasantness, obsessing over our relentless worries about money—that it takes me several moments to notice that the bus hasn’t started to move, that we are still at the curb, that the other passengers are staring at me, scowling, shaking their heads. I begin to prickle with sweat. It is the feeling I had when I woke to hear armed nyilas banging on our door at dawn. The fear when the German soldier held a gun to my chest after I picked the carrots. The feeling that I have done wrong, that I will be punished, that the stakes are life and death. I am so consumed by the sensation of danger and threat that I can’t put together what has happened—that I have boarded the bus the European way, taking my seat and waiting for the conductor to come and sell me a ticket. I have forgotten to put my token in the change box. Now the bus driver is yelling at me, “Pay or get off! Pay or get off!” Even if I could speak English, I would not be able to understand him. I am overcome by fear, by images of barbed wire and raised guns, by thick smoke rising from chimneys and obscuring my present reality, by the prison walls of the past closing in on me. It is the opposite of what happened to me when I danced for Josef Mengele my first night at Auschwitz. Then, I transported myself out of the barracks and onto the stage of the Budapest opera house. Then, my inner vision saved me. Now, my inner life makes me interpret a simple mistake, a misunderstanding, as catastrophe. Nothing in the present is really wrong, nothing that can’t be easily fixed. A man is angry and frustrated because he has misunderstood me, because I can’t understand him. There is shouting and conflict. But my life is not in danger. And yet, that is how I read the present situation. Danger, danger, death.

  “Pay or get off! Pay or get off!” the driver shouts. He stands up from his seat. He is coming toward me. I fall to the ground, I cover my face. He is above me now, grabbing my arm, trying to yank me to my feet. I huddle on the floor of the bus, crying, shaking. A fellow passenger takes pity on me. She is an immigrant like me. She asks me first in Yiddish, then in German, if I have money, she counts the coins in my sweaty palm, she helps me back into my seat and sits with me until I’m breathing again. The bus pulls out onto the street.

  “Stupid greener,” someone says under her breath as she walks up the aisle to her seat.

  When I tell Magda about the incident in a letter, I turn it into a joke—an episode of immigrant—“greener”—slapstick. But something changed in me that day. It will be more than twenty years before I will have the language and psychological training to understand that I was having a flashback, that the unnerving physical sensations—racing heart, sweaty palms, narrowing vision—I experienced that day (and that I will continue to experience many times in my life, even now, in my late eighties) are automatic responses to trauma. This is why I now object to pathologizing post-traumatic stress by calling it a disorder. It’s not a disordered reaction to trauma—it’s a common and natural one. But on that November morning in Baltimore I didn’t know what was happening to me; I assumed that my collapse meant that I was deeply flawed. I wish I had known that I wasn’t a damaged person, that I was suffering the fallout of an interrupted life.

  At Auschwitz, at Mauthausen, on the Death March, I survived by drawing on my inner world. I found hope and faith in life within me, even when I was surrounded by starvation and torture and death. After my first flashback, I began to believe that my inner world was where the demons lived. That there was blight deep inside me. My inner world was no longer sustaining, it became the source of my pain: unstoppable memories, loss, fear. I could be standing in line at the fish counter, and when the clerk called my name I would see Mengele’s face transposed over his. Walking into the factory some mornings I would see my mother beside me, as plain as day, I would see her turn her back and walk away. I tried to banish my memories of the past. I thought it was a matter of survival. Only after many years did I come to understand that running away doesn’t heal pain. It makes the pain worse. In America I was farther geographically than I had ever been from my former prison. But here I became more psychologically imprisoned than I was before.
In running from the past—from my fear—I didn’t find freedom. I made a cell of my dread and sealed the lock with silence.

  Marianne, however, was flourishing. I wanted her to feel normal, normal, normal. And she did. Despite my fear that she would discover that we were poor, that her mother was afraid all the time, that life in America wasn’t what we had expected, she was a happy child. At her day care, which she was allowed to attend for free because the woman who ran it, Mrs. Bower, was sympathetic to immigrants, she learned English quickly. She became a little assistant to Mrs. Bower, tending to the other children when they cried or fussed. No one asked her to fill that role. She had an innate sensitivity to others’ hurt, and an innate confidence in her own strength. Béla and I called her the little ambassador. Mrs. Bower would send her home with books—to help me learn English as much as to support Marianne. I try to read Chicken Little. I can’t keep the characters straight. Who is Ducky Lucky? Who is Goosey Loosey? Marianne laughs at me. She teaches me again. She pretends exasperation. I pretend that I am only playing, that I am only pretending not to understand.

  Even more than poverty, I feared my daughter’s embarrassment. I feared that she would be ashamed of me. On the weekends, she came with me to the Laundromat and helped me operate the machines, she took me to the grocery store to find Jif Peanut Butter and a dozen other foods I’d never heard of, with names I couldn’t spell or pronounce. In 1950, the year Marianne turned three, she insisted that we eat turkey for Thanksgiving, like her classmates. How can I tell her that we can’t afford one? I stop at Schreiber’s on the way home the day before Thanksgiving, and I’m in luck, they’ve put chicken on sale for 29¢ a pound. I choose the smallest one. “Look, sweetie!” I call when I get home. “We have a turkey. A baby turkey!” I want so badly for her—for all three of us—to fit in.