The Choice

by Edith Eger

  I think Béla assumes my desire to return to Auschwitz might wane, but our second morning in Copenhagen I ask our friends for directions to the Polish embassy. They caution me, as Marianne already has, about their survivor friends who visited the camp and then died. “Don’t retraumatize yourself,” they plead. Béla, too, looks worried. “Hitler didn’t win,” I remind him.

  I thought that choosing to return would be the biggest hurdle. But at the Polish embassy, Béla and I learn that labor riots have broken out across Poland, that the Soviets might intervene to suppress the demonstrations, that the embassy has been advised to stop issuing travel visas to Westerners. Béla is ready to console me, but I brush him away. I feel the force of will that led me once to the prison warden in Prešov with a diamond ring in my hand, to a medical examiner’s office in Vienna with my brother-in-law posing as my husband. I have come this far in my life and my healing. I can concede to no obstacle now.

  “I’m a survivor,” I tell the embassy clerk. “I was a prisoner at Auschwitz. My parents and grandparents died there. I fought so hard to survive. Please don’t make me wait to go back.” I don’t know that within a year Polish–American relations will have deteriorated, that they will stay frozen for the rest of the decade, that this is in fact the last chance for me and Béla to go to Auschwitz together. I only know that I can’t let myself be turned back.

  The clerk eyes me, expressionless. He steps away from the counter, returns. “Passports,” he says. Into our blue American passports he has inserted travel visas good for one week. “Enjoy Poland,” he says.

  This is when I start to feel afraid. On the train to Kraków I feel that I’m in a crucible, that I am reaching the point at which I will break or burn, that fear alone could turn me into ash. This is here, this is now. I try to reason with the part of me that feels that with every mile I travel I lose a layer of skin. I will be a skeleton again by the time I get to Poland. I want to be more than bones.

  “Let’s get off at the next stop,” I tell Béla. “It’s not important to go all the way to Auschwitz. Let’s go home.”

  “Edie,” he says, “you’re going to be fine. It’s only a place. It can’t hurt you.”

  I stay on the train for another stop, and another, through Berlin, through Poznań. I think of Dr. Hans Selye—a fellow Hungarian—who said stress is the body’s response to any demand for change. Our automatic responses are to fight or to flee—but in Auschwitz, where we endured more than stress, where we lived in distress, the stakes life and death, never knowing what would happen next, the options to fight or flee didn’t exist. I would have been shot if I’d fought back, electrocuted if I’d tried to run away. So I learned to flow, I learned to stay in the situation, to develop the only thing I had left, to look within for the part of me that no Nazi could ever murder. To find and hold on to my truest self. Maybe I’m not losing skin. Maybe I am only stretching. Stretching to encompass every aspect of who I am—and have been—and can become.

  When we heal, we embrace our real and possible selves. I had a patient who was obese, and she was cruel to herself every time she saw her reflection or stepped on a scale. She called herself a cow, disgusting. She believed her husband found her disappointing and her children found her embarrassing, that the people who loved her deserved better. But for her to be the person she wanted to be she first had to love herself for who she was. We sat in my office and I would ask her to pick a part of her body—a toe, a finger, her stomach, her neck, her chin—and talk about it in a loving way. It looks like this, it feels like this, it is beautiful because … It was awkward at first, even painful. It was easier for her to bash herself than to spend time attentively, willingly, in her own skin. We went slowly, we went gently. I began to notice little changes. She came to see me one day wearing a beautiful bright new scarf. Another day she had treated herself to a pedicure. Another day she told me she had called the sister she had grown distant from. Another time she had discovered that she loved walking on the trail around the park where her daughter played soccer. As she practiced loving all parts of herself, she discovered more joy in her life, and more ease. She also began to lose weight. Release begins with acceptance.

  To heal, we embrace the dark. We walk through the shadow of the valley on our way to the light. I worked with a Vietnam veteran who came home desperate to resume the life he had before the war. But he returned with physical and psychological wounds: He was impotent, he couldn’t find a job. His wife left him. When he sought my help, he was lost in the chaos of divorce and what felt to him like the death of his sexuality and identity. I gave him all of my compassion, but he was stuck, he was angry, caught in the quicksand of his loss. I felt powerless to help him out. The more I tried to love him back from the pit of despair, the deeper he sank.

  As a last resort I decided to try hypnotherapy. I regressed him back to the war, when he was a bomber pilot, when he was in control, before he came home and lost it all. In his hypnotic state, he told me, “In Vietnam, I could drink as much as I wanted to. I could fuck as much as I wanted to.” He got red in the face and screamed, “And I could kill as much as I wanted to!” In the war he wasn’t killing people; he was killing “gooks,” he was killing subhumans. Just as the Nazis weren’t killing people at the death camps; they were eradicating a cancer. The war had brought about his injury and altered his life, and yet he missed the war. He missed the sense of power he gained in fighting an enemy, in feeling himself to be in an invulnerable class, above another nationality, above another race.

  None of my unconditional love did any good until I gave him permission to express the part of him that he was grieving, the part that was both powerful and dark, the part he could no longer express. I don’t mean that he needed to kill again in order to be whole. I mean that to find his way out of victimhood he needed to come to terms with his impotence and his power, the ways he had been injured and the ways he had hurt, his pride and his shame. The only antidote to brokenness is the whole self.

  Maybe to heal isn’t to erase the scar, or even to make the scar. To heal is to cherish the wound.

  It is the middle of the afternoon when we reach Kraków. We will sleep here tonight—or try to. Tomorrow we will take a cab to Auschwitz. Béla wants to tour the Old Town, and I try to pay attention to the medieval architecture, but my mind is too heavy with expectation—a strange mix of promise and dread. We pause outside St. Mary’s Church to hear the trumpeter play the hejnał that marks the top of every hour. A group of teenage boys jostles past us, joking loudly in Polish, but I don’t feel their merriment, I feel anxious. These young men, a little older than my grandchildren, remind me how soon the next generation will come of age. Has my generation taught the youth well enough to prevent another Holocaust from occurring? Or will our hard-won freedom capsize in a new sea of hate?

  I have had many opportunities to influence young people—my own children and grandchildren, my former students, the audiences I address around the world, individual patients. On the eve of my return to Auschwitz, my responsibility to them feels especially potent. It isn’t just for myself that I’m going back. It’s for all that ripples out from me.

  Do I have what it takes to make a difference? Can I pass on my strength instead of my loss? My love instead of my hatred?

  I’ve been tested before. A fourteen-year-old boy who had participated in a car theft was sent to me by a judge. The boy wore brown boots, a brown shirt. He leaned his elbow on my desk. He said, “It’s time for America to be white again. I’m going to kill all the Jews, all the niggers, all the Mexicans, all the chinks.”

  I thought I would be sick. I struggled not to run from the room. What is the meaning of this? I wanted to shout. I wanted to shake the boy, say, Who do you think you’re talking to? I saw my mother go to the gas chamber. I would have been justified. And maybe it was my job to set him straight, maybe that’s why God had sent him my way. To nip his hate in the bud. I could feel the rush of righteousness. It felt good to be angry. Bett
er angry than afraid.

  But then I heard a voice within. Find the bigot in you, the voice said. Find the bigot in you.

  I tried to silence that voice. I listed my many objections to the very notion that I could be a bigot. I came to America penniless. I used the “colored” bathroom in solidarity with my fellow African American factory workers. I marched with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to end segregation. But the voice insisted: Find the bigot in you. Find the part in you that is judging, assigning labels, diminishing another’s humanity, making others less than who they are.

  The boy continued to rant about the blights to America’s purity. My whole being trembled with unease, and I struggled with the inclination to wag my finger, shake my fist, make him accountable for his hate—without being accountable for my own. This boy didn’t kill my parents. Withholding my love wouldn’t conquer his prejudice.

  I prayed for the ability to meet him with love. I summoned every image I had of unconditional love. I thought of Corrie ten Boom, one of the Righteous Gentiles. She and her family resisted Hitler by hiding hundreds of Jews in their home, and she ended up in a concentration camp herself. Her sister perished there—she died in Corrie’s arms. Corrie was released due to a clerical error one day before all of the inmates at Ravensbrück were executed. And a few years after the war, she met one of the most vicious guards at her camp, one of the men who were responsible for her sister’s death. She could have spit on him, wished him death, cursed his name. But she prayed for the strength to forgive him, and she took his hands in her own. She says that in that moment, the former prisoner clasping the hands of the former guard, she felt the purest and most profound love. I tried to find that embrace, that compassion, in my own heart, to fill my eyes with that quality of kindness. I wondered if it was possible that this racist boy had been sent to me so I could learn about unconditional love. What opportunity did I have in this moment? What choice could I make right then that could move me in the direction of love?

  I had an opportunity to love this young person, just for him, for his singular being and our shared humanity. The opportunity to welcome him to say anything, feel any feeling, without the fear of being judged. I remembered a German family that was stationed for a while at Fort Bliss, how the girl would climb into my lap and call me Oma—Grandma—and this little benediction from a child felt like the answer to the fantasy I’d had as I passed through German towns with Magda and the other inmates, as the children spat at us, when I dreamed of a day when German children would know they didn’t have to hate me. And in my own lifetime, that day came to pass. I thought of a statistic I read, that most of the members of white supremacist groups in America lost one of their parents before they were ten years old. These are lost children looking for an identity, looking for a way to feel strength, to feel like they matter.

  And so I gathered myself up and I looked at this young man as lovingly as I could. I said three words: “Tell me more.”

  I didn’t say much more than that during his first visit. I listened. I empathized. He was so much like me after the war. We had both lost our parents—his to neglect and abandonment, mine to death. We both thought of ourselves as damaged goods. In letting go of my judgment, in letting go of my desire for him to be or believe anything different, by seeing his vulnerability and his yearning for belonging and love, in allowing myself to get past my own fear and anger in order to accept and love him, I was able to give him something his brown shirt and brown boots couldn’t—an authentic image of his own worth. When he left my office that day, he didn’t know a thing about my history. But he had seen an alternative to hate and prejudice, he was no longer talking about killing, he had shown me his soft smile. And I had taken responsibility that I not perpetuate hostility and blame, that I not bow to hate and say, You are too much for me.

  Now, on the eve of my return to prison, I remind myself that each of us has an Adolf Hitler and a Corrie ten Boom within us. We have the capacity to hate and the capacity to love. Which one we reach for—our inner Hitler or inner ten Boom—is up to us.

  In the morning, we hire a cab to drive us the hour to Auschwitz. Béla engages the driver in chitchat about his family, his children. I take in the view I didn’t see when I was sixteen, when I approached Auschwitz from within the dark of a cattle car. Farms, villages, green. Life continues, as it did all around us when we were imprisoned there.

  The driver drops us off, and Béla and I are alone again, standing before my former prison. The wrought-iron sign looms: ARBEIT MACHT FREI, work will set you free. My legs shake at the sight, at the memory of how these words gave my father hope. We will work until the end of the war, he thought. It will last for just a little while, and then we’ll be free. Arbeit Macht Frei. These words kept us calm until the gas chamber doors locked around our loved ones, until panic was futile. And then these words became a daily, an hourly irony, because here nothing could set you free. Death was the only escape. And so even the idea of freedom became another form of hopelessness.

  The grass is lush. The trees have filled in. But the clouds are the color of bone, and beneath them the man-made structures, even the ones in ruins, dominate the landscape. Miles and miles of relentless fence. A vast expanse of crumbling brick barracks and bare rectangular patches where buildings used to stand. The bleak horizontal lines—of barracks, fence, tower—are regular and orderly, but there is no life in this geometry. This is the geometry of systematic torture and death. Mathematical annihilation. And then I notice it again, the thing that haunted me those hellish months when this was my home: I can’t see or hear a single bird. No birds live here. Not even now. The sky is bare of their wings, the silence deeper because of the absence of their song.

  Tourists gather. Our tour commences. We are a small group of eight or ten. The immensity crushes. I sense it in our stillness, in the way we almost stop breathing. There is no fathoming the enormity of the horror committed in this place. I was here while the fires burned, I woke and worked and slept to the stench of burning corpses, and even I can’t fathom it. The brain tries to contain the numbers, tries to take in the confounding accumulation of things that have been assembled and put on display for the visitors—the suitcases wrested from the soon to be dead, the bowls and plates and cups, the thousands upon thousands of pairs of glasses amassed in a tangle like a surreal tumbleweed. The baby clothes crocheted by loving hands for babies who never became children or women or men. The 67-foot-long glass case filled entirely with human hair. We count: 4,700 corpses cremated in each fire, 75,000 Polish dead, 21,000 Gypsies, 15,000 Soviets. The numbers accrue and accrue. We can form the equation—we can do the math that describes the more than one million dead at Auschwitz. We can add that number to the rosters of the dead at the thousands of other death camps in the Europe of my youth, to the corpses dumped in ditches or rivers before they were ever sent to a death camp. But there is no equation that can adequately summarize the effect of such total loss. There is no language that can explain the systematic inhumanity of this human-made death factory. More than one million people were murdered right here where I stand. It is the world’s biggest cemetery. And in all the tens, hundreds, thousands, millions of dead, in all the possessions packed and then forcibly relinquished, in all the miles of fence and brick, another number looms. The number zero. Here in the world’s biggest cemetery, there is not one single grave. Only the empty spaces where the crematories and gas chambers, hastily destroyed by the Nazis before liberation, stood. The bare patches of ground where my parents died.

  We complete the tour of the men’s camp. I still must go to the women’s side, to Birkenau. That is why I am here. Béla asks if I want him to come with me, but I shake my head. This last piece of the journey I must travel alone.

  I leave Béla at the entrance gate and I am back in the past. Music plays through the loudspeakers, festive sounds that contradict the bleak surroundings. You see, my father says, it can’t be a terrible place. We’ll only work a little, till the war’s over. It
is temporary. We can survive this. He joins his line and waves to me. Do I wave back to him? O memory, tell me that I waved to my father before he died.

  My mother links her arm in mine. We walk side by side. “Button your coat,” she says. “Stand tall.” I am back inside the image that has occupied my inward gaze for most of my life: three hungry women in wool coats, arms linked, in a barren yard. My mother. My sister. Me.

  I am wearing the coat that I put on that April dawn, I am slim and flat-chested, my hair tucked back under a scarf. My mother scolds me again to stand tall. “You’re a woman, not a child,” she says. There is a purpose to her nagging. She wants me to look every day of my sixteen years and more. My survival depends on it.

  And yet, I won’t for the life of me let go of my mother’s hand. The guards point and shove. We inch forward in our line. I see Mengele’s heavy eyes ahead, the gapped teeth when he grins. He is conducting. He is an eager host. “Is anyone sick?” he asks, solicitous. “Over forty? Under fourteen? Go left, go left.”

  This is our last chance. To share words, to share silence. To embrace. This time I know it is the end. And still I come up short. I just want my mother to look at me. To reassure me. To look at me and never look away. What is this need I hand to her again and again, this impossible thing I want?

  It’s our turn now. Dr. Mengele lifts his finger. “Is she your mother or your sister?” he asks.

  I cling to my mother’s hand, Magda hugs her other side. Although none of us knows the meaning of being sent left, of being sent right, my mother has intuited the need for me to appear my age or older, for me to look old enough to get through the first selection line alive. Her hair is gray but her face is as smooth as mine. She could pass for my sister. But I don’t think about which word will protect her: “mother” or “sister.” I don’t think at all. I only feel every single cell in me that loves her, that needs her. She is my mother, my mama, my only mama. And so I say the word that I have spent the rest of my life trying to banish from my consciousness, the word that I have not let myself remember, until today.