The Choice

by Edith Eva Eger

  If I understand anything about that afternoon, about the whole of my life, it’s that sometimes the worst moments in our lives, the moments that set us spinning with ugly desires, that threaten to unglue us with the sheer impossibility of the pain we must endure, are in fact the moments that bring us to understand our worth. It’s as if we become aware of ourselves as a bridge between all that’s been and all that will be. We become aware of all we’ve received and what we can choose—or choose not—to perpetuate. It’s like vertigo, thrilling and terrifying, the past and the future surrounding us like a vast but traversable canyon. Small as we are in the big scheme of universe and time, each of us is a little mechanism that keeps the whole wheel spinning. And what will we power with the wheel of our own life? Will we keep pushing the same piston of loss or regret? Will we reengage and reenact all the hurts from the past? Will we abandon the people we love as a consequence of our own abandonment? Will we make our children pick up the tab for our losses? Or will we take the best of what we know and let a new crop flourish from the field of our life?

  Craving revenge, holding a gun, picturing himself in his son’s face, Jason was suddenly able to see the choices available to him. He could choose to kill or choose to love. To vanquish or to forgive. To face a grief, or to pass the pain on, again and again. He dropped the gun. He was crying now, huge, rippling sobs, waves of sorrow crashing over his body. He couldn’t stand with the immensity of the feeling. He fell to the ground, to his knees, he bent his head. I could almost see the different feelings breaking over him in waves, the hurt and shame and broken pride and ruined trust and loneliness, the image of the man he couldn’t be and would never be. He couldn’t be a man who had never lost. He would always be a man whose father beat and humiliated him when he was young, whose wife cheated on him. Just as I will always be a woman whose mother and father were gassed and burned and turned to smoke. Jason and I would always be what every person is, someone who will bear suffering. We can’t erase the pain. But we are free to accept who we are and what has been done to us, and move on. Jason knelt, crying. I joined him on the floor. The people we loved and relied on had disappeared or let us down. He needed to be held. I held him. I pulled him to my chest and he sank into my lap and I held him and we cried until our tears had soaked my silk blouse through.

  * * *

  Before Jason left my office, I demanded that he give me the gun. (I would hang on to the gun for years, so long that I forgot it was still in my closet. When I was packing my office in preparation for my move to San Diego, I would discover the gun, still loaded, in the drawer of a filing cabinet, a reminder of the volatility and pain we often choose to hide away, the potential for damage that persists until we consciously face and dismantle it.) “Are you safe to leave now?” I asked him. “Are you safe to go home?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “It’s going to be uncomfortable for you without a gun. Do you have somewhere else to go if the rage comes back? If you feel like you have to hurt or kill someone?”

  He said he could go to his friend’s house, the one who had told him about the affair and advised him to see me.

  “We need to practice what you will say to your wife.” We made a script. He wrote it down. He would tell her, “I feel so sad and upset. I hope we can find a time to talk about it tonight.” He wasn’t allowed to say more until they were alone together, and only then if he could communicate with words instead of violence. He was to call me immediately if he felt incapable of going home. If the homicidal feelings came back, he was to find a safe place to sit down or take a walk. “Close the door. Or go outside. Be by yourself. Breathe and breathe and breathe. The feelings will pass. Promise me you will call me if you start to feel out of control. Get yourself out of the situation, make yourself safe, and call me.”

  He started to cry again. “No one ever cared about me like you do.”

  “We’re going to be a good team together,” I told him. “I know you’re not going to let me down.”

  Jason came back to my office two days later, and so began a therapeutic relationship that would last for five years. But before I knew how his story would turn out, I had a turning point of my own to confront.

  Once Jason left and I had stowed the gun and sat down in my chair, breathing deeply, slowly, regaining my calm, I sorted through the mail my assistant had given me just before Jason’s unexpected arrival. And there I found another letter that changed the course of my life. It was from U.S. Army chaplain David Woehr, a former colleague at William Beaumont, who was then heading the Religious Resource Center in Munich, where he was responsible for administering clinical training to all of the U.S. Army chaplains and chaplain’s assistants currently serving in Europe. The letter was an invitation to address six hundred chaplains at a workshop Dave would be leading in a month. In any other circumstance, I would have accepted, would have been honored and humbled to be of use. Because of my clinical experience at William Beaumont, and my success in treating active-duty personnel and combat veterans, I had been asked a number of times to speak to larger military audiences and had always felt that it was not just an honor but also my moral obligation—as a former prisoner of war, as a person liberated by U.S. soldiers—to do so. But Dave’s workshop was scheduled to meet in Germany. And not just anywhere in Germany. In Berchtesgaden. Hitler’s former retreat in the mountains of Bavaria.

  CHAPTER 17

  Then Hitler Won

  It isn’t the cold air coming through the cooling vent in my office that makes me shiver. Soon I will be fifty-three years old. I am no longer the young orphaned mother fleeing war-torn Europe. I am no longer the immigrant hiding from her past. I am Dr. Edith Eva Eger now. I have survived. I have worked to heal. I use what I have learned from my traumatic past to help others heal. I am often called in by social service organizations and medical and military groups to treat patients with PTSD. I have come a great distance since escaping to America. But I haven’t been back to Germany since the war.

  * * *

  That evening, to distract myself from my worry over how Jason is handling the confrontation with his wife, to ease my own swirling indecision, I call Marianne in San Diego and ask her what she thinks I should do about Berchtesgaden. She is a mother now, and a psychologist. We often consult each other about our most challenging patients. Just as for Jason in the long moments when he held the gun, the decision before me now has a lot to do with my children—with the kind of wound they will carry with them after I’m gone: a healed one or an open one.

  “I don’t know, Mom,” Marianne says. “I want to tell you to go. You survived, and now you get to go back and tell your story. That’s such a triumph. But … do you remember that Danish family, the friends of my host family back in college? They returned to Auschwitz thinking it would bring them peace. But it just stirred up all the trauma. It was very stressful. They both suffered heart attacks when they got home. They died, Mom.”

  Berchtesgaden isn’t Auschwitz, I remind her. I’d be more in the geography of Hitler’s past than my own. Yet even my daily routines in El Paso can trigger flashbacks. I hear sirens and I go cold, I see barbed wire around a construction site and I am no longer in the present, I am watching the blue bodies hanging from the fence, I am stuck in the fear, I am struggling for my life. If mundane triggers can bring my trauma back, what would it be like to be surrounded by people speaking German, to wonder if I am walking among former Hitler Youth, to be in the very rooms where Hitler and his advisers once lived?

  “If you think there’s something to be gained, then go. I support you,” Marianne says. “But it’s got to be for you. You don’t have to prove anything to anyone else. You’re not required to go.”

  When she says it, the relief is immediate. “Thank you, Marchuka,” I say. I am safe now, I am happy. I have done my work. I have grown. Now I can let go. I can be finished. I can say that I am honored by the invitation, but it is too painful for me to accept. Dave will understand.

  Bu
t when I tell Béla that I have decided to decline the invitation, he grabs my shoulder. “If you don’t go to Germany,” he says, “then Hitler won the war.”

  It’s not what I want to hear. I feel like I’ve been sucker-punched. But I have to concede that he’s right about one thing: It’s easier to hold someone or something else responsible for your pain than to take responsibility for ending your own victimhood. Our marriage has taught me that—all the times when my anger or frustration at Béla has taken my attention away from my own work and growth, the times when blaming him for my unhappiness was easier than taking responsibility for myself.

  Most of us want a dictator—albeit a benevolent one—so we can pass the buck, so we can say, “You made me do that. It’s not my fault.” But we can’t spend our lives hanging out under someone else’s umbrella and then complain that we’re getting wet. A good definition of being a victim is when you keep the focus outside yourself, when you look outside yourself for someone to blame for your present circumstances, or to determine your purpose, fate, or worth.

  And that is why Béla tells me that if I don’t go to Berchtesgaden, then Hitler has won. He means that I am sitting on a seesaw with my past. As long as I can put Hitler, or Mengele, or the gaping mouth of my loss on the opposite seat, then I am somehow justified, I always have an excuse. That’s why I’m anxious. That’s why I’m sad. That’s why I can’t risk going to Germany. It’s not that I’m wrong to feel anxious and sad and afraid. It’s not that there isn’t real trauma at the core of my life. And it’s not that Hitler and Mengele and every other perpetrator of violence or cruelty shouldn’t be held accountable for the harm they cause. But if I stay on the seesaw, I am holding the past responsible for what I choose to do now.

  Long ago, Mengele’s finger did point me to my fate. He chose for my mother to die, he chose for Magda and me to live. At every selection line, the stakes were life and death, the choice was never mine to make. But even then, in my prison, in hell, I could choose how I responded, I could choose my actions and speech, I could choose what I held in my mind. I could choose whether to walk into the electrified barbed wire, to refuse to leave my bed, or I could choose to struggle and live, to think of Eric’s voice and my mother’s strudel, to think of Magda beside me, to recognize all I had to live for, even amid the horror and the loss. It has been thirty-five years since I left hell. The panic attacks come at any time of day or night, they can subsume me as easily in my own living room as in Hitler’s old bunker, because my panic isn’t the result of purely external triggers. It is an expression of the memories and fears that live inside. If I keep myself in exile from a particular part of the globe, I am really saying that I want to exile the part of myself that is afraid. Maybe there is something I can learn by getting closer to that part.

  And what of my legacy? Only hours ago, Jason faced a turning point in his life—the moment when he held a gun in his hand but didn’t pull the trigger, when he considered the legacy he wanted to pass on to his children, when he chose something other than violence. What legacy do I want to pass on? What will I leave in the world when I am gone? I have already chosen to relinquish secrets and denial and shame. But have I really made peace with the past? Is there more to resolve so that I don’t perpetuate more pain?

  I think of my mother’s mother, who died suddenly in her sleep. Of my mother, whose grief over the trauma of that sudden childhood loss marked her with hunger and fear from a very early age, and who passed on to her own children a vague inchoate sense of loss. And what will I pass on, besides her smooth skin, her thick hair, her deep eyes, besides the pain and grief and rage at having lost her too young? And what if I have to return to the site of my trauma to stop the cycle, to create a different kind of legacy?

  I accept the invitation to Berchtesgaden.

  CHAPTER 18

  Goebbels’s Bed

  Over the phone, Rev. Dr. David Woehr briefed me for my visit. I would address six hundred Army chaplains gathered for a clinical pastoral retreat at an Armed Forces Recreation Center in the General Walker Hotel, high in the mountains of Bavaria, which had served as a guesthouse and meeting place for Hitler’s SS officers. Béla and I would be provided accommodations at the nearby Hotel zum Türken, which had once been reserved for Hitler’s cabinet and diplomatic visitors. This was where British prime minister Neville Chamberlain stayed in 1938 when he met with Hitler and returned home with the triumphant and tragically misguided news that he had secured “peace for our time,” and where Adolf Eichmann himself had likely briefed Hitler on the Final Solution. The Berghof, or the Eagle’s Nest, Hitler’s former residence, was a short walk away.

  My audience would be made up of healing arts professionals. Army chaplains serve as behavioral health providers in addition to spiritual counselors, and for the first time, Dave told me, chaplains were required to receive a year of clinical pastoral education to complement their seminary studies. The chaplains needed training in psychology as well as in religious doctrine, and Dave was leading weeklong retreats on clinical psychology to the chaplains stationed in Europe. I would give the keynote address.

  Dave told me more about the chaplains and the soldiers they served. These weren’t the soldiers of my youth, or the soldiers I was accustomed to treating at William Beaumont; these were peacetime soldiers, soldiers of the cold war, of war behind the scenes. They weren’t living through daily violence, but nevertheless were on high alert, keeping the peace but at the ready for war. Most cold war soldiers were stationed at the sites of prepositioned missiles. These missiles were mounted on mobile launchers, already hidden at strategic sites. It was a matter of routine for these military personnel to live with the perpetual threat of war, the middle-of-the-night sirens that could signal another alert drill or an actual attack. (Like the showers at Auschwitz. Water or gas? We never knew.) The chaplains I was to address had the responsibility of supporting the spiritual and psychological needs of soldiers doing their best to deter an all-out war, doing their best to be prepared for whatever happened.

  “What do they need to hear?” I asked. “What would it be helpful for me to talk about?”

  “Hope,” Dave said. “Forgiveness. If chaplains can’t talk about this stuff, if we don’t understand it, we can’t do our job.”

  “Why me?”

  “It’s one thing to hear about hope and forgiveness from the pulpit, or from a religious scholar,” Dave explained. “But you’re one of the few people who can talk about holding on to hope even when you’d been stripped of everything, when you were starving and left for dead. I don’t know anyone else with that kind of credibility.”

  * * *

  A month later, when Béla and I are on a train from Berlin to Berchtesgaden, I feel like the least credible person, the last person on Earth qualified to talk about hope and forgiveness. When I close my eyes, I hear the sound of my nightmares, the constant turning of wheel against track. I see my parents, my father who refuses to shave, my mother’s inward gaze. Béla holds my hand. He touches a finger to the gold bracelet he gave me when Marianne was born, that I tucked into Marianne’s diaper when we fled Prešov, the bracelet I wear every day. It’s a token of triumph. We made it. We survived. We stand for life. But not even Béla’s comfort, nor the kiss of the smooth metal on my skin, can mitigate the dread collecting in my gut.

  We share the train compartment with a German couple about our age. They are pleasant, they offer us some of the pastries they’ve brought, the woman compliments me on my outfit. What would they say if they knew that when I was seventeen I sat on the top of a German train under a hail of bombs, a human shield in a thin striped dress, forced to protect Nazi ammunition with my life? And where were they when I shivered on the top of the train? Where were they during the war? Were they the children who spat at Magda and me when we marched through German towns? Were they Hitler Youth? Do they think about the past now, or are they in denial, as I was for so many years?

  The dread in me turns to something else, a
fiery and jagged feeling, fury. I remember Magda’s rage: After the war, I’m going to kill a German mother. She couldn’t erase our loss, but she could flip it on its head, she could retaliate. At times I shared her desire for confrontation, but not her desire for revenge. My devastation manifested as a suicidal urge, not a homicidal one. But now anger collects in me, a gale-force fury, it gathers strength and speed. I am sitting inches away from people who might be my former oppressors. I am afraid of what I might do.

  “Béla,” I whisper, “I think I’ve come far enough. I want to go home.”

  “You’ve been afraid before,” he says. “Welcome it, welcome it.” Béla is reminding me of what I believe too: This is the work of healing. You deny what hurts, what you fear. You avoid it at all costs. Then you find a way to welcome and embrace what you’re most afraid of. And then you can finally let it go.

  * * *

  We arrive in Berchtesgaden and take a shuttle van to the Hotel zum Türken, which is now a museum as well as a hotel. I try to ignore the ominous history of this place and lift my face to the physical grandeur, to the mountain peaks rising around us. The rocky, snowy range reminds me of the Tatra Mountains where Béla and I first met when he reluctantly chaperoned me to the TB hospital.

  Inside the hotel, Béla and I have a good laugh when the concierge addresses us as Dr. and Mrs. Eger.

  “It’s Dr. and Mr. Eger,” Béla says.

  The hotel is like a time machine, an anachronism. The rooms are still appointed as they were in the 1930s and 1940s, with thick Persian rugs and no telephones. Béla and I are assigned to the room that Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s minister of propaganda, slept in, with the same bed, the same mirror and dresser and nightstand that once were his. I stand in the doorway of the room, I feel my inner peace shatter. What does it mean that I am standing here now? Béla runs his hand over the dresser top, the bedspread, he goes to the window. Is history grabbing his skull the way it is mine? I grab for the bedpost to keep from falling to my knees. Béla turns back to me. He winks, he bursts into song.