The Choice

by Edith Eva Eger

  “Hurry, Dicu,” she urges me. “Get up. Get dressed.”

  “Not that wearing clothes ever did your figure any good,” Magda whispers. There’s no reprieve from her teasing. How will I know when it’s time to be really afraid?

  My mother is in the kitchen now, packing leftover food, pots and pans. In fact, she will keep us alive for two weeks on the supplies she thinks to carry with us now—some flour, some chicken fat. My father paces the bedroom and living room, picking up books, candlesticks, clothing, putting things down. “Get blankets,” my mother calls to him. I think that if he had one petit four that is the thing he would take along, if only for the joy of handing it to me later, of seeing a swift second of delight on my face. Thank goodness my mother is more practical. When she was still a child, she became a mother to her younger siblings, and she staved their hunger through many seasons of grief. As God is my witness, I imagine her thinking now, as she packs, I’m never going to be hungry again. And yet I want her to drop the dishes, the survival tools, and come back to the bedroom to help me dress. Or at least I want her to call to me. To tell me what to wear. To tell me not to worry. To tell me all is well.

  The soldiers stomp their boots, knock chairs over with their guns. Hurry. Hurry. I feel a sudden anger with my mother. She would save Klara before she would save me. She’d rather cull the pantry than hold my hand in the dark. I’ll have to find my own sweetness, my own luck. Despite the chill of the dark April morning, I put on a thin blue silk dress, the one I wore when Eric kissed me. I trace the pleats with my fingers. I fasten the narrow blue suede belt. I will wear this dress so that his arms can once again encircle me. This dress will keep me desirable, protected, ready to reclaim love. If I shiver, it will be a badge of hope, a signal of my trust in something deeper, better. I picture Eric and his family also dressing and scrambling in the dark. I can feel him thinking of me. A current of energy shoots down from my ears to my toes. I close my eyes and cup my elbows with my hands, allowing the afterglow of that flash of love and hope to keep me warm.

  But the ugly present intrudes on my private world. “Where are the bathrooms?” one of the soldiers shouts at Magda. My bossy, sarcastic, flirtatious sister cowers under his glare. I’ve never known her to be afraid. She’s never spared an opportunity to get a rise out of someone, to make people laugh. Authority figures have never held any power over her. In school she wouldn’t stand up, as required, when a teacher entered the room. “Elefánt,” her math teacher, a very short man, reprimanded her one day, calling her by our last name. My sister got up on tiptoes and peered at him. “Oh, are you there?” she said. “I didn’t see you.” But today the men hold guns. She gives no crude remark, no rebellious comeback. She points meekly down the hall toward the bathroom door. The soldier shoves her out of his way. He holds a gun. What other proof of his dominance does he need? This is when I start to see that it can always be so much worse. That every moment harbors a potential for violence. We never know when or how we will break. Doing what you’re told might not save you.

  “Out. Now. Time for you to take a little trip,” the soldiers say. My mother closes the suitcase and my father lifts it. She fastens her gray coat and is the first to follow the commanding officer out into the street. I’m next, then Magda. Before we reach the wagon that sits ready for us at the curb, I turn to watch our father leave our home. He stands facing the door, suitcase in his hand, looking muddled, a midnight traveler patting down his pockets for his keys. A soldier yells a jagged insult and kicks our door back open with his heel.

  “Go ahead,” he says, “take a last look. Feast your eyes.”

  My father gazes at the dark space. For a moment he seems confused, as though he can’t determine whether the soldier has been generous or unkind. Then the soldier kicks him in the knee and my father hobbles toward us, toward the wagon where the other families wait.

  I’m caught between the urge to protect my parents and the sorrow that they can no longer protect me. Eric, I pray, wherever we are going, help me find you Don’t forget our future. Don’t forget our love. Magda doesn’t say a word as we sit side by side on the bare board seats. In my catalog of regrets, this one shines bright: that I didn’t reach for my sister’s hand.

  * * *

  Just as daylight breaks, the wagon pulls up alongside the Jakab brick factory at the edge of town, and we are herded inside. We are the lucky ones; early arrivers get quarters in the drying sheds. Most of the nearly twelve thousand Jews imprisoned here will sleep without a roof over their heads. All of us will sleep on the floor. We will cover ourselves with our coats and shiver through the spring chill. We will cover our ears when, for minor offenses, people are beaten with rubber truncheons at the center of the camp. There is no running water here. Buckets come, never enough of them, on horse-drawn carts. At first the rations, combined with the pancakes my mother makes from the scraps she brought from home, are enough to feed us, but after only a few days the hunger pains become a constant cramping throb. Magda sees her old gym teacher in the barracks next door, struggling to take care of a newborn baby in these starvation conditions. “What will I do when my milk is gone?” she moans to us. “My baby just cries and cries.”

  There are two sides to the camp, on either side of a street. Our side is occupied by the Jews from our section of town. We learn that all of Kassa’s Jews are being held here at the brick factory. We find our neighbors, our shopkeepers, our teachers, our friends. But my grandparents, whose home was a thirty-minute walk from our apartment, are not on our side of the camp. Gates and guards separate us from the other side. We are not supposed to cross over. But I plead with a guard and he says I can go in search of my grandparents. I walk the wall-less barracks, quietly repeating their names. As I pace up and down the rows of huddled families, I say Eric’s name too. I tell myself that it is only a matter of time and perseverance. I will find him, or he will find me.

  I don’t find my grandparents. I don’t find Eric.

  And then one afternoon when the water carts arrive and the crowds rush to scoop a little pail of it, he spies me sitting alone, guarding my family’s coats. He kisses my forehead, my cheeks, my lips. I touch the suede belt of my silk dress, praising it for its good luck.

  We manage to meet every day after that. Sometimes we speculate about what will befall us. Rumors spread that we will be sent to a place called Kenyérmező, an internment camp, where we will work and live out the war with our families. We don’t know that the rumor was started by the Hungarian police and nyilas dishing out false hope. After the war, piles of letters from concerned relatives in faraway cities will sit in stacks in post offices, unopened; the address lines read: Kenyérmező. No such place exists.

  The places that do exist, that await our coming trains, are beyond imagining. After the war. That is the time Eric and I allow ourselves to think about. We will go to the university. We will move to Palestine. We will continue the salons and book club we began at school. We will finish reading Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams.

  From inside the brick factory we can hear the streetcars trundle past. They are within reach. How easy it could be to jump aboard. But anyone who comes close to the outer fence is shot without warning. A girl only a little older than me tries to run. They hang her body in the middle of the camp as an example. My parents don’t say a word to me or Magda about her death. “Try to get a little block of sugar,” my father tells us. “Get a block of sugar and hold on to it. Always keep a little something sweet in your pocket.” One day we hear that my grandparents have been sent away in one of the first transports to leave the factory. We’ll see them in Kenyérmező, we think. I kiss Eric good night and trust that his lips are the sweetness I can count on.

  * * *

  One early morning, after we have been in the factory for about a month, our section of the camp is evacuated. I scramble to find someone who can pass a message to Eric. “Let it go, Dicu,” my mother says. She and my father have written a goodbye letter to Klara, bu
t there is no way to send it. I watch my mother throw it away, see her drop it onto the pavement like ash from a cigarette, see it disappear under three thousand pairs of feet. The silk of my dress brushes against my legs as we surge and stop and surge and stop, three thousand of us marched toward the factory gates, pressed into a long row of waiting trucks. Again we huddle in the dark. Just before the truck pulls away, I hear my name. It’s Eric. He’s calling through the slats of the truck. I shove my way toward his voice.

  “I’m here!” I call as the engine starts. The slats are too narrow for me to see him or touch him.

  “I’ll never forget your eyes,” he says. “I’ll never forget your hands.”

  I repeat those sentences ceaselessly as we board a crowded car at the train station. I can’t hear the shouting officers or crying children over the salve of his remembered voice. If I survive today, then I can show him my eyes, I can show him my hands. I breathe to the rhythm of this chant. If I survive today … If I survive today, tomorrow I’ll be free.

  The train car is like none I’ve ever been in. It’s not a passenger train; it’s for transporting livestock or freight. We are human cargo. There are a hundred of us in one car. Each hour feels like a week. The uncertainty makes the moments stretch. The uncertainty and the relentless noise of the wheels on the track. There is one loaf of bread for eight people to share. One bucket of water. One bucket for our bodily waste. It smells of sweat and excrement. People die on the way. We all sleep upright, leaning against our family members, shouldering aside the dead. I see a father give something to his daughter, a packet of pills. “If they try to do anything to you …” he says. Occasionally the train stops and a few people from each car are ordered to get out to fetch water. Magda takes the bucket once. “We’re in Poland,” she tells us when she returns. Later she explains how she knows. When she went for water, a man out in his field had yelled a greeting to her in Polish and in German, telling her the name of the town and gesturing frantically, drawing his finger across his neck. “Just trying to scare us,” Magda says.

  The train moves on and on. My parents slump on either side of me. They don’t speak. I never see them touch. My father’s beard is growing in gray. He looks older than his father, and it frightens me. I beg him to shave. I have no way of knowing that youthfulness could indeed save a life when we reach the end of this journey. It’s just a gut feeling, just a girl missing the father she knows, longing for him to be the bon vivant again, the debonair flirt, the ladies’ man. I don’t want him to become like the father with the pills who mutters to his family, “This is worse than death.”

  But when I kiss my father’s cheek and say, “Papa, please shave,” he answers me with anger. “What for?” he says. “What for? What for?” I’m ashamed that I’ve said the wrong thing and made him annoyed with me. Why did I say the wrong thing? Why did I think it was my job to tell my father what to do? I remember his rage when I lost the tuition money for school. I lean against my mother for comfort. I wish my parents would reach for each other instead of sitting as strangers. My mother doesn’t say much. But she doesn’t moan either. She doesn’t wish to be dead. She simply goes inside herself.

  “Dicuka,” she says into the dark one night, “listen. We don’t know where we’re going. We don’t know what’s going to happen. Just remember, no one can take away from you what you’ve put in your mind.”

  I fall into another dream of Eric. I wake again.

  * * *

  They open the cattle car doors and the bright May sun slashes in. We are desperate to get out. We rush toward the air and the light. We practically fall out of the car, tumbling against one another in our hurry to descend. After several days of the ceaseless motion of the train, it’s hard to stand upright on firm ground. In every way we are trying to get our bearings—piece out our location, steady our nerves and our limbs. I see the crowded dark of winter coats amassed on a narrow stretch of dirt. I see the flash of white in someone’s scarf or cloth bundle of belongings, the yellow of the mandatory stars. I see the sign: ARBEIT MACHT FREI. Music plays. My father is suddenly cheerful. “You see,” he says, “it can’t be a terrible place.” He looks as though he would dance if the platform weren’t so crowded. “We’ll only work a little, till the war’s over,” he says. The rumors we heard at the brick factory must be true. We must be here to work. I search for the ripple of nearby fields and imagine Eric’s lean body across from me, bending to tend a crop. Instead I see unbroken horizontal lines: the boards on the cattle cars, the endless wire of a fence, low-slung buildings. In the distance, a few trees and chimneys break the flat plane of this barren place.

  Men in uniform push among us. Nobody explains anything. They just bark simple directions. Go here. Go there. The Nazis point and shove. The men are herded into a separate line. I see my father wave to us. Maybe they’re being sent ahead to stake out a place for their families. I wonder where we’ll sleep tonight. I wonder when we’ll eat. My mother and Magda and I stand together in a long line of women and children. We inch forward. We approach the man who with a conductor’s wave of a finger will deliver us to our fates. I do not yet know that this man is Dr. Josef Mengele, the infamous Angel of Death. As we advance toward him, I can’t look away from his eyes, so domineering, so cold. When we’ve drawn nearer, I can see a boyish flash of gapped teeth when he grins. His voice is almost kind when he asks if anyone is sick, and sends those who say yes to the left.

  “If you’re over fourteen and under forty, stay in this line,” another officer says. “Over forty, move left.” A long line of the elderly and children and mothers holding babies branches off to the left. My mother has gray hair, all gray, early gray, but her face is as smooth and unlined as mine. Magda and I squeeze our mother between us.

  It’s our turn now. Dr. Mengele conducts. He points my mother to the left. I start to follow her. He grabs my shoulder. “You’re going to see your mother very soon,” he says. “She’s just going to take a shower.” He pushes Magda and me to the right.

  We don’t know the meaning of left versus right. “Where are we going now?” we ask each other. “What will happen to us?” We’re marched to a different part of the sparse campus. Only women surround us, most young. Some look bright, almost giddy, glad to be breathing fresh air and enjoying the sun on their skin after the relentless stench and claustrophobic dark of the train. Others chew their lips. Fear circulates among us, but curiosity too.

  We’re stopped in front of more low buildings. Women in striped dresses stand around us. We soon learn that they are the inmates charged with governing the others, but we don’t know yet that we’re prisoners here. I’ve unbuttoned my coat in the steady sun and one of the girls in a striped dress eyes my blue silk. She walks toward me, cocking her head.

  “Well, look at you,” she says in Polish. She kicks dust on my low-heeled shoes. Before I realize what’s happening, she reaches for the tiny coral earrings set in gold that, in keeping with Hungarian custom, have been in my ears since birth. She yanks and I feel a sharp sting. She pockets the earrings.

  In spite of the physical hurt, I feel desperate for her to like me. As ever, I want to belong. Her humiliating sneer hurts more than my ripped earlobes. “Why did you do that?” I say. “I would have given you the earrings.”

  “I was rotting here while you were free, going to school, going to the theater,” she says.

  I wonder how long she’s been here. She’s thin, but sturdy. She stands tall. She could be a dancer. I wonder why she seems so angry that I have reminded her of normal life. “When will I see my mother?” I ask her. “I was told I’d see her soon.”

  She gives me a cold, sharp stare. There is no empathy in her eyes. There is nothing but rage. She points to the smoke rising up from one of the chimneys in the distance. “Your mother is burning in there,” she says. “You better start talking about her in the past tense.”

  CHAPTER 3

  Dancing in Hell

  “All your ecstasy in life is goi
ng to come from the inside,” my ballet master had told me. I never understood what he meant. Until Auschwitz.

  Magda stares at the chimney on top of the building our mother entered. “The soul never dies,” she says. My sister finds words of comfort. But I am in shock. I am numb. I can’t think about the incomprehensible things that are happening, that have already happened. I can’t picture my mother consumed by flames. I can’t fully grasp that she is gone. And I can’t ask why. I can’t even grieve. Not now. It will take all of my attention to survive the next minute, the next breath. I will survive if my sister is there. I will survive by attaching myself to her as though I am her shadow.

  We are herded through the silent yet echoing showers. We are robbed of our hair. We stand outside, shorn and naked, waiting for our uniforms. Taunts from the kapos and SS officers swarm us like arrows grazing our bare, wet skin. Worse than their words are their eyes. I’m sure the disgust with which they glare at us could tear my skin, split my ribs. Their hate is both possessive and dismissive, and it makes me ill. Once I thought that Eric would be the first man to see me naked. Now he will never see my flesh unscarred by their hatred. Have they already made me something less than human? Will I ever resemble the girl I was? I will never forget your eyes, your hands. I have to keep myself together, if not for myself then for Eric.

  I turn to my sister, who has fallen into her own shocked silence, who has managed in each chaotic dash from place to place, in every crowded line, not to leave my side. She shivers as the sun falls. She holds in her hands her shorn locks, thick strands of her ruined hair. We have been standing naked for hours, and she grips her hair as though in holding it she can hold on to herself, her humanity. She is so near that we are almost touching, and yet I long for her. Magda. The confident, sexy girl with all the jokes. Where is she? She seems to be asking the same question. She searches for herself in her ragged clumps of hair.