The Choice

by Edith Eger

  I rest in the wakeful uncertainty. I try to open myself, to let my intuition speak. For some reason I think of a story I heard of a very talented Jewish boy, an artist. He was told to go to Vienna to art school, but he didn’t have any money for the journey. He walked from Czechoslovakia to Vienna, only to be denied a seat at the exams because he was Jewish. He begged. He had come so far, he had walked the whole way, could he at least take the test, could he be allowed that much? They let him sit for the exam, and he passed. He was so talented that he was offered a spot at the school despite his ancestry. Sitting beside him at the exam was a boy named Adolf Hitler, who was not accepted at the school. But the Jewish boy was. And all his life, this man, who had left Europe and lived in Los Angeles, had felt guilty, because if Hitler hadn’t suffered this loss, if he hadn’t lost to a Jew, he might not have felt the need to scapegoat Jews. The Holocaust might not have happened. Like children who have been abused, or whose parents divorce, we find a way to blame ourselves.

  The self-blame hurts others, too, not just ourselves. I remember a former patient, a man and his family I treated briefly a year or so ago. They sat before me like abandoned pieces from different puzzles: the intimidating colonel in his decorated uniform; the silent blonde wife, her collarbones jutting out from her white blouse; their teenage daughter, her dyed black hair ratted and sprayed into a wild nest, her eyes ringed in black eyeliner; a quiet son, eight years old, studying a comic book in his lap.

  The colonel pointed at his daughter. “Look at her. She’s promiscuous. She’s a drug addict. She won’t respect our rules. She mouths off to her mother. She doesn’t come home when she’s told. It’s becoming impossible to live with her.”

  “We’ve heard your version,” I said. “Let’s hear from Leah.”

  As if taunting him by reading from a script that would confirm every one of her father’s claims, Leah launched into a story about her weekend. She’d had sex with her boyfriend at a party, where there’d been underage drinking and where she’d also dropped acid. She’d stayed out all night. She seemed to take pleasure in listing the details.

  Her mother blinked and picked at her manicured nails. Her father’s face flushed red. He rose from his seat next to hers. He towered over her, shaking his fist. “You see what I have to put up with?” he roared. His daughter saw his anger, but I saw a man on his way to a heart attack.

  “You see what I have to put up with?” Leah said, rolling her eyes. “He doesn’t even try to understand me. He never listens to me. He just tells me what to do.”

  Her brother stared harder at his comic book, as if force of will could take him out of the war zone his family life had become and put him in the fantasy world of his book, where the lines between good and evil were clearly drawn, where the good guys would win, eventually. He had said the least of anyone in the family, and yet I had a hunch that he was the one with the most important things to say.

  I told the parents I would spend the next part of the session with them, without their children in the room, and I took Leah and her brother into my adjoining office, where I gave them drawing paper and markers. I gave them an assignment, something I thought might help them let off steam after the tense minutes with their parents. I asked them each to draw a portrait of their family but without using people.

  I returned to the parents. The colonel was yelling at his wife. She appeared to be wasting away, disappearing, and I was concerned she might be in the early stages of an eating disorder. If I asked her a question directly, she deferred to her husband. Each family member was in his or her own stockade. I could see the evidence of their inner pain in the ways they accused one another and hid themselves. But in trying to get them closer to the sources of their pain, I only seemed to be inviting them to open fire or recede even further.

  “We’ve talked about what you see going on with your children,” I said, interrupting the colonel. “What about what’s going on with you?”

  Leah’s mother blinked at me. Her father gave me a cold stare.

  “What do you wish to achieve, as parents?”

  “To teach them how to be strong in the world,” the colonel said.

  “And how are you doing with that?”

  “My daughter’s a slut and my son’s a sissy. How do you think?”

  “I can see that your daughter’s behaviors are scaring you. What about your son? How is he disappointing you?”

  “He’s weak. He’s always backing down.”

  “Can you give me an example?”

  “When we play basketball together, he’s a sore loser. He doesn’t even try to win. He just walks away.”

  “He’s a boy. He’s much smaller than you. What happens if you let him win?”

  “What would that teach him? That the world bends over for you if you’re soft?”

  “There are ways to teach kids to go farther, to stretch their capacities, with a gentle push, not a kick in the ass,” I said.

  The colonel grunted.

  “How do you want your children to see you?”

  “Like I’m in charge.”

  “A hero? A leader?”

  He nodded.

  “How do you think your children actually see you?”

  “They think I’m a goddamn pussy.”

  Later in the session I brought the family back together, and I asked the kids to share their family portraits. Leah had drawn only one object: an enormous bomb detonating in the middle of the page. Her brother had drawn a ferocious lion and three cowering mice.

  The colonel’s face turned red again. His wife looked down at her lap. He stammered and stared at the ceiling.

  “Tell me what’s going on for you right now.”

  “I fucked up this family, didn’t I?”

  I half expected that I would never see the colonel or his family again. But he called the following week to schedule a private session. I asked him to tell me more about how he felt when his children had showed us their pictures.

  “If my kids are afraid of me, how are they supposed to handle themselves in the world?”

  “What leads you to believe they can’t protect themselves?”

  “Leah can’t say no to boys or drugs. Robbie can’t say no to bullies.”

  “What about you? Can you protect yourself?”

  He puffed out his chest so his medals glinted in the sunlight. “You’re looking at the proof.”

  “I don’t mean on the battlefield. I mean in your home.”

  “I don’t think you understand the pressure I’m under.”

  “What would it take for you to feel safe?”

  “Safety isn’t the issue. If I’m not in control, people die.”

  “Is that what safety would feel like to you? Freedom from the fear that people are going to get hurt on your watch?”

  “It’s not just a fear.”

  “Take me where you are. What are you thinking of?”

  “I don’t think you want to hear this.”

  “You don’t have to worry about me.”

  “You won’t understand.”

  “You’re right, no one can ever understand someone else completely. But I can tell you that I was once a prisoner of war. Whatever it is you want to tell me, I’ve probably heard—and seen—worse.”

  “In the military, it’s kill or be killed. So when I got the order, I didn’t question it.”

  “Where are you when you get this order?”

  “Vietnam.”

  “Are you inside? Outside?”

  “In my office at the air base.”

  I watched his body language as he took me into the past. I watched his energy, his level of agitation, so that I could be attuned to any distress that signaled we were going too far too fast. He had closed his eyes. He seemed to be sinking into a trance.

  “Are you sitting or standing?”

  “I’m sitting when I get the call. But I stand up right away.”

  “Who’s calling you?”

  “My commanding officer.
”

  “What does he say?”

  “That he’s putting my men on a rescue mission in the bush.”

  “Why do you stand up when you hear the order?”

  “I feel hot. My chest is tight.”

  “What are you thinking?”

  “That it isn’t safe. That we’re going to be attacked. That we need more air support if we’re heading to that part of the bush. And they’re not giving it to us.”

  “Are you mad about that?”

  His eyes snapped open. “Of course I’m mad. They send us in there, they feed us a bunch of bullshit about America being the strongest army in the world, that the gooks don’t stand a chance.”

  “The war wasn’t what you expected.”

  “They lied to us.”

  “You feel betrayed.”

  “Hell yes, I feel betrayed.”

  “What happened the day you got the order to send your troops on the rescue mission?”

  “It was night.”

  “What happened that night?”

  “I’ll tell you what happened. It was an ambush.”

  “Your men got hurt?”

  “Do I have to spell it out? They died. They all died that night. And I’m the one who sent them in there. They trusted me, and I sent them in there to die.”

  “War means people die.”

  “You know what I think? Dying is easy. I have to live every day thinking about all those parents burying their sons.”

  “You were following an order.”

  “But I knew it was the wrong decision. I knew those boys needed more air support. And I didn’t have the balls to demand it.”

  “What did you give up to become a colonel?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You made a choice to become a soldier and a military leader. What did you have to give up to get here?”

  “I had to be away from my family a lot.”

  “What else?”

  “When you have six thousand men relying on you for their lives, you don’t have the luxury of being afraid.”

  “You’ve had to give up your feelings. To give up letting others see them.”

  He nodded.

  “You said before that dying is easy. Do you ever wish you were dead?”

  “All the fucking time.”

  “What’s stopping you?”

  “My kids.” His face contorted in anguish. “But they think I’m a monster. They’d be better off without me.”

  “Do you want to know how I see it? I think your children would be very much better off with you. With you, the man I am coming to know and admire. The man who can risk talking about his fear. The man who has the guts to forgive and accept himself.”

  He was silent. Perhaps this was the first moment he had encountered the possibility of freeing himself from the guilt he felt over the past.

  “I can’t help you go back in time to save your troops. I can’t guarantee your children’s safety. But I can help you protect one person: yourself.”

  He stared at me.

  “But to save yourself, you are going to have to give up the image of who you think you’re supposed to be.”

  “I hope this works,” he said.

  Shortly after, the colonel was reassigned and his family left El Paso. I don’t know what happened to them. I hope something good, as I cared for them deeply. But why am I thinking of them now? What does their story have to do with me? Something about the colonel’s guilt, about his prison of self-blame, is calling for my attention. Is my memory pointing to work I have already done, or work that I have yet to do? I have come so far since the end of my literal imprisonment, since the American GI rescued me in 1945. I have taken off my mask. I have learned to feel and express, to stop bottling my fears and my grief. I have worked to express and release my rage. And I have traveled back here, to my oppressor’s old home. I have even forgiven Hitler, released him to the universe, if only for today. But there’s a knot, a darkness, that extends from my gut to my heart, there’s a tightness in my spine—it’s an unrelenting sense of guilt. I was victimized, I wasn’t the victimizer. Whom is it that I think I have wronged?

  Another patient flashes into my mind. She was seventy-one years old and a chronic source of concern to her family. She exhibited all the symptoms of clinical depression. She slept too much and ate too much and isolated herself from her children and grandchildren. And when she did interact with her family, she was so full of anger that her grandchildren were afraid of her. Her son approached me after my lecture in their city to ask if I could spare an hour to meet with his mother. I wasn’t sure in what way I could be useful to her in a single, short visit until the man revealed that, like me, his mother had lost her own mother when she was only sixteen. I felt a surge of compassion for his mother, this stranger. It struck me that she was the person I could easily have become, that I almost became—so steeped in loss that I hid from the people who loved me the most.

  The woman, Margaret, came to see me in my hotel room that afternoon. She was meticulously dressed, but there was a hostility that bristled out of her like quills. She unleashed a litany of complaints about her health, her family members, her housekeeper, her postman, her neighbors, the headmistress of the girls’ school up the street. She seemed to find injustice and inconvenience everywhere in her life. The hour was wasting away, and she was so caught up in the small disasters that we hadn’t touched on what I knew to be her larger grief.

  “Where is your mother buried?” I asked suddenly.

  Margaret pulled away as though I was a dragon breathing on her face with flame. “In the cemetery,” she finally said, recomposed.

  “Where is the cemetery? Nearby?”

  “In this very town,” she said.

  “Your mother needs you right now.”

  I didn’t give her a chance to object. We hailed a taxi. We sat and watched the wet, busy streets through the windows. She kept up a running criticism of other drivers, the speed of the traffic signals, the quality of the shops and businesses we passed, even the color of someone’s umbrella. We drove through the iron gates of the cemetery. The trees were mature and towering. A narrow cobblestone road led from the gate into the field of the dead. Rain fell.

  “There,” Margaret said at last, pointing up the muddy hill to a crowd of headstones. “Now tell me what in God’s name we’re doing here.”

  “Do you know,” I said, “mothers can’t rest in peace unless they know the people they have left behind are fully embracing life?” Take off your shoes, I told her. Take off your stockings. Stand barefoot on your mother’s grave. Make direct contact so she can finally rest in peace.

  Margaret got out of the taxi. She stood on the rain-slick grass. I gave her privacy. I looked back only once, when I saw Margaret crouched on the ground, holding her mother’s headstone in her hands. I don’t know what she said to her mother, if she said anything at all. I only know she stood barefoot on her mother’s grave, that she connected her bare skin to this site of loss and grief. That when she got back in the taxi she was barefoot still. She cried a little, then fell silent.

  Later I would receive a beautiful letter from Margaret’s son. I don’t know what you said to my mother, he would write, but she’s a different person, she is more peaceful, more joyful.

  It was a whim, a lucky experiment. My goal was to help her reframe her experience—to reframe her problem as an opportunity, to put her in the position of helping her mother—and in helping her mother to be free, to help herself. Now that I am back in Germany, it occurs to me that maybe the same principle can work for me. Bare-skinned connection with the site of my loss. Contact and release. Hungarian exorcism.

  Lying awake in Goebbels’s bed, I realize that I need to do what Margaret did, to perform the rite of grief that has eluded me all my life.

  I decide to return to Auschwitz.

  CHAPTER 19

  Leave a Stone

  I CAN’T IMAGINE going back to hell without Magda. “Fly to Kra
ków tonight,” I beg Magda the next morning from the phone in the Hotel zum Türken lobby. “Please come back to Auschwitz with me.”

  I wouldn’t have survived without her. I can’t survive returning to our prison now unless she is beside me, holding my hand. I know it’s not possible to relive the past, to be who I used to be, to hug my mother again, even once. There is nothing that can alter the past, that can make me different from who I am, change what was done to my parents, done to me. There is no going back. I know this. But I can’t ignore the feeling that there is something waiting for me in my old prison, something to recover. Or discover. Some long-lost part of me.

  “What kind of a crazy masochist do you think I am?” Magda says. “Why the hell would I go back there? Why would you?”

  It’s a fair question. Am I only punishing myself? Reopening a wound? Maybe I will regret it. But I think I will regret it more if I don’t go back. No matter how many ways I try to convince her, Magda refuses. Magda is choosing never to return, and I respect her for it. But I will make a different choice.

  Béla and I already have an invitation to visit Marianne’s old host family in Copenhagen while we are in Europe, and we continue there from Berchtesgaden as planned.

  We travel to Salzburg, where we tour the cathedral constructed on the ruins of a Roman church. It has been rebuilt three times, we learn—most recently after a bomb damaged the central dome during the war. There is no evidence of the destruction. “Like us,” Béla says, taking my hand.

  From Salzburg, we go to Vienna, traveling over the same ground Magda and I marched across before we were liberated. I see ditches running alongside roads, and I imagine them as I once saw them, spilling over with corpses, but I can also see them as they are now, filling up with summer grass. I can see that the past doesn’t taint the present, the present doesn’t diminish the past. Time is the medium. Time is the track, we travel it. The train goes through Linz. Through Wels. I am a girl with a broken back who learns to write a capital G again, who learns again to dance.

  We spend the night in Vienna, not far from the Rothschild Hospital where we first lived when we were waiting for our visas to America, and where, I have since learned, my mentor Viktor Frankl was the chief of neurology before the war. In the morning we board another train north.