And so I gathered myself up and I looked at this young man as lovingly as I could. I said three words: “Tell me more.”
I didn’t say much more than that during his first visit. I listened. I empathized. He was so much like me after the war. We had both lost our parents—his to neglect and abandonment, mine to death. We both thought of ourselves as damaged goods. In letting go of my judgment, in letting go of my desire for him to be or believe anything different, by seeing his vulnerability and his yearning for belonging and love, in allowing myself to get past my own fear and anger in order to accept and love him, I was able to give him something his brown shirt and brown boots couldn’t—an authentic image of his own worth. When he left my office that day, he didn’t know a thing about my history. But he had seen an alternative to hate and prejudice, he was no longer talking about killing, he had shown me his soft smile. And I had taken responsibility that I not perpetuate hostility and blame, that I not bow to hate and say, You are too much for me.
Now, on the eve of my return to prison, I remind myself that each of us has an Adolf Hitler and a Corrie ten Boom within us. We have the capacity to hate and the capacity to love. Which one we reach for—our inner Hitler or inner ten Boom—is up to us.
* * *
In the morning, we hire a cab to drive us the hour to Auschwitz. Béla engages the driver in chitchat about his family, his children. I take in the view I didn’t see when I was sixteen, when I approached Auschwitz from within the dark of a cattle car. Farms, villages, green. Life continues, as it did all around us when we were imprisoned there.
The driver drops us off, and Béla and I are alone again, standing before my former prison. The wrought-iron sign looms: ARBEIT MACHT FREI, work will set you free. My legs shake at the sight, at the memory of how these words gave my father hope. We will work until the end of the war, he thought. It will last for just a little while, and then we’ll be free. Arbeit Macht Frei. These words kept us calm until the gas chamber doors locked around our loved ones, until panic was futile. And then these words became a daily, an hourly irony, because here nothing could set you free. Death was the only escape. And so even the idea of freedom became another form of hopelessness.
The grass is lush. The trees have filled in. But the clouds are the color of bone, and beneath them the man-made structures, even the ones in ruins, dominate the landscape. Miles and miles of relentless fence. A vast expanse of crumbling brick barracks and bare rectangular patches where buildings used to stand. The bleak horizontal lines—of barracks, fence, tower—are regular and orderly, but there is no life in this geometry. This is the geometry of systematic torture and death. Mathematical annihilation. And then I notice it again, the thing that haunted me those hellish months when this was my home: I can’t see or hear a single bird. No birds live here. Not even now. The sky is bare of their wings, the silence deeper because of the absence of their song.
Tourists gather. Our tour commences. We are a small group of eight or ten. The immensity crushes. I sense it in our stillness, in the way we almost stop breathing. There is no fathoming the enormity of the horror committed in this place. I was here while the fires burned, I woke and worked and slept to the stench of burning corpses, and even I can’t fathom it. The brain tries to contain the numbers, tries to take in the confounding accumulation of things that have been assembled and put on display for the visitors—the suitcases wrested from the soon to be dead, the bowls and plates and cups, the thousands upon thousands of pairs of glasses amassed in a tangle like a surreal tumbleweed. The baby clothes crocheted by loving hands for babies who never became children or women or men. The 67-foot-long glass case filled entirely with human hair. We count: 4,700 corpses cremated in each fire, 75,000 Polish dead, 21,000 Gypsies, 15,000 Soviets. The numbers accrue and accrue. We can form the equation—we can do the math that describes the more than one million dead at Auschwitz. We can add that number to the rosters of the dead at the thousands of other death camps in the Europe of my youth, to the corpses dumped in ditches or rivers before they were ever sent to a death camp. But there is no equation that can adequately summarize the effect of such total loss. There is no language that can explain the systematic inhumanity of this human-made death factory. More than one million people were murdered right here where I stand. It is the world’s biggest cemetery. And in all the tens, hundreds, thousands, millions of dead, in all the possessions packed and then forcibly relinquished, in all the miles of fence and brick, another number looms. The number zero. Here in the world’s biggest cemetery, there is not one single grave. Only the empty spaces where the crematories and gas chambers, hastily destroyed by the Nazis before liberation, stood. The bare patches of ground where my parents died.
We complete the tour of the men’s camp. I still must go to the women’s side, to Birkenau. That is why I am here. Béla asks if I want him to come with me, but I shake my head. This last piece of the journey I must travel alone.
I leave Béla at the entrance gate and I am back in the past. Music plays through the loudspeakers, festive sounds that contradict the bleak surroundings. You see, my father says, it can’t be a terrible place We’ll only work a little, till the war’s over. It is temporary. We can survive this. He joins his line and waves to me. Do I wave back to him? O memory, tell me that I waved to my father before he died.
My mother links her arm in mine. We walk side by side. “Button your coat,” she says. “Stand tall.” I am back inside the image that has occupied my inward gaze for most of my life: three hungry women in wool coats, arms linked, in a barren yard. My mother. My sister. Me.
I am wearing the coat that I put on that April dawn, I am slim and flat-chested, my hair tucked back under a scarf. My mother scolds me again to stand tall. “You’re a woman, not a child,” she says. There is a purpose to her nagging. She wants me to look every day of my sixteen years and more. My survival depends on it.
And yet, I won’t for the life of me let go of my mother’s hand. The guards point and shove. We inch forward in our line. I see Mengele’s heavy eyes ahead, the gapped teeth when he grins. He is conducting. He is an eager host. “Is anyone sick?” he asks, solicitous. “Over forty? Under fourteen? Go left, go left.”
This is our last chance. To share words, to share silence. To embrace. This time I know it is the end. And still I come up short. I just want my mother to look at me. To reassure me. To look at me and never look away. What is this need I hand to her again and again, this impossible thing I want?
It’s our turn now. Dr. Mengele lifts his finger. “Is she your mother or your sister?” he asks.
I cling to my mother’s hand, Magda hugs her other side. Although none of us knows the meaning of being sent left, of being sent right, my mother has intuited the need for me to appear my age or older, for me to look old enough to get through the first selection line alive. Her hair is gray but her face is as smooth as mine. She could pass for my sister. But I don’t think about which word will protect her: “mother” or “sister.” I don’t think at all. I only feel every single cell in me that loves her, that needs her. She is my mother, my mama, my only mama. And so I say the word that I have spent the rest of my life trying to banish from my consciousness, the word that I have not let myself remember, until today.
“Mother,” I say.
As soon as the word is out of my mouth, I want to pull it back into my throat. I have realized too late the significance of the question. Is she your mother or your sister? “Sister, sister, sister!” I want to scream. Mengele points my mother to the left. She follows behind the young children and the elderly, the mothers who are pregnant or holding babies in their arms. I will follow her. I won’t let her out of my sight. I begin to run toward my mother, but Mengele grabs my shoulder. “You’ll see your mother very soon,” he says. He pushes me to the right. Toward Magda. To the other side. To life.
“Mama!” I call. We are separated again, in memory as we were in life, but I will not let memory be another dead end. “Ma
ma!” I say. I will not be satisfied with the back of her head. I must see the full sun of her face.
She turns to look at me. She is a point of stillness in the marching river of the other condemned. I feel her radiance, the beauty that was more than beauty, that she often hid under her sadness and disapproval. She sees me watching her. She smiles. It’s a small smile. A sad smile.
“I should have said ‘sister’! Why didn’t I say ‘sister’?” I call to her across the years, to ask her forgiveness. That is what I have returned to Auschwitz to receive, I think. To hear her tell me I did the best with what I knew. That I made the right choice.
But she can’t say that, or even if she did, I wouldn’t believe it. I can forgive the Nazis, but how can I forgive myself? I would live it all again, every selection line, every shower, every freezing-cold night and deadly roll call, every haunted meal, every breath of smoke-charred air, every time I nearly died or wanted to, if I could only live this moment over, this moment and the one just before it, when I could have made a different choice. When I could have given a different answer to Mengele’s question. When I could have saved, if even for a day, my mother’s life.
My mother turns away. I watch her gray coat, her soft shoulders, her hair that is coiled and shining, receding from me. I see her walk away with the other women and children, toward the locker rooms, where they will undress, where she will take off the coat that still holds Klara’s caul, where they will be told to memorize the hook number where they’ve stored their clothes, as though they will be returning to that dress, to that coat, to that pair of shoes. My mother will stand naked with the other mothers—the grandmothers, the young mothers with their babies in their arms—and with the children of mothers who were sent to the line that Magda and I joined. She will file down the stairs into the room with showerheads on the walls, where more and more people will be pushed inside until the room is damp with sweat and tears and echoing with the cries of the terrified women and children, until it is packed and there is not enough air to breathe. Will she notice the small square windows in the ceiling through which the guards will push the poison? For how long will she know she is dying? Long enough to think of me and Magda and Klara? Of my father? Long enough to say a prayer to her mother? Long enough to feel angry at me for saying the word that in one quick second sent her to her death?
If I’d known my mother would die that day, I would have said a different word. Or nothing at all. I could have followed her to the showers and died with her. I could have done something different. I could have done more. I believe this.
And yet. (This “and yet” opening like a door.) How easily a life can become a litany of guilt and regret, a song that keeps echoing with the same chorus, with the inability to forgive ourselves. How easily the life we didn’t live becomes the only life we prize. How easily we are seduced by the fantasy that we are in control, that we were ever in control, that the things we could or should have done or said have the power, if only we had done or said them, to cure pain, to erase suffering, to vanish loss. How easily we can cling to—worship—the choices we think we could or should have made.
Could I have saved my mother? Maybe. And I will live for all of the rest of my life with that possibility. And I can castigate myself for having made the wrong choice. That is my prerogative. Or I can accept that the more important choice is not the one I made when I was hungry and terrified, when we were surrounded by dogs and guns and uncertainty, when I was sixteen; it’s the one I make now. The choice to accept myself as I am: human, imperfect. And the choice to be responsible for my own happiness. To forgive my flaws and reclaim my innocence. To stop asking why I deserved to survive. To function as well as I can, to commit myself to serve others, to do everything in my power to honor my parents, to see to it that they did not die in vain. To do my best, in my limited capacity, so future generations don’t experience what I did. To be useful, to be used up, to survive and to thrive so I can use every moment to make the world a better place. And to finally, finally stop running from the past. To do everything possible to redeem it, and then let it go. I can make the choice that all of us can make. I can’t ever change the past. But there is a life I can save: It is mine. The one I am living right now, this precious moment.
I am ready to go. I take a stone from the ground, a little one, rough, gray, unremarkable. I squeeze the stone. In Jewish tradition, we place small stones on graves as a sign of respect for the dead, to offer mitzvah, or blessing. The stone signifies that the dead live on, in our hearts and memories. The stone in my hand is a symbol of my enduring love for my parents. And it is an emblem of the guilt and the grief I came here to face—something immense and terrifying that all the same I can hold in my hand. It is the death of my parents. It is the death of the life that was. It is what didn’t happen. And it is the birth of the life that is. Of the patience and compassion I learned here, the ability to stop judging myself, the ability to respond instead of react. It is the truth and the peace I have come here to discover, and all that I can finally put to rest and leave behind.
I leave the stone on the patch of earth where my barrack used to be, where I slept on a wooden shelf with five other girls, where I closed my eyes as “The Blue Danube” played and I danced for my life. I miss you, I say to my parents. I love you I’ll always love you.
And to the vast campus of death that consumed my parents and so very many others, to the classroom of horror that still had something sacred to teach me about how to live—that I was victimized but I’m not a victim, that I was hurt but not broken, that the soul never dies, that meaning and purpose can come from deep in the heart of what hurts us the most—I utter my final words. Goodbye, I say. And, Thank you. Thank you for life, and for the ability to finally accept the life that is.
* * *
I walk toward the iron gate of my old prison, toward Béla waiting for me on the grass. Out of the corner of my eye I see a man in uniform pacing back and forth under the sign. He is a museum guard, not a soldier. But it is impossible, when I see him marching in his uniform, not to freeze, not to hold my breath, not to expect the shout of a gun, the blast of bullets. For a split second I am a terrified girl again, a girl who is in danger. I am the imprisoned me. But I breathe, I wait for the moment to pass. I feel for the blue American passport in my coat pocket. The guard reaches the wrought-iron sign and turns around, marching back into the prison. He must stay here. It is his duty to stay. But I can leave. I am free!
I leave Auschwitz. I skip out! I pass under the words ARBEIT MACHT FREI. How cruel and mocking those words were when we realized that nothing we could do would set us free. But as I leave the barracks and the ruined crematories and the watch houses and the visitors and the museum guard behind me, as I skip under the dark iron letters toward my husband, I see the words spark with truth. Work has set me free. I survived so that I could do my work. Not the work the Nazis meant—the hard labor of sacrifice and hunger, of exhaustion and enslavement. It was the inner work. Of learning to survive and thrive, of learning to forgive myself, of helping others to do the same. And when I do this work, then I am no longer the hostage or the prisoner of anything. I am free.
PART IV
HEALING
CHAPTER 20
The Dance of Freedom
One of the last times I saw Viktor Frankl was at the Third World Congress on Logotherapy, in Regensburg in 1983. He was almost eighty; I was fifty-six. In many ways I was the same person who had fallen into a panic in an El Paso lecture hall when I put a little paperback book into my bag. I still spoke English with a thick accent. I still had flashbacks. I still carried painful images and mourned the losses of the past. But I no longer felt like I was the victim of anything. I felt—and will always feel—tremendous love and gratitude for my two liberators: the GI who pulled me from a heap of bodies at Gunskirchen, and Viktor Frankl, who gave me permission not to hide anymore, who helped me find words for my experience, who helped me to cope with my pain. Through his mentorship
and friendship, I discovered a purpose in my suffering, a sense of meaning that helped me not only to come to peace with the past but also to emerge from my trials with something precious worth sharing: a path to freedom. The last night of the conference, we danced. There we were, two aging dancers. Two people enjoying the sacred present. Two survivors who had learned to thrive and be free.
My decades-long friendship with Viktor Frankl, and my healing relationships with all of my patients, including those I’ve been describing, have taught me the same important lesson that I began studying at Auschwitz: Our painful experiences aren’t a liability—they’re a gift. They give us perspective and meaning, an opportunity to find our unique purpose and our strength.
There is no one-size-fits-all template for healing, but there are steps that can be learned and practiced, steps that each individual can weave together in his or her own way, steps in the dance of freedom.
My first step in the dance was to take responsibility for my feelings. To stop repressing and avoiding them, and to stop blaming them on Béla or other people, to accept them as my own. This was a vital step in Captain Jason Fuller’s healing too. Like me, he was in the habit of cutting his feelings off, of running from them until they got big enough to control him, instead of the other way around. I told him that he couldn’t avoid pain by avoiding his feelings. He had to take responsibility for experiencing—and eventually expressing—them safely, and then for letting them go.
In those early weeks of treatment, I taught him a mantra for managing his emotions: notice, accept, check, stay. When a feeling started to overwhelm him, the first action toward managing the feeling was to notice—to acknowledge—that he was having a feeling. He could say to himself, Aha! Here I go again. This is anger. This is jealousy. This is sadness. (My Jungian therapist taught me something that I find quite comforting—that although it feels like the palette of human feelings is limitless, in fact every emotional shade, like every color, is derived from just a few primary emotions: sad, mad, glad, scared. For those just learning an emotional vocabulary, as I was, it’s less overwhelming to learn to identify only four feelings.)
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