The Choice

by Edith Eva Eger

  He stared at me.

  “But to save yourself, you are going to have to give up the image of who you think you’re supposed to be.”

  “I hope this works,” he said.

  Shortly after, the colonel was reassigned and his family left El Paso. I don’t know what happened to them. I hope something good, as I cared for them deeply. But why am I thinking of them now? What does their story have to do with me? Something about the colonel’s guilt, about his prison of self-blame, is calling for my attention. Is my memory pointing to work I have already done, or work that I have yet to do? I have come so far since the end of my literal imprisonment, since the American GI rescued me in 1945. I have taken off my mask. I have learned to feel and express, to stop bottling my fears and my grief. I have worked to express and release my rage. And I have traveled back here, to my oppressor’s old home. I have even forgiven Hitler, released him to the universe, if only for today. But there’s a knot, a darkness, that extends from my gut to my heart, there’s a tightness in my spine—it’s an unrelenting sense of guilt. I was victimized, I wasn’t the victimizer. Whom is it that I think I have wronged?

  Another patient flashes into my mind. She was seventy-one years old and a chronic source of concern to her family. She exhibited all the symptoms of clinical depression. She slept too much and ate too much and isolated herself from her children and grandchildren. And when she did interact with her family, she was so full of anger that her grandchildren were afraid of her. Her son approached me after my lecture in their city to ask if I could spare an hour to meet with his mother. I wasn’t sure in what way I could be useful to her in a single, short visit until the man revealed that, like me, his mother had lost her own mother when she was only sixteen. I felt a surge of compassion for his mother, this stranger. It struck me that she was the person I could easily have become, that I almost became—so steeped in loss that I hid from the people who loved me the most.

  The woman, Margaret, came to see me in my hotel room that afternoon. She was meticulously dressed, but there was a hostility that bristled out of her like quills. She unleashed a litany of complaints about her health, her family members, her housekeeper, her postman, her neighbors, the headmistress of the girls’ school up the street. She seemed to find injustice and inconvenience everywhere in her life. The hour was wasting away, and she was so caught up in the small disasters that we hadn’t touched on what I knew to be her larger grief.

  “Where is your mother buried?” I asked suddenly.

  Margaret pulled away as though I was a dragon breathing on her face with flame. “In the cemetery,” she finally said, recomposed.

  “Where is the cemetery? Nearby?”

  “In this very town,” she said.

  “Your mother needs you right now.”

  I didn’t give her a chance to object. We hailed a taxi. We sat and watched the wet, busy streets through the windows. She kept up a running criticism of other drivers, the speed of the traffic signals, the quality of the shops and businesses we passed, even the color of someone’s umbrella. We drove through the iron gates of the cemetery. The trees were mature and towering. A narrow cobblestone road led from the gate into the field of the dead. Rain fell.

  “There,” Margaret said at last, pointing up the muddy hill to a crowd of headstones. “Now tell me what in God’s name we’re doing here.”

  “Do you know,” I said, “mothers can’t rest in peace unless they know the people they have left behind are fully embracing life?” Take off your shoes, I told her. Take off your stockings. Stand barefoot on your mother’s grave. Make direct contact so she can finally rest in peace.

  Margaret got out of the taxi. She stood on the rain-slick grass. I gave her privacy. I looked back only once, when I saw Margaret crouched on the ground, holding her mother’s headstone in her hands. I don’t know what she said to her mother, if she said anything at all. I only know she stood barefoot on her mother’s grave, that she connected her bare skin to this site of loss and grief. That when she got back in the taxi she was barefoot still. She cried a little, then fell silent.

  Later I would receive a beautiful letter from Margaret’s son. I don’t know what you said to my mother, he would write, but she’s a different person, she is more peaceful, more joyful.

  It was a whim, a lucky experiment. My goal was to help her reframe her experience—to reframe her problem as an opportunity, to put her in the position of helping her mother—and in helping her mother to be free, to help herself. Now that I am back in Germany, it occurs to me that maybe the same principle can work for me. Bare-skinned connection with the site of my loss. Contact and release. Hungarian exorcism.

  Lying awake in Goebbels’s bed, I realize that I need to do what Margaret did, to perform the rite of grief that has eluded me all my life.

  I decide to return to Auschwitz.

  CHAPTER 19

  Leave a Stone

  I can’t imagine going back to hell without Magda. “Fly to Kraków tonight,” I beg Magda the next morning from the phone in the Hotel zum Türken lobby. “Please come back to Auschwitz with me.”

  I wouldn’t have survived without her. I can’t survive returning to our prison now unless she is beside me, holding my hand. I know it’s not possible to relive the past, to be who I used to be, to hug my mother again, even once. There is nothing that can alter the past, that can make me different from who I am, change what was done to my parents, done to me. There is no going back. I know this. But I can’t ignore the feeling that there is something waiting for me in my old prison, something to recover. Or discover. Some long-lost part of me.

  “What kind of a crazy masochist do you think I am?” Magda says. “Why the hell would I go back there? Why would you?”

  It’s a fair question. Am I only punishing myself? Reopening a wound? Maybe I will regret it. But I think I will regret it more if I don’t go back. No matter how many ways I try to convince her, Magda refuses. Magda is choosing never to return, and I respect her for it. But I will make a different choice.

  * * *

  Béla and I already have an invitation to visit Marianne’s old host family in Copenhagen while we are in Europe, and we continue there from Berchtesgaden as planned.

  We travel to Salzburg, where we tour the cathedral constructed on the ruins of a Roman church. It has been rebuilt three times, we learn—most recently after a bomb damaged the central dome during the war. There is no evidence of the destruction. “Like us,” Béla says, taking my hand.

  From Salzburg, we go to Vienna, traveling over the same ground Magda and I marched across before we were liberated. I see ditches running alongside roads, and I imagine them as I once saw them, spilling over with corpses, but I can also see them as they are now, filling up with summer grass. I can see that the past doesn’t taint the present, the present doesn’t diminish the past. Time is the medium. Time is the track, we travel it. The train goes through Linz. Through Wels. I am a girl with a broken back who learns to write a capital G again, who learns again to dance.

  We spend the night in Vienna, not far from the Rothschild Hospital where we first lived when we were waiting for our visas to America, and where, I have since learned, my mentor Viktor Frankl was the chief of neurology before the war. In the morning we board another train north.

  I think Béla assumes my desire to return to Auschwitz might wane, but our second morning in Copenhagen I ask our friends for directions to the Polish embassy. They caution me, as Marianne already has, about their survivor friends who visited the camp and then died. “Don’t retraumatize yourself,” they plead. Béla, too, looks worried. “Hitler didn’t win,” I remind him.

  I thought that choosing to return would be the biggest hurdle. But at the Polish embassy, Béla and I learn that labor riots have broken out across Poland, that the Soviets might intervene to suppress the demonstrations, that the embassy has been advised to stop issuing travel visas to Westerners. Béla is ready to console me, but I brush him away. I feel t
he force of will that led me once to the prison warden in Prešov with a diamond ring in my hand, to a medical examiner’s office in Vienna with my brother-in-law posing as my husband. I have come this far in my life and my healing. I can concede to no obstacle now.

  “I’m a survivor,” I tell the embassy clerk. “I was a prisoner at Auschwitz. My parents and grandparents died there. I fought so hard to survive. Please don’t make me wait to go back.” I don’t know that within a year Polish–American relations will have deteriorated, that they will stay frozen for the rest of the decade, that this is in fact the last chance for me and Béla to go to Auschwitz together. I only know that I can’t let myself be turned back.

  The clerk eyes me, expressionless. He steps away from the counter, returns. “Passports,” he says. Into our blue American passports he has inserted travel visas good for one week. “Enjoy Poland,” he says.

  This is when I start to feel afraid. On the train to Kraków I feel that I’m in a crucible, that I am reaching the point at which I will break or burn, that fear alone could turn me into ash. This is here, this is now. I try to reason with the part of me that feels that with every mile I travel I lose a layer of skin. I will be a skeleton again by the time I get to Poland. I want to be more than bones.

  “Let’s get off at the next stop,” I tell Béla. “It’s not important to go all the way to Auschwitz. Let’s go home.”

  “Edie,” he says, “you’re going to be fine. It’s only a place. It can’t hurt you.”

  I stay on the train for another stop, and another, through Berlin, through Poznań. I think of Dr. Hans Selye—a fellow Hungarian—who said stress is the body’s response to any demand for change. Our automatic responses are to fight or to flee—but in Auschwitz, where we endured more than stress, where we lived in distress, the stakes life and death, never knowing what would happen next, the options to fight or flee didn’t exist. I would have been shot if I’d fought back, electrocuted if I’d tried to run away. So I learned to flow, I learned to stay in the situation, to develop the only thing I had left, to look within for the part of me that no Nazi could ever murder. To find and hold on to my truest self. Maybe I’m not losing skin. Maybe I am only stretching. Stretching to encompass every aspect of who I am—and have been—and can become.

  When we heal, we embrace our real and possible selves. I had a patient who was obese, and she was cruel to herself every time she saw her reflection or stepped on a scale. She called herself a cow, disgusting. She believed her husband found her disappointing and her children found her embarrassing, that the people who loved her deserved better. But for her to be the person she wanted to be she first had to love herself for who she was. We sat in my office and I would ask her to pick a part of her body—a toe, a finger, her stomach, her neck, her chin—and talk about it in a loving way. It looks like this, it feels like this, it is beautiful because … It was awkward at first, even painful. It was easier for her to bash herself than to spend time attentively, willingly, in her own skin. We went slowly, we went gently. I began to notice little changes. She came to see me one day wearing a beautiful bright new scarf. Another day she had treated herself to a pedicure. Another day she told me she had called the sister she had grown distant from. Another time she had discovered that she loved walking on the trail around the park where her daughter played soccer. As she practiced loving all parts of herself, she discovered more joy in her life, and more ease. She also began to lose weight. Release begins with acceptance.

  To heal, we embrace the dark. We walk through the shadow of the valley on our way to the light. I worked with a Vietnam veteran who came home desperate to resume the life he had before the war. But he returned with physical and psychological wounds: He was impotent, he couldn’t find a job. His wife left him. When he sought my help, he was lost in the chaos of divorce and what felt to him like the death of his sexuality and identity. I gave him all of my compassion, but he was stuck, he was angry, caught in the quicksand of his loss. I felt powerless to help him out. The more I tried to love him back from the pit of despair, the deeper he sank.

  As a last resort I decided to try hypnotherapy. I regressed him back to the war, when he was a bomber pilot, when he was in control, before he came home and lost it all. In his hypnotic state, he told me, “In Vietnam, I could drink as much as I wanted to. I could fuck as much as I wanted to.” He got red in the face and screamed, “And I could kill as much as I wanted to!” In the war he wasn’t killing people; he was killing “gooks,” he was killing subhumans. Just as the Nazis weren’t killing people at the death camps; they were eradicating a cancer. The war had brought about his injury and altered his life, and yet he missed the war. He missed the sense of power he gained in fighting an enemy, in feeling himself to be in an invulnerable class, above another nationality, above another race.

  None of my unconditional love did any good until I gave him permission to express the part of him that he was grieving, the part that was both powerful and dark, the part he could no longer express. I don’t mean that he needed to kill again in order to be whole. I mean that to find his way out of victimhood he needed to come to terms with his impotence and his power, the ways he had been injured and the ways he had hurt, his pride and his shame. The only antidote to brokenness is the whole self.

  Maybe to heal isn’t to erase the scar, or even to make the scar. To heal is to cherish the wound.

  * * *

  It is the middle of the afternoon when we reach Kraków. We will sleep here tonight—or try to. Tomorrow we will take a cab to Auschwitz. Béla wants to tour the Old Town, and I try to pay attention to the medieval architecture, but my mind is too heavy with expectation—a strange mix of promise and dread. We pause outside St. Mary’s Church to hear the trumpeter play the hejnał that marks the top of every hour. A group of teenage boys jostles past us, joking loudly in Polish, but I don’t feel their merriment, I feel anxious. These young men, a little older than my grandchildren, remind me how soon the next generation will come of age. Has my generation taught the youth well enough to prevent another Holocaust from occurring? Or will our hard-won freedom capsize in a new sea of hate?

  I have had many opportunities to influence young people—my own children and grandchildren, my former students, the audiences I address around the world, individual patients. On the eve of my return to Auschwitz, my responsibility to them feels especially potent. It isn’t just for myself that I’m going back. It’s for all that ripples out from me.

  Do I have what it takes to make a difference? Can I pass on my strength instead of my loss? My love instead of my hatred?

  I’ve been tested before. A fourteen-year-old boy who had participated in a car theft was sent to me by a judge. The boy wore brown boots, a brown shirt. He leaned his elbow on my desk. He said, “It’s time for America to be white again. I’m going to kill all the Jews, all the niggers, all the Mexicans, all the chinks.”

  I thought I would be sick. I struggled not to run from the room. What is the meaning of this? I wanted to shout. I wanted to shake the boy, say, Who do you think you’re talking to? I saw my mother go to the gas chamber. I would have been justified. And maybe it was my job to set him straight, maybe that’s why God had sent him my way. To nip his hate in the bud. I could feel the rush of righteousness. It felt good to be angry. Better angry than afraid.

  But then I heard a voice within. Find the bigot in you, the voice said. Find the bigot in you.

  I tried to silence that voice. I listed my many objections to the very notion that I could be a bigot. I came to America penniless. I used the “colored” bathroom in solidarity with my fellow African American factory workers. I marched with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to end segregation. But the voice insisted: Find the bigot in you. Find the part in you that is judging, assigning labels, diminishing another’s humanity, making others less than who they are.

  The boy continued to rant about the blights to America’s purity. My whole being trembled with unease, and I struggl
ed with the inclination to wag my finger, shake my fist, make him accountable for his hate—without being accountable for my own. This boy didn’t kill my parents. Withholding my love wouldn’t conquer his prejudice.

  I prayed for the ability to meet him with love. I summoned every image I had of unconditional love. I thought of Corrie ten Boom, one of the Righteous Gentiles. She and her family resisted Hitler by hiding hundreds of Jews in their home, and she ended up in a concentration camp herself. Her sister perished there—she died in Corrie’s arms. Corrie was released due to a clerical error one day before all of the inmates at Ravensbrück were executed. And a few years after the war, she met one of the most vicious guards at her camp, one of the men who were responsible for her sister’s death. She could have spit on him, wished him death, cursed his name. But she prayed for the strength to forgive him, and she took his hands in her own. She says that in that moment, the former prisoner clasping the hands of the former guard, she felt the purest and most profound love. I tried to find that embrace, that compassion, in my own heart, to fill my eyes with that quality of kindness. I wondered if it was possible that this racist boy had been sent to me so I could learn about unconditional love. What opportunity did I have in this moment? What choice could I make right then that could move me in the direction of love?

  I had an opportunity to love this young person, just for him, for his singular being and our shared humanity. The opportunity to welcome him to say anything, feel any feeling, without the fear of being judged. I remembered a German family that was stationed for a while at Fort Bliss, how the girl would climb into my lap and call me Oma—Grandma—and this little benediction from a child felt like the answer to the fantasy I’d had as I passed through German towns with Magda and the other inmates, as the children spat at us, when I dreamed of a day when German children would know they didn’t have to hate me. And in my own lifetime, that day came to pass. I thought of a statistic I read, that most of the members of white supremacist groups in America lost one of their parents before they were ten years old. These are lost children looking for an identity, looking for a way to feel strength, to feel like they matter.