The Choice

by Edith Eger

  Fear pulled a current through our comfortable lives. Once, when Audrey was ten, she had a friend over, and I walked past the open door of her room just as an ambulance raced past our house, siren wailing. I covered my head, a stubborn habit from the war, something I still do. Before I had consciously registered the siren or my reaction to it, I heard Audrey yelling to her friend, “Quick, get under the bed!” She threw herself on the floor and rolled under the bed skirt. Her friend laughed, followed her down, probably thinking it was a peculiar game. But I could tell that Audrey wasn’t joking. She really thought sirens signaled danger. That you have to take cover. Without meaning to, without any conscious awareness, I had taught her that.

  What else were we unconsciously teaching our children, about safety, values, love?

  The night of Marianne’s high school prom, she stands on our front porch in her silk dress, a beautiful orchid corsage on her wrist. As she steps off the porch with her date, Béla calls, “Have a great time, honey. You know, your mother was in Auschwitz when she was your age and her parents were dead.”

  I scream at Béla when Marianne has left. I call him bitter and cold, I tell him he had no right to ruin her joy on her special night, to ruin the vicarious pleasure I took in her joy. If he can’t censor himself, I won’t either. If he can’t bless our daughter with happy thoughts, I tell him, then he might as well be dead. “The fact that you were at Auschwitz and she’s not is a happy thought,” Béla defends. “I want Marianne to feel glad for the life she has.” “Then don’t poison it!” I yell. Worse than Béla’s comment is the fact that I never talk to Marianne about it afterward. I pretend not to notice that she is also living two lives—the one she lives for herself and the one she lives for me because I wasn’t allowed to live it.

  In the fall of 1966, when Audrey is twelve, Marianne a sophomore at Whittier College, and Johnny, ten, fulfilling Dr. Clark’s prediction that with the right support, he could be physically and academically stable, I have time again to devote to my own progress. I return to school. My English is now good enough to write my papers without Béla’s help (when he helped me, the best grade I got was a C, but now I earn As). I feel that I am finally getting ahead, finally transcending the limitations of my past. But once again the two worlds I’ve done my best to keep separate collide. I’m sitting in a lecture hall, waiting for my introductory political science class to begin, when a sandy-haired man sits down behind me.

  “You were there, weren’t you?” he says.

  “There?” I feel the panic start to rise.

  “Auschwitz. You’re a survivor, aren’t you?”

  I am so rattled by his question that I don’t think to ask him one in return. What makes him think I’m a survivor? How does he know? How did he guess? I have never said a single word about my experience to anyone in my present life, not even my kids. I don’t have a number tattooed on my arm.

  “Aren’t you a Holocaust survivor?” he asks again.

  He is young, maybe twenty—roughly half my age. Something in his youth, in his earnest nature, in the kind intensity of his voice, reminds me of Eric, how we sat in a movie theater together after curfew, how he took a picture of me on the shore doing the splits, how he kissed my lips for the first time, his hands resting on the thin belt at my waist. Twenty-one years after liberation, I feel pounded by loss. The loss of Eric. The loss of our young love. The loss of the future—the vision we shared of marriage and family and activism. For the entire year of my imprisonment, for the year I somehow escaped a death that seemed mandatory and inevitable, I held to Eric’s remembered verse: I’ll never forget your eyes, I’ll never forget your hands. Memory was my lifeline. And now? I have shut out the past. To remember is to concede to the horror again and again. But in the past, too, is Eric’s voice. In the past is the love that I felt and sang in my mind all those months that I starved.

  “I am a survivor,” I say, shaking.

  “Have you read this?” He shows me a small paperback: Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl. It sounds like a philosophy text. The author’s name doesn’t ring a bell. I shake my head. “Frankl was at Auschwitz,” the student explains. “He wrote this book about it, just after the war. I think you would find it of interest,” he says, offering it to me.

  I take the book in my hand. It is slim. It fills me with dread. Why would I willingly return to hell, even through the filter of someone else’s experience? But I don’t have the heart to reject this young man’s gesture. I whisper a thank you and tuck the little book into my bag, where it sits all evening like a ticking bomb.

  I start to make dinner, I feel distracted and out of my body. I send Béla to Safeway for more garlic, and then again for more peppers. I barely taste my meal. After dinner, I quiz Johnny on his spelling words. I do the dishes. I kiss my children good night. Béla goes to the den to listen to Rachmaninoff and read The Nation. My bag sits in the hall by the front door, the book still inside. Even its presence in my house is causing me discomfort. I won’t read it. I don’t have to. I was there. I will spare myself the pain.

  Sometime after midnight, my curiosity wins out over my fear. I creep into the living room, where I sit for a long time in a pool of lamplight holding the book. I begin to read. This book does not claim to be an account of facts and events but of personal experiences, experiences which millions of prisoners have suffered time and again. It is the inside story of a concentration camp, told by one of its survivors. The back of my neck prickles. He is speaking to me. He is speaking for me. How was everyday life in a concentration camp reflected in the mind of the average prisoner? He writes about the three phases of a prisoner’s life—beginning with what it is like to arrive at a death camp and feel the “delusion of reprieve.” Yes, I remember so well how my father heard the music playing on the train platform and said this couldn’t be a bad place, remember the way Mengele wagged his finger between life and death, and said, as casually as you please, “You’ll see your mother very soon.” Then there is the second phase—learning to adapt to the impossible and inconceivable. To endure the kapos’ beatings, to get up no matter how cold or hungry or tired or ill, to eat the soup and save the bread, to watch our own flesh disappearing, to hear everywhere that the only escape is death. Even the third phase, release and liberation, wasn’t an end to the imprisonment, Frankl writes. It can continue in bitterness, disillusionment, a struggle for meaning and happiness.

  I am staring directly at the thing I have sought to hide. And as I read, I find I don’t feel shut down or trapped, locked back in that place. To my surprise, I don’t feel afraid. For every page I read, I want to write ten. What if telling my story could lighten its grip instead of tightening it? What if speaking about the past could heal it instead of calcify it? What if silence and denial aren’t the only choices to make in the wake of catastrophic loss?

  I read how Frankl marches to his work site in the icy dark. The cold is harsh, the guards are brutal, the prisoners stumble. In the midst of physical pain and dehumanizing injustice, Frankl flashes on his wife’s face. He sees her eyes, and his heart blooms with love in the depth of winter. He understands how a man who has nothing left in this world may still know bliss, be it only for a brief moment, in the contemplation of his beloved. My heart opens. I weep. It is my mother speaking to me from the page, from the oppressive dark of the train: Just remember, no one can take away from you what you’ve put in your mind. We can’t choose to vanish the dark, but we can choose to kindle the light.

  In those predawn hours in the autumn of 1966, I read this, which is at the very heart of Frankl’s teaching: Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way. Each moment is a choice. No matter how frustrating or boring or constraining or painful or oppressive our experience, we can always choose how we respond. And I finally begin to understand that I, too, have a choice. This realization will change my life.

 
; CHAPTER 14

  From One Survivor to Another

  NO ONE HEALS in a straight line.

  One January evening in 1969, when Audrey comes home from a babysitting job, Béla and I ask her and John to sit on the brown Danish couch in the living room. I can’t look at Béla, I can’t look at my children, I stare at the clean modern lines of the couch, its thin little legs. Béla starts to cry.

  “Did someone die?” Audrey asks. “Just tell us.”

  Johnny kicks his feet nervously against the couch.

  “Everything’s fine,” Béla says. “We love you both very much. Your mother and I have decided that we need to live in separate houses for a while.” He stutters as he speaks, the sentences last a year.

  “What are you saying?” Audrey asks. “What’s going on?”

  “We need to explore how to have more peace in our family,”

  I say. “This isn’t your fault.”

  “You don’t love each other anymore?”

  “We do,” Béla says. “I do.” This is his jab, the one knife he points at me.

  “You’re not happy all of a sudden? I thought you were happy. Or have you just been lying to us our whole lives?” Audrey has been clutching her babysitting money in her hand—when she turned twelve, Béla opened a checking account for her and said he would double any dollar that she made—but now she throws her money on the couch, as though we have contaminated every good or valuable thing.

  It was an accrual of experiences, not a sudden recognition, that led me to divorce Béla. My choice had something to do with my mother—what she had chosen and what she hadn’t been allowed to choose. Before she married my father, she was working for a consulate in Budapest, she was earning her own money, she was part of a cosmopolitan social and professional circle. She was quite liberated for her time. But then her younger sister got married, and the pressure was on her to do what her society and family expected of her, to marry before she became an embarrassment. There was a man she loved, someone she met through her work at the consulate, the man who had given her the inscribed copy of Gone with the Wind. But her father forbade her to marry him because he wasn’t Jewish. My father, the celebrated tailor, fit her for a dress one day, he admired her figure, and she opted to leave the life she had chosen for herself in favor of the life she was expected to live. In marrying Béla, I feared I had done the same thing—forgone taking responsibility for my own dreams in exchange for the safety Béla provided me. Now the qualities that had drawn me to him, his ability to provide and caretake, felt suffocating, our marriage felt like an abdication of myself.

  I didn’t want the kind of marriage my parents had—lonely, lacking in intimacy—and I didn’t want their broken dreams (my father’s, to be a doctor; my mother’s, to be a career woman, to marry for love). But what did I want for myself? I didn’t know. And so I erected Béla as a force to push against. In place of discovering my own genuine purpose and direction, I found meaning in fighting against him, against the ways I imagined that he limited me. Really, Béla was supportive of my schooling, he paid for my tuition, he loved talking with me about the philosophy and literature I was reading, he found my reading lists and analyses interesting complements to his favorite subject: history. Maybe because Béla occasionally expressed some resentment for the time I gave to school, or because in the interest of my own health he sometimes cautioned me to slow down, the notion took root and grew in me that if I wanted to progress in my life, it would have to be on my own. I was so hungry, so tired of discounting myself.

  I remember traveling with Audrey to a swim meet in San Angelo in 1967, when she was thirteen. The other parent chaperones got together in the hotel in the evening and drank and caroused. If Béla had been there, I realized, we would have been at the center of the activity, not because either of us liked to be around heavy drinking, but because Béla was a natural charmer—he saw a room of people and he couldn’t stay away. Any room that he occupied became a social sphere, people drawn into convivial relationship because of the atmosphere he created. I admired this about him, and I resented it, too, resented the ways I became silent so that his voice could ring. Just like in my family growing up, there was room for one star. At our weekly prime rib and dancing dates with friends in El Paso, I got to share the light when everyone made room for Béla and me on the dance floor. Together, we were sensational, our friends said, it was hard to look away. We were admired as a couple—but there wasn’t space for just me. That night in San Angelo, I found the noise and drunkenness of the other parents unpleasant, and I was about to retreat to my room. I was lonely, feeling a little sorry for myself. Then I flashed on Frankl’s book. On my freedom to choose my own response to any situation.

  I did something I had never done before. I knocked on the door of Audrey’s hotel room. She was surprised to see me, but she invited me in. She and her friends were playing cards, watching TV. “When I was your age,” I said, “I was an athlete too.” Audrey’s eyes opened wide. “You girls are so lucky and beautiful. You know what it is to have a strong body. To work hard. To be a team.” I told them what my ballet teacher had told me a lifetime ago: “All your ecstasy in life is going to come from the inside.” I said good night and started to walk out the door, but before I left the room, I did a high kick. Audrey’s eyes glittered with pride. Her friends clapped and cheered. I wasn’t the quiet mom with the strange accent. I was the performer, the athlete, the mom whose daughter admired her. Inside, I equated that feeling of self-worth and elation with Béla’s absence. If I wanted to feel that glow more often, perhaps I needed to be with him less often.

  That hunger for self fueled me in my undergraduate studies too. I was voracious, always in search of more knowledge, and also the respect and approval that might signal to me that I was of value. I stayed up all night working on papers that were already good, for fear that they wouldn’t—or would only—be good enough. When a psychology professor announced to our class at the beginning of the semester that he only gave C’s, I marched to his office, told him I only earned As, and asked what I could do to continue my exceptional academic performance. He invited me to work with him as an assistant, augmenting my classroom learning with field experience usually granted only to graduate students.

  One afternoon, some of my classmates invited me to join them for a beer after class. I sat with them in the darkened bar near campus, my chilled glass on the table, enthralled by their youthful energy, their political passion. I admired them, social justice advocates, pacifists. I was happy to be included. And sad too. This stage of my life had been cut short. Individuation and independence from my family. Dating and romance. Participation in social movements that were bringing about real change. I had lost my childhood to the war, my adolescence to the death camps, and my young adulthood to the compulsion to never look back. I had become a mother before I had grieved my own mother’s death. I had tried too fast and too soon to be whole. It wasn’t Béla’s fault that I had chosen denial, that I often kept myself, my memories, my true opinions and experiences hidden, even from him. But now I held him responsible for prolonging my stuckness.

  That day over beers, one of my fellow students asked me how Béla and I had met. “I love a good love story,” she said. “Was it love at first sight?” I don’t remember how I answered her, but I do know that the question made me think, again, about the kind of love I wished I’d had. With Eric there had been sparks, a flush all over my body when he was near. Even Auschwitz didn’t kill the romantic girl in me, the girl who told herself each day that she might meet him again. But after the war, that dream died. When I met Béla, I wasn’t in love; I was hungry. And he brought me Swiss cheese. He brought me salami. I could remember feeling happy in those early years with Béla—when I was pregnant with Marianne, walking to the market every morning to buy flowers, talking to her in my womb, telling her how she was going to blossom like a flower. And she had, all of my children had. And now I was forty years old, the age my mother had been when she died,
and I still hadn’t blossomed, still hadn’t had the love I thought I was due. I felt cheated, denied of an essential human rite, trapped in a marriage that had become a meal consumed with no expectation of nourishment, with no hope of erasing hunger.

  My sustenance came from an unexpected source. One day in 1968, I came home to find a letter in the mailbox addressed to me in a European-looking hand, sent from Southern Methodist University, in Dallas. There was no name above the return address, only initials: V. F. When I opened the letter, I almost fell over. From one survivor to another, the salutation read. The letter was from Viktor Frankl.

  Following my predawn immersion in Man’s Search for Meaning two years earlier, I had written an essay called “Viktor Frankl and Me.” I had written it for myself, it was a personal exercise, not an academic one, my first attempt to speak about my past. Timidly, cautiously hopeful for the possibility of personal growth, I had shared it with some professors and some friends, and eventually it had found its way into a campus publication. Someone had anonymously mailed a copy of my article to Frankl in Dallas, where, unbeknownst to me, he had been a visiting professor since 1966. Frankl was twenty-three years my senior—he had been thirty-nine years old, already a successful physician and psychiatrist, when he was interned at Auschwitz. Now he was the celebrated founder of Logotherapy. He had practiced, lectured, and taught all over the world. And he had been moved enough by my little essay to contact me, to relate to me as a fellow survivor, as a peer. I had written about imagining myself onstage at the Budapest opera house the night I was forced to dance for Mengele. Frankl wrote that he had done something similar at Auschwitz—in his worst moments, he had imagined himself a free man, giving lectures in Vienna on the psychology of imprisonment. He had also found a sanctuary in an inner world that both shielded him from his present fear and pain, and inspired his hope and sense of purpose—that gave him the means and a reason to survive. Frankl’s book and his letter helped me find words for our shared experience.