by Edith Eger
“Mother,” I say.
As soon as the word is out of my mouth, I want to pull it back into my throat. I have realized too late the significance of the question. Is she your mother or your sister? “Sister, sister, sister!” I want to scream. Mengele points my mother to the left. She follows behind the young children and the elderly, the mothers who are pregnant or holding babies in their arms. I will follow her. I won’t let her out of my sight. I begin to run toward my mother, but Mengele grabs my shoulder. “You’ll see your mother very soon,” he says. He pushes me to the right. Toward Magda. To the other side. To life.
“Mama!” I call. We are separated again, in memory as we were in life, but I will not let memory be another dead end. “Mama!” I say. I will not be satisfied with the back of her head. I must see the full sun of her face.
She turns to look at me. She is a point of stillness in the marching river of the other condemned. I feel her radiance, the beauty that was more than beauty, that she often hid under her sadness and disapproval. She sees me watching her. She smiles. It’s a small smile. A sad smile.
“I should have said ‘sister’! Why didn’t I say ‘sister’?” I call to her across the years, to ask her forgiveness. That is what I have returned to Auschwitz to receive, I think. To hear her tell me I did the best with what I knew. That I made the right choice.
But she can’t say that, or even if she did, I wouldn’t believe it. I can forgive the Nazis, but how can I forgive myself? I would live it all again, every selection line, every shower, every freezing-cold night and deadly roll call, every haunted meal, every breath of smoke-charred air, every time I nearly died or wanted to, if I could only live this moment over, this moment and the one just before it, when I could have made a different choice. When I could have given a different answer to Mengele’s question. When I could have saved, if even for a day, my mother’s life.
My mother turns away. I watch her gray coat, her soft shoulders, her hair that is coiled and shining, receding from me. I see her walk away with the other women and children, toward the locker rooms, where they will undress, where she will take off the coat that still holds Klara’s caul, where they will be told to memorize the hook number where they’ve stored their clothes, as though they will be returning to that dress, to that coat, to that pair of shoes. My mother will stand naked with the other mothers—the grandmothers, the young mothers with their babies in their arms—and with the children of mothers who were sent to the line that Magda and I joined. She will file down the stairs into the room with showerheads on the walls, where more and more people will be pushed inside until the room is damp with sweat and tears and echoing with the cries of the terrified women and children, until it is packed and there is not enough air to breathe. Will she notice the small square windows in the ceiling through which the guards will push the poison? For how long will she know she is dying? Long enough to think of me and Magda and Klara? Of my father? Long enough to say a prayer to her mother? Long enough to feel angry at me for saying the word that in one quick second sent her to her death?
If I’d known my mother would die that day, I would have said a different word. Or nothing at all. I could have followed her to the showers and died with her. I could have done something different. I could have done more. I believe this.
And yet. (This “and yet” opening like a door.) How easily a life can become a litany of guilt and regret, a song that keeps echoing with the same chorus, with the inability to forgive ourselves. How easily the life we didn’t live becomes the only life we prize. How easily we are seduced by the fantasy that we are in control, that we were ever in control, that the things we could or should have done or said have the power, if only we had done or said them, to cure pain, to erase suffering, to vanish loss. How easily we can cling to—worship—the choices we think we could or should have made.
Could I have saved my mother? Maybe. And I will live for all of the rest of my life with that possibility. And I can castigate myself for having made the wrong choice. That is my prerogative. Or I can accept that the more important choice is not the one I made when I was hungry and terrified, when we were surrounded by dogs and guns and uncertainty, when I was sixteen; it’s the one I make now. The choice to accept myself as I am: human, imperfect. And the choice to be responsible for my own happiness. To forgive my flaws and reclaim my innocence. To stop asking why I deserved to survive. To function as well as I can, to commit myself to serve others, to do everything in my power to honor my parents, to see to it that they did not die in vain. To do my best, in my limited capacity, so future generations don’t experience what I did. To be useful, to be used up, to survive and to thrive so I can use every moment to make the world a better place. And to finally, finally stop running from the past. To do everything possible to redeem it, and then let it go. I can make the choice that all of us can make. I can’t ever change the past. But there is a life I can save: It is mine. The one I am living right now, this precious moment.
I am ready to go. I take a stone from the ground, a little one, rough, gray, unremarkable. I squeeze the stone. In Jewish tradition, we place small stones on graves as a sign of respect for the dead, to offer mitzvah, or blessing. The stone signifies that the dead live on, in our hearts and memories. The stone in my hand is a symbol of my enduring love for my parents. And it is an emblem of the guilt and the grief I came here to face—something immense and terrifying that all the same I can hold in my hand. It is the death of my parents. It is the death of the life that was. It is what didn’t happen. And it is the birth of the life that is. Of the patience and compassion I learned here, the ability to stop judging myself, the ability to respond instead of react. It is the truth and the peace I have come here to discover, and all that I can finally put to rest and leave behind.
I leave the stone on the patch of earth where my barrack used to be, where I slept on a wooden shelf with five other girls, where I closed my eyes as “The Blue Danube” played and I danced for my life. I miss you, I say to my parents. I love you. I’ll always love you.
And to the vast campus of death that consumed my parents and so very many others, to the classroom of horror that still had something sacred to teach me about how to live—that I was victimized but I’m not a victim, that I was hurt but not broken, that the soul never dies, that meaning and purpose can come from deep in the heart of what hurts us the most—I utter my final words. Goodbye, I say. And, Thank you. Thank you for life, and for the ability to finally accept the life that is.
I walk toward the iron gate of my old prison, toward Béla waiting for me on the grass. Out of the corner of my eye I see a man in uniform pacing back and forth under the sign. He is a museum guard, not a soldier. But it is impossible, when I see him marching in his uniform, not to freeze, not to hold my breath, not to expect the shout of a gun, the blast of bullets. For a split second I am a terrified girl again, a girl who is in danger. I am the imprisoned me. But I breathe, I wait for the moment to pass. I feel for the blue American passport in my coat pocket. The guard reaches the wrought-iron sign and turns around, marching back into the prison. He must stay here. It is his duty to stay. But I can leave. I am free!
I leave Auschwitz. I skip out! I pass under the words arbeit macht frei. How cruel and mocking those words were when we realized that nothing we could do would set us free. But as I leave the barracks and the ruined crematories and the watch houses and the visitors and the museum guard behind me, as I skip under the dark iron letters toward my husband, I see the words spark with truth. Work has set me free. I survived so that I could do my work. Not the work the Nazis meant—the hard labor of sacrifice and hunger, of exhaustion and enslavement. It was the inner work. Of learning to survive and thrive, of learning to forgive myself, of helping others to do the same. And when I do this work, then I am no longer the hostage or the prisoner of anything. I am free.
PART IV
Healing
CHAPTER 20
The Dance of Freedom
&n
bsp; ONE OF THE last times I saw Viktor Frankl was at the Third World Congress on Logotherapy, in Regensburg in 1983. He was almost eighty; I was fifty-six. In many ways I was the same person who had fallen into a panic in an El Paso lecture hall when I put a little paperback book into my bag. I still spoke English with a thick accent. I still had flashbacks. I still carried painful images and mourned the losses of the past. But I no longer felt like I was the victim of anything. I felt—and will always feel—tremendous love and gratitude for my two liberators: the GI who pulled me from a heap of bodies at Gunskirchen, and Viktor Frankl, who gave me permission not to hide anymore, who helped me find words for my experience, who helped me to cope with my pain. Through his mentorship and friendship, I discovered a purpose in my suffering, a sense of meaning that helped me not only to come to peace with the past but also to emerge from my trials with something precious worth sharing: a path to freedom. The last night of the conference, we danced. There we were, two aging dancers. Two people enjoying the sacred present. Two survivors who had learned to thrive and be free.
My decades-long friendship with Viktor Frankl, and my healing relationships with all of my patients, including those I’ve been describing, have taught me the same important lesson that I began studying at Auschwitz: Our painful experiences aren’t a liability—they’re a gift. They give us perspective and meaning, an opportunity to find our unique purpose and our strength.
There is no one-size-fits-all template for healing, but there are steps that can be learned and practiced, steps that each individual can weave together in his or her own way, steps in the dance of freedom.
My first step in the dance was to take responsibility for my feelings. To stop repressing and avoiding them, and to stop blaming them on Béla or other people, to accept them as my own. This was a vital step in Captain Jason Fuller’s healing too. Like me, he was in the habit of cutting his feelings off, of running from them until they got big enough to control him, instead of the other way around. I told him that he couldn’t avoid pain by avoiding his feelings. He had to take responsibility for experiencing—and eventually expressing—them safely, and then for letting them go.
In those early weeks of treatment, I taught him a mantra for managing his emotions: notice, accept, check, stay. When a feeling started to overwhelm him, the first action toward managing the feeling was to notice—to acknowledge—that he was having a feeling. He could say to himself, Aha! Here I go again. This is anger. This is jealousy. This is sadness. (My Jungian therapist taught me something that I find quite comforting—that although it feels like the palette of human feelings is limitless, in fact every emotional shade, like every color, is derived from just a few primary emotions: sad, mad, glad, scared. For those just learning an emotional vocabulary, as I was, it’s less overwhelming to learn to identify only four feelings.)
Once he could name his feelings, Jason needed to accept that those feelings were his own. They might be triggered by someone else’s actions or speech, but they were his. Lashing out at someone else wasn’t going to make them go away.
Then, once he was there with the feeling, he was to check his body response. Am I hot? Cold? Is my heart racing? How’s my breathing? Am I okay?
Tuning into the feeling itself, and to how it was moving in his body, would help him stay with it until it passed or changed. He didn’t have to cover, medicate, or run from his feelings. He could choose to feel them. They were only feelings. He could accept them, bear them, stay with them—because they were temporary.
Once Jason was more adept at tuning in to his feelings, we practiced how to respond to them, instead of reacting. Jason had learned to live like he was in a pressure cooker. He kept himself under tight control—until he burst. I helped him learn to be more like a teapot, to vent off the steam. Sometimes he’d come to a session and I’d ask him how he was feeling, and he’d say, “I feel like screaming.” And I’d say, “Okay! Let’s scream. Let’s get it all out so it doesn’t make you ill.”
As Jason learned to accept and face his feelings, he also began to see that in many ways he was re-creating the fear, repression, and violence of his childhood in his current family. The need to control his feelings, learned at the hand of an abusive father, had translated into a need to control his wife and his children.
Sometimes our healing helps us to repair our relationships with our partners; sometimes our healing releases the other person to do his or her own growth. After a few months of joining him for couples counseling, Jason’s wife told him that she was ready to separate. Jason was shocked and furious. I was concerned that his grief over the failed marriage would govern how he treated his children. At first Jason was vindictive and wanted to fight for full custody, but he was able to shift his all-or-nothing mind-set, and he and his wife worked out an agreement to share custody. He was able to mend and nurture his relationships with the people who had inspired him to drop the gun: his kids. He ended the legacy of violence.
Once we are recognizing and taking responsibility for our feelings, we can learn to recognize and take responsibility for our role in the dynamic that shapes our relationships. As I learned in my marriage, and in my relationships with my children, one of the proving grounds for our freedom is in how we relate to our loved ones. This is something that comes up frequently in my work.
Jun wore pressed slacks and a button-up shirt the morning I met him. Ling stepped through the door in a perfectly tailored skirt and blazer, her makeup expertly applied and her hair carefully coiffed. Jun sat at one end of the couch, his eyes going over the framed diplomas and photographs on my office walls, looking everywhere except at Ling. She perched neatly on the edge of the couch and looked right at me. “This is the problem,” she said without preamble. “My husband drinks too much.”
Jun’s face reddened. He seemed on the verge of speaking, but he kept quiet.
“It has to stop,” Ling said.
I asked what “it” was. What were the behaviors she found so objectionable?
According to Ling, over the last year or two, Jun’s drinking had gone from an occasional evening or weekend activity to an everyday ritual. He began before he came home, with a scotch at a bar near the university campus where he was a professor. That drink was followed at home by another, and another. By the time they sat down for dinner with their two children, his eyes were a little glassy, his voice a little too loud, his jokes a little too off-color. Ling felt lonely and burdened by the responsibility of marching the kids through cleanup and bedtime routines. By the time she was ready for sleep, she was simmering with frustration. When I asked about their intimate life, Ling blushed, and then told me that Jun used to initiate sex when they went to bed, but often she was too upset to reciprocate. Now he usually fell asleep on the couch.
“That’s not all,” she said. She was listing all the evidence. “He breaks dishes because he’s drunk. He comes home late. He forgets things that I tell him. He’s driving drunk. He’s going to get in an accident. How can I trust him to drive the kids?”
As Ling spoke, Jun seemed to disappear. His eyes dropped to his lap. He looked hurt, reserved, ashamed—and angry, but his hostility was directed inward. I asked Jun for his perspective on their daily life.
“I’m always responsible with the kids,” he said. “She has no right to accuse me of putting them in danger.”
“What about your relationship with Ling? How do you see your marriage working?”
He shrugged. “I’m here,” he said.
“I notice a big space between you on the couch. Is that an accurate indication of a big gulf between you?”
Ling gripped her purse.
“It’s accurate,” Jun said.
“It’s because he drinks!” Ling interjected. “That’s what’s making this distance.”
“It sounds like there’s a lot of anger there pushing you apart.”
Ling looked quickly at her husband before nodding.
I see a lot of couples locked in the same dance. She
nags, he drinks. He drinks, she nags. That’s the choreography they’ve chosen. But what if one of them changes the steps? “I wonder,” I began. “I wonder if your marriage would survive if Jun stopped drinking.”
Jun’s jaw clenched. Ling loosened her hold on her purse. “Exactly,” she said. “This is what needs to happen.”
“What would really happen if Jun stopped drinking?” I asked.
I told them about another couple I know. The husband was also a drinker. One day, he’d had enough. He didn’t want to drink anymore. He wanted to get help. He decided that rehab was the best option, and he started working hard on his sobriety. This was precisely what his wife had been praying would happen. They both expected his sobriety to be the solution to all their problems. But as his recovery progressed, their marriage got worse. When the wife visited the rehab facility, angry and bitter feelings would surface. She couldn’t stop herself from rehashing the past. Remember five years ago when you came home and threw up all over my favorite rug? And that other time you ruined our anniversary party? She couldn’t keep from reciting a litany of all the mistakes he’d made, all the ways he’d hurt and disappointed her. The better her husband got, the worse she became. He felt stronger, less toxic, less ashamed, more in touch with himself, more tuned in to his life and relationships. And she grew more and more enraged. He let go of the drinking, but she couldn’t let go of the criticism and blame.
I call this the seesaw. One person’s up, and one person’s down. Lots of marriages and relationships are built this way. Two people agree to an unspoken contract: One of them will be good and one of them will be bad. The whole system relies on one person’s inadequacy. The “bad” partner gets a free pass to test all the limits; the “good” partner gets to say, Look how selfless I am! Look how patient I am! Look at everything I put up with!