The Choice

by Edith Eva Eger

  The contradictions in this place unnerve me. Murder, we’ve just learned, is efficient here. Systematic. But there seems to be no system in place for distributing the uniforms for which we’ve been waiting most of the day. The guards are cruel and rigid, yet it seems that no one is in charge. The scrutiny they give our bodies doesn’t signal our value, it signifies only the degree to which we have been forgotten by the world. Nothing makes sense. But this, too, the interminable waiting, the complete absence of reason, must be part of the design. How can I keep myself steady in a place where the only steadiness is in fences, in death, in humiliation, in the steadily churning smoke?

  Magda finally speaks to me. “How do I look?” she asks. “Tell me the truth.”

  The truth? She looks like a mangy dog. A naked stranger. I can’t tell her this, of course, but any lie would hurt too much and so I must find an impossible answer, a truth that doesn’t wound. I gaze into the fierce blue of her eyes and think that even for her to ask the question, “How do I look?” is the bravest thing I’ve ever heard. There aren’t mirrors here. She is asking me to help her find and face herself. And so I tell her the one true thing that’s mine to say.

  “Your eyes,” I tell my sister, “they’re so beautiful. I never noticed them when they were covered up by all that hair.” It’s the first time I see that we have a choice: to pay attention to what we’ve lost or to pay attention to what we still have.

  “Thank you,” she whispers.

  The other things I want to ask her, tell her, seem better left wordless. Words can’t give shape to this new reality. To the gray coat of my mama’s shoulder as I lean on her and the train goes on and on. To my papa’s face overgrown with shadow. To what I wouldn’t give to have those dark and hungry hours back again. To the transformation of my parents into smoke. Both of my parents. I must assume my father is dead too. I am about to muster a voice to ask Magda if we dare hope that we haven’t been totally orphaned in the space of a day, but I see that Magda has let her hair fall out of her fingers and onto the dusty ground.

  They bring the uniforms—gray, ill-fitting dresses made of scratchy cotton and wool. The sky is going dark. They herd us to the gloomy, primitive barracks where we will sleep on tiered shelves, six to a board. It is a relief to go into the ugly room, to lose sight of the endlessly smoking chimney. The kapo, the young woman who stole my earrings, assigns us bunks and explains the rules. No one is allowed outside at night. There is the bucket—our nighttime bathroom. With our bunkmates, Magda and I try lying on our board on the top tier. We discover there’s more room if we alternate heads and feet. Still, no one person can roll over or adjust her position without displacing someone else. We work out a system for rolling together, coordinating our turns. The kapo distributes a bowl to each new inmate. “Don’t lose it,” she warns. “If you don’t have a bowl, you don’t eat.” In the darkening barracks, we stand waiting for the next command. Will we be fed a meal? Will we be sent to sleep? We hear music. I think I must be imagining the sound of woodwinds and strings, but another inmate explains there is a camp orchestra here, led by a world-class violinist. Klara! I think. But the violinist she mentions is Viennese.

  We hear clipped voices speaking German outside the barracks. The kapo pulls herself straight as the door rattles open. There on the threshold I recognize the uniformed officer from the selection line. I know it’s him, the way he smiles with his lips parted, the gap between his front teeth. Dr. Mengele, we learn. He is a refined killer and a lover of the arts. He trawls among the barracks in the evenings, searching for talented inmates to entertain him. He walks in tonight with his entourage of assistants and casts his gaze like a net over the new arrivals with our baggy dresses and our hastily shorn hair. We stand still, backs to the wooden bunks that edge the room. He examines us. Magda ever so subtly grazes my hand with hers. Dr. Mengele barks out a question, and before I know what is happening, the girls standing nearest me, who know I trained as a ballerina and gymnast back in Kassa, push me forward, closer to the Angel of Death.

  He studies me. I don’t know where to put my eyes. I stare straight ahead at the open door. The orchestra is assembled just outside. They are silent, awaiting orders. I feel like Eurydice in the underworld, waiting for Orpheus to strike a chord on his lyre that can melt the heart of Hades and set me free. Or I am Salome, made to dance for her stepfather, Herod, lifting veil after veil to expose her flesh. Does the dance give her power, or does the dance strip it away?

  “Little dancer,” Dr. Mengele says, “dance for me.” He directs the musicians to begin playing. The familiar opening strain of “The Blue Danube” waltz filters into the dark, close room. Mengele’s eyes bulge at me. I’m lucky. I know a routine to “The Blue Danube” that I can dance in my sleep. But my limbs are heavy, as in a nightmare when there’s danger and you can’t run away. “Dance!” he commands again, and I feel my body start to move.

  First the high kick. Then the pirouette and turn. The splits. And up. As I step and bend and twirl, I can hear Mengele talking to his assistant. He never takes his eyes off me, but he attends to his duties as he watches. I can hear his voice over the music. He discusses with the other officer which ones of the hundred girls present will be killed next. If I miss a step, if I do anything to displease him, it could be me. I dance. I dance. I am dancing in hell. I can’t bear to see the executioner as he decides our fates. I close my eyes.

  I focus on my routine, on my years of training—each line and curve of my body like a syllable in verse, my body telling a story: A girl arrives at a dance. She spins in excitement and anticipation. Then she pauses to reflect and observe. What will happen in the hours ahead? Whom will she meet? She turns toward a fountain, arms sweeping up and around to embrace the scene. She bends to pick up flowers and tosses them one at a time to her admirers and fellow revelers, throwing flowers to the people, handing out tokens of love. I can hear the violins swell. My heart races. In the private darkness within, I hear my mother’s words come back to me, as though she is there in the barren room, whispering below the music. Just remember, no one can take away from you what you’ve put in your own mind. Dr. Mengele, my fellow starved-to-the-bone inmates, the defiant who will survive and the soon to be dead, even my beloved sister disappear, and the only world that exists is the one inside my head. “The Blue Danube” fades, and now I can hear Tchaikovsky’s Romeo and Juliet. The barracks floor becomes a stage at the Budapest opera house. I dance for my fans in the audience. I dance within the glow of hot lights. I dance for my lover, Romeo, as he lifts me high above the stage. I dance for love. I dance for life.

  As I dance, I discover a piece of wisdom that I have never forgotten. I will never know what miracle of grace allows me this insight. It will save my life many times, even after the horror is over. I can see that Dr. Mengele, the seasoned killer who just this morning murdered my mother, is more pitiful than me. I am free in my mind, which he can never be. He will always have to live with what he’s done. He is more a prisoner than I am. As I close my routine with a final, graceful split, I pray, but it isn’t myself I pray for. I pray for him. I pray, for his sake, that he won’t have the need to kill me.

  He must be impressed by my performance, because he tosses me a loaf of bread—a gesture, as it turns out, that will later save my life. As evening turns to night, I share the bread with Magda and our bunkmates. I am grateful to have bread. I am grateful to be alive.

  * * *

  In my first weeks at Auschwitz I learn the rules of survival. If you can steal a piece of bread from the guards, you are a hero, but if you steal from an inmate, you are disgraced, you die; competition and domination get you nowhere, cooperation is the name of the game; to survive is to transcend your own needs and commit yourself to someone or something outside yourself. For me, that someone is Magda, that something is the hope that I will see Eric again tomorrow, when I am free. To survive, we conjure an inner world, a haven, even when our eyes are open. I remember a fellow inmate who managed
to save a picture of herself from before internment, a picture in which she had long hair. She was able to remind herself who she was, that that person still existed. This awareness became a refuge that preserved her will to live.

  I remember that some months later, in winter, we were issued old coats. They just tossed us the coats, willy-nilly, with no attention to size. It was up to us to find the one with the best fit and fight for it. Magda was lucky. They threw her a thick warm coat, long and heavy, with buttons all the way up to the neck. It was so warm, so coveted. But she traded it instantly. The coat she chose in its place was a flimsy little thing, barely to the knees, showing off plenty of chest. For Magda, wearing something sexy was a better survival tool than staying warm. Feeling attractive gave her something inside, a sense of dignity, more valuable to her than physical comfort.

  I remember that even when we were starving, we would feast. We cooked all the time at Auschwitz. In our heads, we were having celebrations at every hour, fighting over how much paprika you put in Hungarian chicken paprikash, or how to make the best seven-layer chocolate cake. We’d wake at 4:00 A.M. for the Appell, the roll call, stand in the freezing dark to be counted, and recounted, and we’d smell the rich, full aroma of cooking meat. Marching to our daily labor—to a warehouse called Canada, where we were ordered to sort the belongings of the newly arrived inmates; to the barracks that we had to clean and clean and clean; or to the crematoriums, where the unluckiest were forced to harvest gold teeth and hair and skin from the corpses waiting to be burned—we talked as though we were heading to market, planning our weekly menu, how we would test each fruit and vegetable for ripeness. We’d give one another cooking lessons. Here’s how to make palacsinta, Hungarian crepes. How thin the pancake must be. How much sugar to use. How many nuts. Do you put caraway in your székely gulyás? Do you use two onions? No, three. No, just one and a half. We’d salivate over our imaginary dishes, and as we ate our one actual meal of the day—watery soup, a stale piece of bread—I would talk about the goose my mother kept in the attic and fed with corn each day, its liver bulging, more and more, until it was time to slaughter the goose and blend its liver into pâté. And when we fell onto our bunks at night and finally slept, we dreamt of food then too. The village clock chimes 10:00 A.M., and my father slips into our apartment with a package from the butcher across the street. Today, a cut of pork hidden in newspaper. “Dicuka, come taste,” he beckons. “What a role model you are,” my mother gripes, “feeding a Jewish girl pork.” But she is almost smiling. She’s making strudel, stretching the phyllo dough over the dining room table, working it with her hands and blowing underneath it till it’s paper thin.

  The tang of peppers and cherries in my mother’s strudel; her deviled eggs; the pasta she cut by hand, so fast I feared she’d lose a finger; especially the challah, our Friday night bread. For my mother, food was as much about the artistry of creating it as it was about enjoying the finished meal. Food fantasies sustained us at Auschwitz. Just as athletes and musicians can become better at their craft through mental practice, we were barracks artists, always in the thick of creating. What we made in our minds provided its own kind of sustenance.

  One night we enact a beauty pageant in the barracks before bed. We model in our gray, shapeless dresses, our dingy underwear. There’s a Hungarian saying that beauty is all in the shoulders. Nobody can strike a pose like Magda. She wins the pageant. But no one is ready for sleep.

  “Here’s a better competition,” Magda says. “Who’s got the best boobs?”

  We strip in the dark and parade around with our chests sticking out. Mere months ago I was working out for more than five hours a day in the studio. I would ask my father to beat my stomach to feel how strong I was. I could even pick him up and carry him. I feel that pride in my body now, topless and freezing in the barracks. I used to envy my mother’s round, inviting bosom and feel embarrassed by my tiny breasts. But this is how we prized them in Europe. I strut around in the dark like a model. And I win the contest!

  “My famous sister,” Magda says as we drift off to sleep.

  We can choose what the horror teaches us. To become bitter in our grief and fear. Hostile. Paralyzed. Or to hold on to the childlike part of us, the lively and curious part, the part that is innocent.

  Another night I learn that the young woman in the bunk next to mine was married before the war. I pump her for information. “What is it like?” I ask. “To belong to a man?” I’m not asking about sex, not entirely. Of course passion interests me. More so, the idea of daily belonging. In her sigh I hear the echo of something beautiful, unharmed by loss. For a few minutes, as she talks, I see marriage not as my parents lived it but as something luminous. It’s brighter even than the peaceful comfort of my grandparents’ affection. It sounds like love, whole love.

  * * *

  When my mother said to me, “I’m glad you have brains because you have no looks,” those words stoked my fear that I was inadequate, worthless. But at Auschwitz, my mother’s voice rang in my ears with a different significance. I’ve got brains. I’m smart. I’m going to figure things out. The words I heard inside my head made a tremendous difference in my ability to maintain hope. This was true for other inmates as well. We were able to discover an inner strength we could draw on—a way to talk to ourselves that helped us feel free inside, that kept us grounded in our own morality, that gave us foundation and assurance even when the external forces sought to control and obliterate us. I’m good, we learned to say. I’m innocent. Somehow, something good will come of this.

  I knew a girl at Auschwitz who was very ill and wasting away. Every morning I expected to find her dead on her bunk, and I feared at every selection line that she’d be sent toward death. But she surprised me. She managed to gather strength each morning to work another day and kept a lively spark in her eyes each time she faced Mengele’s pointing finger in a selection line. At night she would collapse onto her bunk, breathing in rasps. I asked her how she was managing to go on. “I heard we’re going to be liberated by Christmas,” she said. She kept a meticulous calendar in her head, counting down the days and then the hours until our liberation, determined to live to be free.

  Then Christmas came, but our liberators did not. And she died the next day. I believe that her inner voice of hope kept her alive, but when she lost hope she wasn’t able to keep living. While nearly everyone around me—SS officers, kapos, fellow inmates—told me every moment of every day, from Appell to the end of the workday, from selection lines to meal lines, that I would never get out of the death camp alive, I worked to develop an inner voice that offered an alternative story. This is temporary, I’d tell myself. If I survive today, tomorrow I will be free.

  We were sent to the showers every day at Auschwitz, and every shower was fraught with uncertainty. We never knew whether water or gas would stream out of the tap. One day when I feel the water falling down on us, I let out my breath. I spread greasy soap over my body. I’m not skin and bones yet. Here in the quiet after the fear, I can recognize myself. My arms and thighs and stomach are still taut with my dancer muscles. I slip into a fantasy of Eric. We are university students now, living in Budapest. We take our books to study at a café. His eyes leave the page and travel over my face. I feel him pausing over my eyes and lips. Just as I imagine lifting my face to receive his kiss, I realize how quiet the shower room has become. I feel a chill in my gut. The man I fear above all others stands at the door. The Angel of Death is gazing right at me. I stare at the floor, waiting for the others to begin breathing again so that I know he is gone. But he doesn’t leave.

  “You!” he calls. “My little dancer.”

  I try to hear Eric’s voice more loudly than Mengele’s. I’ll never forget your eyes. I’ll never forget your hands.

  “Come,” he orders.

  I follow. What else can I do? I walk toward the buttons on his coat, avoiding the eyes of my fellow inmates, because I can’t stand the thought of seeing my fear mirrored t
here. Breathe, breathe, I tell myself. He leads me, naked and wet, down a hall and into an office with a desk, a chair. Water runs from my body onto the cold floor. He leans against the desk and looks me over, taking his time. I am too terrified to think, but little currents of impulse move through my body like reflexes. Kick him. A high kick to the face. Drop to the floor in a little ball and hold myself tight. I hope that whatever he plans to do to me will be over quickly.

  “Come closer,” he says.

  I face him as I inch forward, but I don’t see him. I focus only on the living part of me, the yes I can, yes I can. I feel his body as I near him. A menthol smell. The taste of tin can on my tongue. As long as I’m shaking, I know I’m alive. His fingers work over his buttons. Yes I can, yes I can. I think of my mama and her long, long hair. The way she’d wind it up on top of her head and let it down like a curtain at night. I’m naked with her murderer, but he can’t ever take her away. Just as I am close enough for him to touch me, with fingers that I determine not to feel, a phone rings in another room. He flinches. He rebuttons his coat.

  “Don’t move,” he orders as he opens the door.

  I hear him pick up the phone in the next room, his voice neutral and curt. I don’t make a decision. I run. The next thing I know I’m sitting beside my sister as we devour the daily ladle of soup, the little pieces of potato skin in the weak broth bobbing up at us like scabs. The fear that he will find me again and punish me, that he will finish what he started, that he will select me for death never leaves me. It never goes away. I don’t know what will happen next. But in the meantime I can keep myself alive inside. I survived today, I chant in my head. I survived today. Tomorrow I will be free.

  CHAPTER 4

  A Cartwheel

  At some point in the summer of 1944, Magda and I realize that no more Hungarian Jews are arriving at the camp. Later we will learn that in July, Prime Minister Horthy, tired of bowing to German authority, put the deportations on hold. He was too late. Hundreds of thousands of us had already been sent to the camps, four hundred thousand of us killed in two short months. By October, Horthy’s government fell to the Nazis. The two hundred thousand Jews still remaining in Hungary—mostly in Budapest—weren’t sent to Auschwitz. They were force-marched two hundred miles to Austria. But we didn’t know any of this then, we didn’t know anything of life or the war outside.