The Choice

by Edith Eger

  Berchtesgaden isn’t Auschwitz, I remind her. I’d be more in the geography of Hitler’s past than my own. Yet even my daily routines in El Paso can trigger flashbacks. I hear sirens and I go cold, I see barbed wire around a construction site and I am no longer in the present, I am watching the blue bodies hanging from the fence, I am stuck in the fear, I am struggling for my life. If mundane triggers can bring my trauma back, what would it be like to be surrounded by people speaking German, to wonder if I am walking among former Hitler Youth, to be in the very rooms where Hitler and his advisers once lived?

  “If you think there’s something to be gained, then go. I support you,” Marianne says. “But it’s got to be for you. You don’t have to prove anything to anyone else. You’re not required to go.”

  When she says it, the relief is immediate. “Thank you, Marchuka,” I say. I am safe now, I am happy. I have done my work. I have grown. Now I can let go. I can be finished. I can say that I am honored by the invitation, but it is too painful for me to accept. Dave will understand.

  But when I tell Béla that I have decided to decline the invitation, he grabs my shoulder. “If you don’t go to Germany,” he says, “then Hitler won the war.”

  It’s not what I want to hear. I feel like I’ve been sucker-punched. But I have to concede that he’s right about one thing: It’s easier to hold someone or something else responsible for your pain than to take responsibility for ending your own victimhood. Our marriage has taught me that—all the times when my anger or frustration at Béla has taken my attention away from my own work and growth, the times when blaming him for my unhappiness was easier than taking responsibility for myself.

  Most of us want a dictator—albeit a benevolent one—so we can pass the buck, so we can say, “You made me do that. It’s not my fault.” But we can’t spend our lives hanging out under someone else’s umbrella and then complain that we’re getting wet. A good definition of being a victim is when you keep the focus outside yourself, when you look outside yourself for someone to blame for your present circumstances, or to determine your purpose, fate, or worth.

  And that is why Béla tells me that if I don’t go to Berchtesgaden, then Hitler has won. He means that I am sitting on a seesaw with my past. As long as I can put Hitler, or Mengele, or the gaping mouth of my loss on the opposite seat, then I am somehow justified, I always have an excuse. That’s why I’m anxious. That’s why I’m sad. That’s why I can’t risk going to Germany. It’s not that I’m wrong to feel anxious and sad and afraid. It’s not that there isn’t real trauma at the core of my life. And it’s not that Hitler and Mengele and every other perpetrator of violence or cruelty shouldn’t be held accountable for the harm they cause. But if I stay on the seesaw, I am holding the past responsible for what I choose to do now.

  Long ago, Mengele’s finger did point me to my fate. He chose for my mother to die, he chose for Magda and me to live. At every selection line, the stakes were life and death, the choice was never mine to make. But even then, in my prison, in hell, I could choose how I responded, I could choose my actions and speech, I could choose what I held in my mind. I could choose whether to walk into the electrified barbed wire, to refuse to leave my bed, or I could choose to struggle and live, to think of Eric’s voice and my mother’s strudel, to think of Magda beside me, to recognize all I had to live for, even amid the horror and the loss. It has been thirty-five years since I left hell. The panic attacks come at any time of day or night, they can subsume me as easily in my own living room as in Hitler’s old bunker, because my panic isn’t the result of purely external triggers. It is an expression of the memories and fears that live inside. If I keep myself in exile from a particular part of the globe, I am really saying that I want to exile the part of myself that is afraid. Maybe there is something I can learn by getting closer to that part.

  And what of my legacy? Only hours ago, Jason faced a turning point in his life—the moment when he held a gun in his hand but didn’t pull the trigger, when he considered the legacy he wanted to pass on to his children, when he chose something other than violence. What legacy do I want to pass on? What will I leave in the world when I am gone? I have already chosen to relinquish secrets and denial and shame. But have I really made peace with the past? Is there more to resolve so that I don’t perpetuate more pain?

  I think of my mother’s mother, who died suddenly in her sleep. Of my mother, whose grief over the trauma of that sudden childhood loss marked her with hunger and fear from a very early age, and who passed on to her own children a vague inchoate sense of loss. And what will I pass on, besides her smooth skin, her thick hair, her deep eyes, besides the pain and grief and rage at having lost her too young? And what if I have to return to the site of my trauma to stop the cycle, to create a different kind of legacy?

  I accept the invitation to Berchtesgaden.

  CHAPTER 18

  Goebbels’s Bed

  OVER THE PHONE, Rev. Dr. David Woehr briefed me for my visit. I would address six hundred Army chaplains gathered for a clinical pastoral retreat at an Armed Forces Recreation Center in the General Walker Hotel, high in the mountains of Bavaria, which had served as a guesthouse and meeting place for Hitler’s SS officers. Béla and I would be provided accommodations at the nearby Hotel zum Türken, which had once been reserved for Hitler’s cabinet and diplomatic visitors. This was where British prime minister Neville Chamberlain stayed in 1938 when he met with Hitler and returned home with the triumphant and tragically misguided news that he had secured “peace for our time,” and where Adolf Eichmann himself had likely briefed Hitler on the Final Solution. The Berghof, or the Eagle’s Nest, Hitler’s former residence, was a short walk away.

  My audience would be made up of healing arts professionals. Army chaplains serve as behavioral health providers in addition to spiritual counselors, and for the first time, Dave told me, chaplains were required to receive a year of clinical pastoral education to complement their seminary studies. The chaplains needed training in psychology as well as in religious doctrine, and Dave was leading weeklong retreats on clinical psychology to the chaplains stationed in Europe. I would give the keynote address.

  Dave told me more about the chaplains and the soldiers they served. These weren’t the soldiers of my youth, or the soldiers I was accustomed to treating at William Beaumont; these were peacetime soldiers, soldiers of the cold war, of war behind the scenes. They weren’t living through daily violence, but nevertheless were on high alert, keeping the peace but at the ready for war. Most cold war soldiers were stationed at the sites of prepositioned missiles. These missiles were mounted on mobile launchers, already hidden at strategic sites. It was a matter of routine for these military personnel to live with the perpetual threat of war, the middle-of-the-night sirens that could signal another alert drill or an actual attack. (Like the showers at Auschwitz. Water or gas? We never knew.) The chaplains I was to address had the responsibility of supporting the spiritual and psychological needs of soldiers doing their best to deter an all-out war, doing their best to be prepared for whatever happened.

  “What do they need to hear?” I asked. “What would it be helpful for me to talk about?”

  “Hope,” Dave said. “Forgiveness. If chaplains can’t talk about this stuff, if we don’t understand it, we can’t do our job.”

  “Why me?”

  “It’s one thing to hear about hope and forgiveness from the pulpit, or from a religious scholar,” Dave explained. “But you’re one of the few people who can talk about holding on to hope even when you’d been stripped of everything, when you were starving and left for dead. I don’t know anyone else with that kind of credibility.”

  A month later, when Béla and I are on a train from Berlin to Berchtesgaden, I feel like the least credible person, the last person on Earth qualified to talk about hope and forgiveness. When I close my eyes, I hear the sound of my nightmares, the constant turning of wheel against track. I see my parents, my father who refuses to sh
ave, my mother’s inward gaze. Béla holds my hand. He touches a finger to the gold bracelet he gave me when Marianne was born, that I tucked into Marianne’s diaper when we fled Prešov, the bracelet I wear every day. It’s a token of triumph. We made it. We survived. We stand for life. But not even Béla’s comfort, nor the kiss of the smooth metal on my skin, can mitigate the dread collecting in my gut.

  We share the train compartment with a German couple about our age. They are pleasant, they offer us some of the pastries they’ve brought, the woman compliments me on my outfit. What would they say if they knew that when I was seventeen I sat on the top of a German train under a hail of bombs, a human shield in a thin striped dress, forced to protect Nazi ammunition with my life? And where were they when I shivered on the top of the train? Where were they during the war? Were they the children who spat at Magda and me when we marched through German towns? Were they Hitler Youth? Do they think about the past now, or are they in denial, as I was for so many years?

  The dread in me turns to something else, a fiery and jagged feeling, fury. I remember Magda’s rage: After the war, I’m going to kill a German mother. She couldn’t erase our loss, but she could flip it on its head, she could retaliate. At times I shared her desire for confrontation, but not her desire for revenge. My devastation manifested as a suicidal urge, not a homicidal one. But now anger collects in me, a gale-force fury, it gathers strength and speed. I am sitting inches away from people who might be my former oppressors. I am afraid of what I might do.

  “Béla,” I whisper, “I think I’ve come far enough. I want to go home.”

  “You’ve been afraid before,” he says. “Welcome it, welcome it.” Béla is reminding me of what I believe too: This is the work of healing. You deny what hurts, what you fear. You avoid it at all costs. Then you find a way to welcome and embrace what you’re most afraid of. And then you can finally let it go.

  We arrive in Berchtesgaden and take a shuttle van to the Hotel zum Türken, which is now a museum as well as a hotel. I try to ignore the ominous history of this place and lift my face to the physical grandeur, to the mountain peaks rising around us. The rocky, snowy range reminds me of the Tatra Mountains where Béla and I first met when he reluctantly chaperoned me to the TB hospital.

  Inside the hotel, Béla and I have a good laugh when the concierge addresses us as Dr. and Mrs. Eger.

  “It’s Dr. and Mr. Eger,” Béla says.

  The hotel is like a time machine, an anachronism. The rooms are still appointed as they were in the 1930s and 1940s, with thick Persian rugs and no telephones. Béla and I are assigned to the room that Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s minister of propaganda, slept in, with the same bed, the same mirror and dresser and nightstand that once were his. I stand in the doorway of the room, I feel my inner peace shatter. What does it mean that I am standing here now? Béla runs his hand over the dresser top, the bedspread, he goes to the window. Is history grabbing his skull the way it is mine? I grab for the bedpost to keep from falling to my knees. Béla turns back to me. He winks, he bursts into song.

  It’ … springtime for Hitler, and Germany! he sings. It’s from Mel Brooks’s The Producers. Deutschland is happy and gay!

  He does a tap-dance routine in front of the window, he holds a pretend cane in his hands. We saw The Producers together when it opened in 1968, the year before our divorce. I sat in a movie theater with a hundred laughing people, Béla laughing loudest of all. I couldn’t even crack a smile. Intellectually, I understood the purpose of the satire. I knew that laughter can lift, that it can carry us over and through difficult times. I knew that laughter can heal. But to hear this song now, in this place, it is too much. I am furious at Béla, less for his absence of tact, more for his ability to move so quickly and successfully out of anguish. I have to get away.

  I head out alone for a walk. Just outside the hotel lobby is a path that leads to the Berghof, the Eagle’s Nest, Hitler’s old residence. I will not choose that path. I will not give Hitler the satisfaction of acknowledging his home, his existence. I am not stranded in the past. I follow a different trail instead, to a different peak, toward the open sky.

  And then I stop myself. Here I am, forever giving a dead person the power to cut off my own discovery. Isn’t this why I have come to Germany? To get closer to the discomfort? To see what the past still has to teach me?

  I slide along the gravel path toward the unassuming remains of Hitler’s once grand estate, perched at the edge of a cliff. Now all that exists of the house is an old retaining wall covered in moss, pieces of rubble and pipes poking out of the ground. I look out over the valley as Hitler must have done. Hitler’s house is gone—American GIs burned it to the ground in the last days of the war, but not before raiding Hitler’s stores of wine and cognac. They sat on the terrace and raised their glasses, behind them his house obscured by smoke and flames. The house is gone, but what of Hitler? Can I still feel his presence here? I test my gut for nausea, my spine for chills. I listen for his voice. I listen for the echoing register of his hate, for the relentless call of evil. But it’s quiet here today. I gaze up the mountain, I see wildflowers fed by the first cold trickles of melting snow from the surrounding peaks. I am walking on the same steps that Hitler once took, but he isn’t here now, I am. It is springtime, though not for Hitler. For me. The thick crust of silent snow has melted; dead quiet winter has yielded to the burst of new leaves and the jolting rush of fast water. Within the layers of the terrible sorrow I carry in me always, another feeling shoots through. It is the first melting trickle of long-frozen snow. Pulsing down the mountainside, the water speaks, the chambers of my heart speak. I am alive, the bubbling stream says. I made it. A song of triumph is filling me, pushing its way out of my heart, out through my mouth to the sky up above and the valley below.

  “I release you!” I shout to that old sorrow. “I release you!”

  “Tempora mutantur, et nos mutamur in illis,” I say to the chaplains when I give my keynote address the next morning. “It’s a Latin phrase I learned as a girl. Times are changing and we are changing with them. We are always in the process of becoming.” I ask them to travel back with me forty years, to the same mountain village where we sit right now, maybe to this very room, when fifteen highly educated people contemplated how many of their fellow humans they could incinerate in an oven at one time. “In human history, there is war,” I say. “There is cruelty, there is violence, there is hate. But never in the history of humankind has there ever been a more scientific and systematic annihilation of people. I survived Hitler’s horrific death camps. Last night I slept in Joseph Goebbels’s bed. People ask me, how did you learn to overcome the past? Overcome? Overcome? I haven’t overcome anything. Every beating, bombing, and selection line, every death, every column of smoke pushing skyward, every moment of terror when I thought it was the end—these live on in me, in my memories and my nightmares. The past isn’t gone. It isn’t transcended or excised. It lives on in me. But so does the perspective it has afforded me: that I lived to see liberation because I kept hope alive in my heart. That I lived to see freedom because I learned to forgive.”

  Forgiveness isn’t easy, I tell them. It is easier to hold grudges, to seek revenge. I tell of my fellow survivors, the courageous men and women I met in Israel, who looked pained when I mentioned forgiveness, who insisted that to forgive is to condone or to forget. Why forgive? Doesn’t that let Hitler off the hook for what he did?

  I tell of my dear friend Laci Gladstein—Larry Gladstone—and the single time in the decades since the war when he spoke to me explicitly about the past. It was during my divorce, when he knew money was a struggle for me. He called to say that he knew of a lawyer representing survivors in reparations cases, he encouraged me to step forward as a survivor, to claim my due. That was the right choice for many, but not for me. It felt like blood money. As if one could put a price on my parents’ heads. A way to stay chained to those who had tried to destroy us.

  It is too
easy to make a prison out of our pain, out of the past. At best, revenge is useless. It can’t alter what was done to us, it can’t erase the wrongs we’ve suffered, it can’t bring back the dead. At worst, revenge perpetuates the cycle of hate. It keeps the hate circling on and on. When we seek revenge, even non-violent revenge, we are revolving, not evolving.

  I even thought when I arrived yesterday that my presence here is a healthy kind of revenge, a comeuppance, a settling of the scores. And then I stood overlooking the cliff at the Berghof, and it came to me that revenge doesn’t make you free. So I stood on the site of Hitler’s former home and forgave him. This had nothing to do with Hitler. It was something I did for me. I was letting go, releasing the part of myself that had spent most of my life exerting the mental and spiritual energy to keep Hitler in chains. As long as I was holding on to that rage, I was in chains with him, locked in the damaging past, locked in my grief. To forgive is to grieve—for what happened, for what didn’t happen—and to give up the need for a different past. To accept life as it was and as it is. I do not of course mean that it was acceptable for Hitler to murder six million people. Just that it happened, and I do not want that fact to destroy the life that I clung to and fought for against all odds.

  The chaplains rise to their feet. They shower me in warm applause. I stand in the light on the stage, thinking that I will never feel so elated, so free. I don’t know that forgiving Hitler isn’t the hardest thing I’ll ever do. The hardest person to forgive is someone I’ve still to confront: myself.

  Our last night in Berchtesgaden, I can’t sleep. I lie awake in Goebbels’s bed. A crack of light breaks in from under the door and I can see the pattern of vines on the old wallpaper, the way they intertwine, the way they rise. Tempora mutantur, et nos mutamur in illis. If I am changing, what am I in the process of becoming?