Her Soviet competitor takes the floor. Because of the uprising in Hungary, the tensions between Hungarian and Soviet athletes are especially fraught. Béla boos loudly. Little Audrey, two years old, does the same. I tell them both to hush. I watch Larisa Latynina the way the judges do, the way Keleti must be watching her. I see that her high kick is maybe a little higher than Keleti’s, I see the buoyancy of her flips, the way she lands in a full split. Marianne sighs with appreciation. Béla boos again. “She’s really good, Daddy,” Marianne says. “She’s from a country of oppressors and bullies,” Béla says. “She didn’t choose where she was born,” I say. Béla shrugs. “Try twirling like that when your country’s under siege,” he says. “In this house we cheer for Hungarians.” In the end, Keleti and Latynina share the gold. Latynina’s shoulder brushes Keleti’s as they stand side by side at the awards ceremony. Keleti grimaces from the pedestal. “Mom, why are you crying?” Marianne asks me. “I’m not,” I say.
Deny. Deny. Deny. Who am I protecting? My daughter? Or myself?
Marianne grows ever more curious, and is a voracious reader. When she has read every book in the children’s section of the El Paso Public Library, she begins scrambling around the bookcases in our house, reading my philosophy and literature, Béla’s history. In 1957, when she is ten, she sits Béla and me down on the beige couch in the den. She stands before us like a little teacher. She opens a book that she tells us she found hidden behind the other books on one of our shelves. She points to a picture of naked, skeletal corpses piled up in a heap. “What is this?” she asks. I am sweating, the room spins. I could have predicted this moment would come, but it is as surprising to me, as arresting and terrifying, as if I had walked into the house to discover that the live alligator pit from San Jacinto Plaza had been installed in our living room. To face the truth, to face my daughter facing the truth, is to face a beast. I run from the room. I vomit in the bathroom sink. I hear Béla telling our daughter about Hitler, about Auschwitz. I hear him say the dreaded words: Your mother was there. I could crack the mirror. No! No! No! I want to scream. I wasn’t there! What I mean is, This isn’t yours to carry! “Your mother is very strong,” I hear Béla tell Marianne. “But you must understand that you are a survivor’s daughter, you must always, always protect her.” This could have been an opportunity. To soothe Marianne. To unburden her from the need to worry about or pity me. To tell her how much her grandparents would have loved her. To tell her, It’s all okay, we are safe now. But I can’t leave the bathroom. I don’t trust myself. If I say a word about the past, I will stoke the rage and the loss, I will fall into the dark, I will take her there with me.
* * *
I focus on the children, on the things I can do to make all of us feel secure and accepted and happy in our new home.
There are the daily rituals, the hallmarks of the week and seasons, the things we do for joy, the things we count on: Béla’s unusual practice of shaving his bald head in the morning while he drives Audrey to school. Béla on a shopping run to the Safeway that was built in the vast desert behind our house. Inevitably, I’ve forgotten to add something to the list, and I call him at the store. The grocery clerks know my voice. “Mr. Eger, your wife’s on the phone,” they call over the PA. I tend our garden, I mow the lawn, I work part time in Béla’s office. He becomes the loved and trusted accountant for all the successful immigrants in El Paso—Syrians, Mexicans, Italians, European Jews. On Saturdays he brings the kids along to meet with clients, and if I didn’t already know how much Béla was adored, I would see their love for him in the affection they shower on our children. Sundays, Béla drives to Juárez to buy fresh fruit from Chuy the grocer, and then we have a big family brunch at our house, we listen to Broadway musicals albums, we sing along to the show tunes (Béla can sing without stuttering), and then we go to the YMCA for a family swim. We go to San Jacinto Plaza in downtown El Paso on Christmas Day. We don’t celebrate Christmas with gifts, but the kids still write letters to Santa. We exchange practical gifts—socks and clothes—for Hanukkah, and we bring in the New Year with lots of food and the Sun Carnival parade—the Sun Queen, the high school bands, the Rotary Club men riding by on motorcycles. In spring, there are picnic outings to White Sands and Santa Fe. In the fall, back-to-school clothes shopping at Amen Wardy. Running my hands over the racks, I can feel the best fabrics by touch, I have a knack for finding the finest garments for the lowest price. (Béla and I both have these tactile rituals—for him, choosing produce; for me, choosing clothes.) We go to farms in Mexico for fall harvest, we fill ourselves with homemade tamales. Food is love. When our kids bring home good report cards, we take them for a banana split at the soda fountain behind our house.
When Audrey is nine, she tries out for a year-round swimming team and becomes a competitive swimmer. By the time she is in high school, she will be training six hours a day, as I used to do in gymnastics and ballet. When Marianne is thirteen, we build an addition to our house, adding a master suite so that Marianne and Audrey and Johnny have their own rooms. We buy a piano. Marianne and Audrey both take lessons, we host chamber music concerts like my parents did when I was a girl, we have bridge parties. Béla and I join a book club hosted by Molly Shapiro, well known in El Paso for her salons, where she brings artists and intellectuals together. I take an ESL class at the University of Texas. My English finally improves enough that in 1959 I feel I can enroll as an undergraduate student. It’s long been my dream to continue my education—another dream deferred, but this one now seems possible. I take my first psychology class, sit in a row of basketball players, take notes in Hungarian, ask for Béla’s help writing every paper. I am thirty-two years old. We are happy on the outside, on the inside often too.
* * *
But there is the way Béla looks at our son. He wanted a son, but he didn’t expect this son. Johnny had athetoid cerebral palsy, probably caused by encephalitis before birth, and this affected his motor control. He struggled to do things Marianne and Audrey had learned to do with little fuss—dress himself, talk, use a fork or a spoon to feed himself. He looked different from them too. His eyes drooped. He drooled. Béla was critical of Johnny, impatient with his struggles. I remembered the ridicule I had faced for being cross-eyed, and I ached for my son. Béla would yell in frustration over Johnny’s challenges. (He yelled in Czech, so the children, who had picked up a little Hungarian in our home, despite my wish for them to speak only flawless American English, wouldn’t understand the words—though of course they understood his tone.) I would retreat into our bedroom. I was a master hider. In 1960, when Johnny was four, I took him to see Dr. Clark, a specialist at Johns Hopkins, who told me, “Your son will be whatever you make of him. John’s going to do everything everyone else does, but it’s going to take him longer to get there. You can push him too hard, and that will backfire, but it will also be a mistake not to push him hard enough. You need to push him to the level of his potential.” I dropped out of school so that I could get Johnny to his speech therapy appointments, his occupational therapy appointments, to every kind of clinic I could think of, to every kind of specialist who might help. (Audrey says now that her most vivid childhood memories aren’t in the swimming pool—they’re in waiting rooms.) I chose not to accept that our son was forever compromised. I felt sure that he could thrive if we believed he could. But when he was young, eating with his hands, chewing with his mouth open because that was the best he could manage, Béla gazed at him with such disappointment, such sadness, I felt I had to protect my son from his father.
* * *
Fear pulled a current through our comfortable lives. Once, when Audrey was ten, she had a friend over, and I walked past the open door of her room just as an ambulance raced past our house, siren wailing. I covered my head, a stubborn habit from the war, something I still do. Before I had consciously registered the siren or my reaction to it, I heard Audrey yelling to her friend, “Quick, get under the bed!” She threw herself on the floor and rolled
under the bed skirt. Her friend laughed, followed her down, probably thinking it was a peculiar game. But I could tell that Audrey wasn’t joking. She really thought sirens signaled danger. That you have to take cover. Without meaning to, without any conscious awareness, I had taught her that.
What else were we unconsciously teaching our children, about safety, values, love?
The night of Marianne’s high school prom, she stands on our front porch in her silk dress, a beautiful orchid corsage on her wrist. As she steps off the porch with her date, Béla calls, “Have a great time, honey. You know, your mother was in Auschwitz when she was your age and her parents were dead.”
I scream at Béla when Marianne has left. I call him bitter and cold, I tell him he had no right to ruin her joy on her special night, to ruin the vicarious pleasure I took in her joy. If he can’t censor himself, I won’t either. If he can’t bless our daughter with happy thoughts, I tell him, then he might as well be dead. “The fact that you were at Auschwitz and she’s not is a happy thought,” Béla defends. “I want Marianne to feel glad for the life she has.” “Then don’t poison it!” I yell. Worse than Béla’s comment is the fact that I never talk to Marianne about it afterward. I pretend not to notice that she is also living two lives—the one she lives for herself and the one she lives for me because I wasn’t allowed to live it.
* * *
In the fall of 1966, when Audrey is twelve, Marianne a sophomore at Whittier College, and Johnny, ten, fulfilling Dr. Clark’s prediction that with the right support, he could be physically and academically stable, I have time again to devote to my own progress. I return to school. My English is now good enough to write my papers without Béla’s help (when he helped me, the best grade I got was a C, but now I earn As). I feel that I am finally getting ahead, finally transcending the limitations of my past. But once again the two worlds I’ve done my best to keep separate collide. I’m sitting in a lecture hall, waiting for my introductory political science class to begin, when a sandy-haired man sits down behind me.
“You were there, weren’t you?” he says.
“There?” I feel the panic start to rise.
“Auschwitz. You’re a survivor, aren’t you?”
I am so rattled by his question that I don’t think to ask him one in return. What makes him think I’m a survivor? How does he know? How did he guess? I have never said a single word about my experience to anyone in my present life, not even my kids. I don’t have a number tattooed on my arm.
“Aren’t you a Holocaust survivor?” he asks again.
He is young, maybe twenty—roughly half my age. Something in his youth, in his earnest nature, in the kind intensity of his voice, reminds me of Eric, how we sat in a movie theater together after curfew, how he took a picture of me on the shore doing the splits, how he kissed my lips for the first time, his hands resting on the thin belt at my waist. Twenty-one years after liberation, I feel pounded by loss. The loss of Eric. The loss of our young love. The loss of the future—the vision we shared of marriage and family and activism. For the entire year of my imprisonment, for the year I somehow escaped a death that seemed mandatory and inevitable, I held to Eric’s remembered verse: I’ll never forget your eyes, I’ll never forget your hands. Memory was my lifeline. And now? I have shut out the past. To remember is to concede to the horror again and again. But in the past, too, is Eric’s voice. In the past is the love that I felt and sang in my mind all those months that I starved.
“I am a survivor,” I say, shaking.
“Have you read this?” He shows me a small paperback: Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl. It sounds like a philosophy text. The author’s name doesn’t ring a bell. I shake my head. “Frankl was at Auschwitz,” the student explains. “He wrote this book about it, just after the war. I think you would find it of interest,” he says, offering it to me.
I take the book in my hand. It is slim. It fills me with dread. Why would I willingly return to hell, even through the filter of someone else’s experience? But I don’t have the heart to reject this young man’s gesture. I whisper a thank you and tuck the little book into my bag, where it sits all evening like a ticking bomb.
I start to make dinner, I feel distracted and out of my body. I send Béla to Safeway for more garlic, and then again for more peppers. I barely taste my meal. After dinner, I quiz Johnny on his spelling words. I do the dishes. I kiss my children good night. Béla goes to the den to listen to Rachmaninoff and read The Nation. My bag sits in the hall by the front door, the book still inside. Even its presence in my house is causing me discomfort. I won’t read it. I don’t have to. I was there. I will spare myself the pain.
Sometime after midnight, my curiosity wins out over my fear. I creep into the living room, where I sit for a long time in a pool of lamplight holding the book. I begin to read. This book does not claim to be an account of facts and events but of personal experiences, experiences which millions of prisoners have suffered time and again. It is the inside story of a concentration camp, told by one of its survivors. The back of my neck prickles. He is speaking to me. He is speaking for me. How was everyday life in a concentration camp reflected in the mind of the average prisoner? He writes about the three phases of a prisoner’s life—beginning with what it is like to arrive at a death camp and feel the “delusion of reprieve.” Yes, I remember so well how my father heard the music playing on the train platform and said this couldn’t be a bad place, remember the way Mengele wagged his finger between life and death, and said, as casually as you please, “You’ll see your mother very soon.” Then there is the second phase—learning to adapt to the impossible and inconceivable. To endure the kapos’ beatings, to get up no matter how cold or hungry or tired or ill, to eat the soup and save the bread, to watch our own flesh disappearing, to hear everywhere that the only escape is death. Even the third phase, release and liberation, wasn’t an end to the imprisonment, Frankl writes. It can continue in bitterness, disillusionment, a struggle for meaning and happiness.
I am staring directly at the thing I have sought to hide. And as I read, I find I don’t feel shut down or trapped, locked back in that place. To my surprise, I don’t feel afraid. For every page I read, I want to write ten. What if telling my story could lighten its grip instead of tightening it? What if speaking about the past could heal it instead of calcify it? What if silence and denial aren’t the only choices to make in the wake of catastrophic loss?
I read how Frankl marches to his work site in the icy dark. The cold is harsh, the guards are brutal, the prisoners stumble. In the midst of physical pain and dehumanizing injustice, Frankl flashes on his wife’s face. He sees her eyes, and his heart blooms with love in the depth of winter. He understands how a man who has nothing left in this world may still know bliss, be it only for a brief moment, in the contemplation of his beloved. My heart opens. I weep. It is my mother speaking to me from the page, from the oppressive dark of the train: Just remember, no one can take away from you what you’ve put in your mind. We can’t choose to vanish the dark, but we can choose to kindle the light.
In those predawn hours in the autumn of 1966, I read this, which is at the very heart of Frankl’s teaching: Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way. Each moment is a choice. No matter how frustrating or boring or constraining or painful or oppressive our experience, we can always choose how we respond. And I finally begin to understand that I, too, have a choice. This realization will change my life.
CHAPTER 14
From One Survivor to Another
No one heals in a straight line.
One January evening in 1969, when Audrey comes home from a babysitting job, Béla and I ask her and John to sit on the brown Danish couch in the living room. I can’t look at Béla, I can’t look at my children, I stare at the clean modern lines of the couch, its thin little legs. Béla starts to cry.
&nb
sp; “Did someone die?” Audrey asks. “Just tell us.”
Johnny kicks his feet nervously against the couch.
“Everything’s fine,” Béla says. “We love you both very much. Your mother and I have decided that we need to live in separate houses for a while.” He stutters as he speaks, the sentences last a year.
“What are you saying?” Audrey asks. “What’s going on?”
“We need to explore how to have more peace in our family,” I say. “This isn’t your fault.”
“You don’t love each other anymore?”
“We do,” Béla says. “I do.” This is his jab, the one knife he points at me.
“You’re not happy all of a sudden? I thought you were happy. Or have you just been lying to us our whole lives?” Audrey has been clutching her babysitting money in her hand—when she turned twelve, Béla opened a checking account for her and said he would double any dollar that she made—but now she throws her money on the couch, as though we have contaminated every good or valuable thing.
* * *
It was an accrual of experiences, not a sudden recognition, that led me to divorce Béla. My choice had something to do with my mother—what she had chosen and what she hadn’t been allowed to choose. Before she married my father, she was working for a consulate in Budapest, she was earning her own money, she was part of a cosmopolitan social and professional circle. She was quite liberated for her time. But then her younger sister got married, and the pressure was on her to do what her society and family expected of her, to marry before she became an embarrassment. There was a man she loved, someone she met through her work at the consulate, the man who had given her the inscribed copy of Gone with the Wind. But her father forbade her to marry him because he wasn’t Jewish. My father, the celebrated tailor, fit her for a dress one day, he admired her figure, and she opted to leave the life she had chosen for herself in favor of the life she was expected to live. In marrying Béla, I feared I had done the same thing—forgone taking responsibility for my own dreams in exchange for the safety Béla provided me. Now the qualities that had drawn me to him, his ability to provide and caretake, felt suffocating, our marriage felt like an abdication of myself.
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