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Contents

Foreword by Philip Zimbardo, PhD
PART I: PRISON

Introduction: I Had My Secret, and My Secret Had Me
1: The Four Questions
2: What You Put in Your Mind
3: Dancing in Hell
4: A Cartwheel
5: The Stairs of Death
6: To Choose a Blade of Grass
PART II: ESCAPE

7: My Liberator, My Assailant
8: In Through a Window
9: Next Year in Jerusalem
10: Flight
PART III: FREEDOM

11: Immigration Day
12: Greener
13: You Were There?
14: From One Survivor to Another
15: What Life Expected

16: The Choice
17: Then Hitler Won
18: Goebbels’s Bed
19: Leave a Stone
PART IV: HEALING

20: The Dance of Freedom
21: The Girl Without Hands
22: Somehow the Waters Part
23: Liberation Day
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Index

For the five generations of my family
my father, Lajos, who taught me to laugh;
my mother, Ilona, who helped me find what I needed inside;
my gorgeous and unbelievable sisters, Magda and Klara;
my children: Marianne, Audrey, and John;
and their children: Lindsey, Jordan, Rachel, David, and Ashley;
and their children’s children: Silas, Graham, and Hale

Foreword
By Philip Zimbardo, PhD

Psychologist and professor emeritus at Stanford University, Phil Zimbardo is the creator of
the famed Stanford prison experiment (1971) and author of many notable books, including
the New York Times bestseller and winner of the William James Book Award for best
psychology book e Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil (2007)
...


One spring, at the invitation of the chief psychiatrist of the U
...
Navy,
Dr
...
e plane swooped down toward a tiny vehundred-foot runway and landed with a jolt as its tailhook caught the
arresting wire and stopped the plane from careening into the ocean
...
Eger was shown to her room in
the captain’s cabin
...

On countless occasions, Dr
...
How is this gentle grandmother able to help so many military
personnel heal from the inner brutality of war?
Before I met Dr
...
Her age

and her accent made me picture an old-world babushka with a
headscarf tied under her chin
...
Luminous with her radiant smile,
shining earrings, and blazing golden hair, dressed head to toe in what
my wife later told me was Chanel, she wove her horri c and
harrowing stories of surviving the Nazi death camps with humor, with
an upbeat and feisty attitude, and with a presence and warmth I can
only describe as pure light
...
Eger’s life has been full of darkness
...
Despite torture, starvation,
and the constant threat of annihilation, she preserved her mental and
spiritual freedom
...
In fact, her wisdom
comes from deep within the most devastating episodes of her life
...
She has discovered how to use her
experience of human cruelty to empower so many—from military
personnel like those aboard the USS Nimitz to couples struggling to
rekindle intimacy, from those who were neglected or abused to those
who are suffering from addiction or illness, from those who have lost
loved ones to those who have lost hope
...

At the close of her lecture, every single one of my three hundred
students leapt into a spontaneous standing ovation
...
In all my
decades of teaching I had never seen a group of students so inspired
...
From a Hero Round Table
in Flint, Michigan, where we spoke to a group of young people in a
city struggling with high poverty, 50 percent unemployment, and
increasing racial con ict, to Budapest, Hungary, the city where many
of Edie’s relatives perished, where she spoke to hundreds of people
trying to rebuild from a damaging past, I have seen it happen again
and again: people are transformed in Edie’s presence
...
Eger weaves together the stories of her patients’
transformations with her own unforgettable story of surviving
Auschwitz
...
It is the fact that
Edie has used her experiences to help so many to discover true
freedom
...

Her goal is nothing less than to help each of us to escape the prisons of
our own minds
...

When Edie is introduced to young audiences, she is oen called
“the Anne Frank who didn’t die,” because Edie and Anne were of a
similar age and upbringing when they were deported to the camps
...
Of course, at the time Anne Frank was
writing her diary, she had yet to experience the extremity of the
camps, which makes Edie’s insights as a survivor and as a clinician
(and great-grandmother!) especially moving and compelling
...
Eger’s
reveals both the darkest side of evil and the indomitable strength of
the human spirit in the face of evil
...


Perhaps the best comparison for Edie’s book is to another Shoah
memoir, Viktor Frankl’s brilliant classic Man’s Search for Meaning
...

Eger shares Frankl’s profundity and deep knowledge of humanity, and
adds the warmth and intimacy of a lifelong clinician
...
Dr
...

In my own work I have long studied the psychological foundations
of negative forms of social in uence
...
Edie has helped me to discover that heroism is not
the province only of those who perform extraordinary deeds or take
impulsive risks to protect themselves or others—though Edie has done
both of these things
...
It is a way of being
...
To be a hero requires taking effective action
at crucial junctures in our lives, to make an active attempt to address
injustice or create positive change in the world
...
And each of us has an inner hero waiting to be
expressed
...
” Our hero training is life, the
daily circumstances that invite us to practice the habits of heroism: to
commit daily deeds of kindness; to radiate compassion, starting with
self-compassion; to bring out the best in others and ourselves; to
sustain love, even in our most challenging relationships; to celebrate
and exercise the power of our mental freedom
...

Two years ago Edie and I traveled together to Budapest, to the city
where her sister was living when the Nazis began rounding up
Hungarian Jews
...
We visited the Shoes on the Danube
Bank memorial that honors the people, including some of Edie’s own
family members, who were killed by the Arrow Cross militiamen
during World War II, ordered to stand on the riverbank and take off
their shoes, and then shot, their bodies falling into the water, carried
away by the current
...

roughout the day, Edie grew more and more quiet
...
But when she took the stage she didn’t begin
with a story of the fear or trauma or horror that our visit had likely
made all too real for her again
...

“Isn’t it amazing?” she said
...
”
At the end of her speech, which she concluded with her trademark
high ballet kick, Edie called out, “Okay, now everybody dance!” e
audience rose as one
...
ere
was no music
...
We danced and sang and laughed and
hugged in an incomparable celebration of life
...
Eger is one of the dwindling number of survivors who can bear
rsthand testimony to the horrors of the concentration camps
...
And it is a universal message of
hope and possibility to all who are trying to free themselves from pain
and suffering
...

e Choice is an extraordinary chronicle of heroism and healing,

resiliency and compassion, survival with dignity, mental toughness,
and moral courage
...
Eger’s inspiring cases
and riveting personal story to heal our own lives
...

War had taught me to sense danger even before I could explain why I
was afraid
...
His blue eyes
looked distant, his jaw frozen, and he wouldn’t—or couldn’t—speak
...
He sat stiffly, sts pressing
into his knees
...
His body was close enough to touch, and
his anguish practically palpable, but he was far away, lost
...

I took a deep breath and searched for a way to begin
...
Sometimes I jump right into identifying and
investigating the feelings that have brought the patient to my office
...
He was
completely shut down
...
And I had to pay attention to my body’s warning system

without letting my sense of danger overwhelm my ability to help
...

He didn’t answer
...
He reminded me of a
character in a myth or folktale who has been turned to stone
...
is was my secret weapon
...
I need to know why they are
motivated to change
...
Asking “Why now?”
isn’t just asking a question—it’s asking everything
...
But he said nothing
...

Still he said nothing
...
Jason hadn’t arrived with an
official referral
...
But I knew from clinical and personal experience that even
when someone chooses to heal, he or she can remain frozen for years
...
Dr
...
I pictured Jason in a
hospital gown, his eyes still glazed, his body, now so tense, racked with
the muscle spasms that are oen a side effect of the drugs prescribed
to manage psychosis
...
But I don’t like to jump to hospitalization if there’s any chance of
success with a therapeutic intervention
...
His
pain, whatever its cause, might be muted by the drugs, but it wouldn’t
be resolved
...

What now? I wondered as the heavy minutes dragged past, as Jason
sat frozen on my couch—there by choice, but still imprisoned
...
One opportunity
...
I only knew
then that I had to try
...
I would give orders
...

“We’re going for a walk,” I said
...
I gave the command
...
”
Jason looked panicked for a moment
...
I
could see him looking around, wondering, “How can I get out of

here?” But he was a good soldier
...

“Yes, ma’am,” he said
...
”
* * *
I would discover soon enough the origin of Jason’s trauma, and he
would discover that despite our obvious differences, there was much
we shared
...
And we both knew what it was
like to become frozen
...

My past still haunted me: an anxious, dizzy feeling every time I
heard sirens, or heavy footsteps, or shouting men
...
My trauma can still rise up
out of mundane encounters
...
e day I met Captain Fuller, more
than thirty years had passed since I’d been liberated from the
concentration camps of the Holocaust
...
What happened can never be forgotten and can never be
changed
...
I can be miserable, or I can be hopeful—I can be depressed,
or I can be happy
...
I’m here, this is now, I have learned to tell myself, over and
over, until the panicky feeling begins to ease
...
Don’t dwell on it
...
So we run from past traumas and hardships or from current
discomfort or con ict
...
In my early immigrant years in Baltimore in the 1950s, I
didn’t even know how to pronounce Auschwitz in English
...
I
didn’t want anyone’s pity
...

I just wanted to be a Yankee doodle dandy
...
To hide from the past
...
I hadn’t yet discovered that my silence and my desire
for acceptance, both founded in fear, were ways of running away from
myself—that in choosing not to face the past and myself directly,
decades aer my literal imprisonment had ended, I was still choosing
not to be free
...

e catatonic Army captain sitting immobile on my couch
reminded me of what I had eventually discovered: that when we force
our truths and stories into hiding, secrets can become their own
trauma, their own prison
...
When we don’t allow ourselves to grieve our
losses, wounds, and disappointments, we are doomed to keep reliving
them
...
Freedom
means we muster the courage to dismantle the prison, brick by brick
...
is we can’t change
...
But so many of us remain stuck in a trauma or grief, unable to
experience our lives fully
...

At Kennedy International Airport recently, waiting for my ight
home to San Diego, I sat and studied the faces of every passing
stranger
...
I saw boredom, fury, tension,

worry, confusion, discouragement, disappointment, sadness, and, most
troubling of all, emptiness
...
Even the dullest moments of our lives are opportunities to
experience hope, buoyancy, happiness
...
As is
painful life, and stressful life
...
No, I would say hunger
...
We are hungry for approval, attention, affection
...

My own search for freedom and my years of experience as a
licensed clinical psychologist have taught me that suffering is universal
...
ere is a difference between victimization
and victimhood
...
At some point we will suffer some kind of affliction
or calamity or abuse, caused by circumstances or people or institutions
over which we have little or no control
...
And this is
victimization
...
It’s the neighborhood bully,
the boss who rages, the spouse who hits, the lover who cheats, the
discriminatory law, the accident that lands you in the hospital
...
No one can make
you a victim but you
...
We develop
a victim’s mind—a way of thinking and being that is rigid, blaming,
pessimistic, stuck in the past, unforgiving, punitive, and without
healthy limits or boundaries
...


I want to make one thing very clear
...
I could never blame those who were sent right to the gas
chambers or who died in their cot, or even those who ran into the
electric barbed wire fence
...
I live to guide others to a
position of empowerment in the face of all of life’s hardships
...
ere’s
nothing that makes my pain worse or better than yours, no graph on
which we can plot the relative importance of one sorrow versus
another
...
” is kind of
comparison can lead us to minimize or diminish our own suffering
...
If we discount our pain, or punish ourselves for
feeling lost or isolated or scared about the challenges in our lives,
however insignificant these challenges may seem to someone else, then
we’re still choosing to be victims
...
We’re
judging ourselves
...
” I want you to hear my story and say, “If
she can do it, then so can I!”
One morning I saw two patients back to back, both mothers in their
forties
...

She spent most of her visit crying, asking how God could take her
child’s life
...

She was angry, she was grieving, and she wasn’t at all sure that she
could survive the hurt
...
She, too, spent much of the hour crying
...
On the surface, her problem seemed petty,
especially compared to my previous patient’s anguish over her dying
child
...

Oen, the little upsets in our lives are emblematic of the larger losses;
the seemingly insignificant worries are representative of greater pain
...
Both women were responding to a situation they couldn’t
control in which their expectations had been upended
...
Each woman’s pain was real
...
Both
women deserved my compassion
...
Both
women, like all of us, had choices in attitude and action that could
move them from victim to survivor even if the circumstances they were
dealing with didn’t change
...
I would love to help you experience freedom from
the past, freedom from failures and fears, freedom from anger and
mistakes, freedom from regret and unresolved grief—and the freedom
to enjoy the full, rich feast of life
...
But we can choose to be free, to escape the past, no matter
what befalls us, and to embrace the possible
...

Like the challah my mother used to make for our Friday night
meal, this book has three strands: my story of survival, my story of
healing myself, and the stories of the precious people I’ve had the
privilege of guiding to freedom
...
e stories about patients accurately re ect the core
of their experiences, but I have changed all names and identifying
details and in some instances created composites from patients
working through similar challenges
...


CHAPTER 1

The Four Questions

If I could distill my entire life into one moment, into one still image, it
is this: three women in dark wool coats wait, arms linked, in a barren
yard
...
ey’ve got dust on their shoes
...

e three women are my mother, my sister Magda, and me
...
We don’t know that
...
Or we are too weary even to speculate about what is ahead
...
And yet only hindsight can give it this
meaning
...
Why
does memory give me the back of my mother’s head but not her face?
Her long hair is intricately braided and clipped on top of her head
...
My dark hair is
tucked under a scarf
...
It is impossible to discern if we are the ones who
keep our mother upright, or if it is the other way around, her strength
the pillar that supports Magda and me
...
For
seven decades I have returned again and again to this image of the
three of us
...
As though I can regain the life that
precedes this moment, the life that precedes loss
...

I have returned so that I can rest a little longer in this time when
our arms are joined and we belong to one another
...
e dust holding to the bottoms of our coats
...

My sister
...

* * *
Our childhood memories are oen fragments, brief moments or
encounters, which together form the scrapbook of our life
...

Even before the moment of our separation, my most intimate
memory of my mother, though I treasure it, is full of sorrow and loss
...
“Read to me,” she
says, and I fetch the worn copy of Gone with the Wind from her
bedside table
...
Now we have
begun again
...
It’s in a man’s
handwriting, but not my father’s
...

We sit in straight-backed chairs near the woodstove
...
“I’m glad
you have brains because you have no looks,” she has told me more
than once, a compliment and a criticism intertwined
...
But I savor this time
...
I sink into the words and the story and the
feeling of being alone in a world with her
...
“As God is my witness,” Scarlett says, “ I’m never going to
be hungry again
...
I want to climb into her lap
...
I want her to touch her lips to my hair
...
“America, now that would be a place to see
...
All the smells of my mother’s kitchen
are mixed up for me with the drama of hunger and feast—always,
even in the feast, that longing
...

We sit with the fire between us
...

Now that she is talking, I am afraid to move, afraid she won’t
continue if I do
...
One morning I woke up because my father was
calling to me, ‘Ilonka, wake up your mother, she hasn’t made breakfast
yet or laid out my clothes
...
But she wasn’t moving
...
”
She has never told me this before
...
I also want to look away
...

“When they buried her that aernoon, I thought they had put her
in the ground alive
...
So that’s what I did
...
I wait for the lesson at the end, or
the reassurance
...
She bends to sweep the ash under
the stove
...
I can smell my
father’s tobacco even before I hear the jangle of his keys
...
“I won again,” he
boasts
...
Tonight he’s brought a petit four laced in pink
icing
...

She is standing now, on her way from the re to the sink
...
He pulls her in for an embrace,
one hand on her back, one teasing at her breast
...

“I’m a disappointment to your mother,” my father half whispers to
me as we leave the kitchen
...
Yet the bitterness in his voice scares me
...

I’m just a tailor
...
”
My father’s defeated tone confuses me
...
Playful, smiling, he always seems comfortable
and alive
...
He goes out with his many friends
...
His tailor shop has won two
gold medals
...

He is a master of couture
...
But he had wanted to be a doctor, not a tailor, a dream
his father had discouraged, and every once in a while his

disappointment in himself surfaces
...
“You’re the best
tailor!”
“And you’re going to be the best-dressed lady in Košice,” he tells
me, patting my head
...
”
He seems to have remembered himself
...
We reach the door to the
bedroom I share with Magda and our middle sister, Klara, where I can
picture Magda pretending to do homework and Klara wiping rosin
dust off her violin
...

“I wanted you to be a boy, you know,” my father says
...

But now you’re the only one I can talk to
...

I love my father’s attention
...
As though my worthiness of their love has less to do with
me and more to do with their loneliness
...

“Good night, Dicuka,” my father says at last
...
Ditzu-ka
...
“Tell your sisters it’s time for lights out
...
ey made it up when I was three
and one of my eyes became crossed in a botched medical procedure
...
“You’ll never nd a
husband
...
I
haven’t yet learned that the problem isn’t that my sisters taunt me with
a mean song; the problem is that I believe them
...
I never tell

people, “I am Edie
...
She mastered the
Mendelssohn violin concerto when she was ve
...

But tonight I have special knowledge
...
I am so certain of the privileged
nature of this information that it doesn’t occur to me that for my
sisters this is old news, that I am the last and not the first to know
...
She is een, busty, with sensual lips,
wavy hair
...
When we were younger,
she showed me how to drop grapes out of our bedroom window into
the coffee cups of the patrons sitting on the patio below
...
My girlfriend and I will sashay up to boys at school or on the
street
...
ey will come, they will always come,
sometimes giddy, sometimes shy, sometimes swaggering with
expectation
...

“Don’t tease so much,” Klara snaps at Magda now
...
“You know that picture
above the piano?” she says to me
...
” I know the picture she’s talking about
...
“Help me, help me,” our mother
moans up at the portrait as she dusts the piano, sweeps the oor
...
And I’m disappointed that my information gives
me no special status with my sisters
...
It doesn’t
occur to me that Magda might tire of being the clown, that Klara
might resent being the prodigy
...
Magda and I have to work
at getting something we are certain there will never be enough of;
Klara has to worry that at any moment she might make a fatal mistake
and lose it all
...
It’s not until much later that I realize the cost of her
extraordinary talent: she gave up being a child
...
Instead she stood in front of an open window to practice
violin, not able to enjoy her creative genius unless she could summon
an audience of passersby to witness it
...
e distance
between our parents, the sad things they have each confessed to me,
remind me that I have never seen them dressed up to go out together
...
ough she denies my concern, I
think I see a recognition in her eyes
...
It will take me years to learn what my sisters must
already know, that what we call love is oen something more
conditional—the reward for a performance, what you settle for
...
I
have been studying ballet since I was ve years old, since my mother
intuited that I wasn’t a musician, that I had other gis
...
Our ballet master reminded us that strength and
exibility are inseparable—for one muscle to ex, another must open;
to achieve length and limberness, we have to hold our cores strong
...
Down I go, spine
straight, abdominal muscles tight, legs stretching apart
...
I picture my body expanding like
the strings on my sister’s violin, nding the exact place of tautness that

makes the whole instrument ring
...
I am here
...
“Brava!” My ballet master claps
...
” He
lis me off the ground and over his head
...
I feel like pure light
...
” It will take
me years to really understand what he means
...
As my muscles stretch
and strengthen, every movement, every pose seems to call out: I am, I
am, I am
...
I am somebody
...
But it’s haunted too
...
It’s the place where I go searching for the answer to
the unanswerable question: Why did I survive?
I am seven years old, and my parents are hosting a dinner party
...
From the
kitchen I hear them joke, “We could have saved that one
...
ey had a daughter who played piano and a daughter who
played violin
...
is is the way we misinterpret the facts of our
lives, the way we assume and don’t check it out, the way we invent a
story to tell ourselves, reinforcing the very thing in us we already
believe
...
I will test the
theory that I am dispensable, invisible
...
Instead of going to school, I take the trolley to
my grandparents’ house
...
ey engage in a continuous war

with my mother on Magda’s behalf, hiding cookies in my sister’s
dresser drawer
...
ey hold hands, something my own parents never do
...

ey are comfort—the smell of brisket and baked beans, of sweet
bread, of cholent, a rich stew that my grandmother brings to the
bakery to cook on Sabbath, when Orthodox practice does not permit
her to use her own oven
...
It is a wonderful morning
...
But then the doorbell rings
...
A moment later he rushes into the
kitchen
...

“Hide, Dicuka!” he yells
...

What bothers me the most is the look on my mother’s face when
she sees me in my grandparents’ kitchen
...
As though I am not who she wants or
expects me to be
...
Dr
...
On the train
to Budapest I eat chocolate and enjoy my mother’s exclusive attention
...
Klein is a celebrity, my mother says, the rst to perform eye
surgery without anesthetic
...
It has never occurred to me that the surgery will hurt
...
My mother and her relatives, who
have connected us to the celebrated Dr
...
Worse than the pain, which is huge and limitless, is
the feeling of the people who love me restraining me so that I cannot

move
...

I am happiest when I am alone, when I can retreat into my inner
world
...
en invention
takes hold, and I am off and away in a new dance of my own, one in
which I imagine my parents meeting
...
My
father does a slapstick double take when he sees my mother walk into
the room
...
I make my whole body
arc into a joyful laugh
...

When I get to school, the tuition money my father gave me to cover
an entire quarter of school is gone
...
I check every pocket and crease of my clothing, but it is
gone
...

At home he can’t look at me as he raises his sts
...
He doesn’t say a word to me when he
is done
...
And then I wish my father dead
...

Maybe every life is a study of the things we don’t have but wish we
did, and the things we have but wish we didn’t
...
Not: Why did I live? But: What is mine to do
with the life I’ve been given?

* * *
My family’s ordinary human dramas were complicated by borders, by
wars
...
Czechoslovakia was cobbled together from agrarian
Slovakia, my family’s region, which was ethnically Hungarian and
Slovak; the more industrial regions of Moravia and Bohemia, which
were ethnically Czech; and Subcarpathian Rus’, a region that is now
part of Ukraine
...
And my family
became double minorities
...

ough Jews had lived in Slovakia since the eleventh century, it
wasn’t until 1840 that Jews were permitted to settle in Kassa
...
Yet by the turn of the
century, Kassa had become one of Europe’s largest Jewish
communities
...
We weren’t segregated,
and we enjoyed plenty of educational, professional, and cultural
opportunities
...

Anti-Semitism wasn’t a Nazi invention
...
It was difficult to nd a sense of identity and belonging
...

My mother stands on our balcony at Andrássy Palace, an old
building that has been carved into single-family apartments
...
She’s not cleaning; she’s
celebrating
...
I understand my parents’ excitement and pride
...
I perform a dance
...
When I
do the high kick by the river, Horthy applauds
...
He embraces me
...

We are still years away from curfews and discriminatory laws, but
Horthy’s parade is the starting point of all that will come
...
We are so happy to speak our native tongue, to be accepted as
Hungarians—but that acceptance depends on our assimilation
...

“It’s best not to let on you’re Jewish,” my sister Magda warns me
...
”
Magda is the rstborn; she reports the world to me
...
In 1939, the year
that Nazi Germany invades Poland, the Hungarian Nazis—the
nyilas—occupy the apartment below ours in Andrássy Palace
...
ey evict us
...
e apartment is available
because its former occupants, another Jewish family, have le for
South America
...

My father’s sister Matilda has been gone for years already
...
Her life in America seems more circumscribed than
ours
...

Even in 1940, when I’m thirteen, and the nyilas begin to round up
the Jewish men of Kassa and send them to a forced labor camp, the
war feels far away from us
...
Not at rst
...
If we don’t pay attention, then we can continue
our lives unnoticed
...
We
can make ourselves invisible to harm
...
She dashes three blocks to the safety of our grandparents’
house, only to find half of it gone
...
But their
landlady didn’t
...
We’re told the Russians are responsible for the rubble
and death
...
We are
lucky and vulnerable in the same instant
...

Destruction and absence—these become facts
...
We invade Russia
...
e trick is
to hide the star, to let your coat cover it
...

What is my unpardonable sin? My mother is always near the radio
...
I know that his POW
experience—his trauma, though I don’t know to call it that—has
something to do with his eating pork, with his distance from religion
...
But the war, this war, is still
elsewhere
...

Aer school, I spend ve hours at the ballet studio, and I begin to
study gymnastics too
...

I join a book club, a group made up of girls from my private
gymnasium and students from a nearby private boys’ school
...

We talk about Zweig’s way of writing about history from the inside,
from the mind of one person
...
I see him looking closely at me every
time I speak
...
I imagine
Versailles
...
I imagine meeting
Eric there
...
I see him
notice me, and I wonder, What would our children look like? Would
they have freckles too? Eric approaches me aer the discussion
...

Our relationship holds weight and substance from the start
...
We talk about Palestine (he is a devoted Zionist)
...
is is love in the face of war
...

We stand in line at the cinema
...
It’s an
American lm, starring Bette Davis
...
Bette Davis plays an unmarried daughter tyrannized by
her controlling mother
...
Eric sees it as a
political metaphor about self-determination and self-worth
...


e battles in my family, the front with Russia closing in—we never
know what is coming next
...
Each day, as our freedom and
choices become more and more restricted, we plan our future
...
Plans, passion, promise
...
No one else
knows what will come to pass, but we do
...
We go to the river one August day in 1943
...
I imagine showing our children the picture one day
...

When I come home that day, my father is gone
...
He is a tailor, he is apolitical
...
Is it simply because
she doesn’t know? Or is she protecting me? Or herself? She doesn’t
talk openly about her worries, but in the long months that my father is
away, I can feel how sad and scared she is
...
She gets migraines
...
He owns a store across the
street from our apartment, and I sit long hours in his store just to be
near his comforting presence
...
She watches
him stagger under the weight of a table he has to he from place to
place
...
I don’t know what
this image means
...
I
have two images of my father: one, as I have known him my entire

life, cigarette hanging out of his mouth, tape measure around his neck,
chalk in his hand for marking a pattern onto expensive cloth, his eyes
twinkling, ready to burst into song, about to tell a joke
...

On my sixteenth birthday, I stay home from school with a cold, and
Eric comes to our apartment to deliver sixteen roses and my rst sweet
kiss
...
What can I hold on to? What lasts?
I give the picture Eric took of me on the riverbank to a friend
...
For safekeeping? I had no premonition that I would
be gone soon, well before my next birthday
...

Sometime in early spring, aer seven or eight months at the work
camp, my father returns
...
at’s what we think
...
He doesn’t talk about
where he has been
...
I
feel like myself again
...
I’m not the daughter afraid for her family
...
I don’t have Magda’s
looks, or Klara’s fame, but I have my lithe and expressive body, the
budding existence of which is the only one true thing I need
...
e best of us in my
gymnastics class have formed an Olympic training team
...

I close my eyes and stretch my arms and torso forward across my

legs
...
We are half in love with her
...
It’s hero worship
...
We are jealous of what we don’t know of her life
...
If I can manage to absorb all she has to teach me, and if I can
fulfill her trust in me, then great things lie in store
...
“A word, please
...

I look at her expectantly
...
Maybe she would like me to lead the team in more
stretching exercises at the end of practice today
...
I’m ready to say yes before she has even
asked
...
She studies my face
and then looks away toward the window where the dropping sun
blazes in
...
Klara studies at the conservatory in Budapest
now
...
It’s too early in the week for them to be traveling home,
but that is the only tragedy I can think of
...

“Your family is ne
...
“Edith
...
But I must be the one to tell you that your place on
the Olympic training team will go to someone else
...
I feel foreign in my own skin
...
“I don’t understand
...
“e simple truth is that because of
your background, you are no longer qualified
...
“If someone spits at you, spit
back,” my father has instructed me
...
” I consider
spitting on my coach
...
I won’t accept it
...

“I’m sorry, Editke,” she says
...
I still want you at the
studio
...
” Again, her ngers on my back
...
Within weeks, my
very life will be on the line
...

* * *
In the days that follow my expulsion from the Olympic training team, I
plot my revenge
...
I will show my coach that I am the best
...
e best trainer
...
On the day that my mother and Klara are due back
from Budapest, I cartwheel my way down the red-carpeted hall
toward our apartment, imagining my replacement as my understudy,
myself the headlining star
...
Magda’s chopping apples
for the charoset
...
ey glower over their
work, barely registering my arrival
...
ey
ght all the time, and when they’re not ghting they treat each other
as though they are already in a face-off
...
“Where’s
Klarie?” I ask, swiping chopped walnuts from a bowl
...
My mother slams her bowl onto the
counter
...
Has
she really chosen music over us? Or was she not allowed to miss class
for a holiday that none of her fellow students celebrates? But I don’t
ask
...
I retreat to the bedroom that we all share,
my parents and Magda and me
...
Magda and I weren’t prodigies like Klara,
but we still had creative passions that our parents recognized and
nurtured
...

“Dance, Dicuka!” my mother would say
...
en Klara, the star attraction, would play her violin and my
mother would look transformed
...
Before the meal, Magda tries to cheer me up by reminding me

of seders past when I would stuff socks in my bra to impress Klara,
wanting to show her that I’d become a woman while she was away
...
At the seder table she continues the antics, splashing her ngers
around in the glass of wine we’ve set for Prophet Elijah, as is the
custom
...
On any other night our
father might laugh, despite himself
...
But tonight our father is
too distracted to notice, and our mother is too distraught by Klara’s
absence to chastise Magda
...
In some deep part of myself I know how badly we need
protection now
...
He isn’t even pretending
to lead the seder anymore
...
“Ilona?”
“I tried the consulate,” my mother says
...

“Tell me again what Klara said
...

“Again
...
Klara had
called her hotel at four that morning
...
Klara’s professor
forbade her to return home to Kassa
...

“Ilona, why did you come home?” my father moans
...
“What about all that we’ve
worked for here? We should just leave it? And if you three couldn’t

make it to Budapest? You want me to live with that?”
I don’t realize that they are terri ed
...
Here’s what you did
...
Here’s what you did
...
Later I’ll learn that
this isn’t just their usual quarreling, that there’s a history and a weight
to the dispute they are having now
...
ere is the Hungarian official who
approached my mother with fake papers for the whole family, urging
us to ee
...
Now they suffer with their regret, and they cover their
regret in blame
...

at is my job in the family
...
Whatever plans are being made
outside our door I can’t control
...
It is my job as the youngest child to ask the four questions
...
I know the text by heart
...

At the end of the meal, my father circles the table, kissing each of
us on the head
...
Why is this night different from all other
nights? Before dawn breaks, we’ll know
...
ey pound on the door, they yell
...
My mouth still tastes of seder wine
...
We’re allowed one
suitcase for all four of us
...
Before I know it she is dressed and reaching high into the
closet for the little box that I know holds Klara’s caul, the piece of
amniotic sac that covered her head and face like a helmet when she
was born
...
My mother doesn’t trust the box to the
suitcase—she tucks it deep into the pocket of her coat, a good luck
totem
...

“Hurry, Dicu,” she urges me
...
Get dressed
...
ere’s no reprieve from her teasing
...
In fact, she will keep us alive for two weeks on the supplies she
thinks to carry with us now—some our, some chicken fat
...
“Get blankets,” my mother calls to him
...
ank goodness my mother is more
practical
...
As God is my witness, I imagine her thinking now, as she packs,
I’m never going to be hungry again
...
Or at least I want her to call to me
...
To
tell me not to worry
...

e soldiers stomp their boots, knock chairs over with their guns
...
Hurry
...
She would save
Klara before she would save me
...
I’ll have to find my own sweetness, my own luck
...
I trace the pleats with my
ngers
...
I will wear this dress so
that his arms can once again encircle me
...
If I shiver, it will be a badge
of hope, a signal of my trust in something deeper, better
...
I can feel him
thinking of me
...
I close my eyes and cup my elbows with my hands, allowing the
afterglow of that flash of love and hope to keep me warm
...
“Where are the
bathrooms?” one of the soldiers shouts at Magda
...
I’ve never known her to be
afraid
...
Authority gures have never held any power

over her
...
“Elefánt,” her math teacher, a very short man,
reprimanded her one day, calling her by our last name
...
“Oh, are you there?” she said
...
” But today the men hold guns
...
She points meekly down the hall
toward the bathroom door
...
He
holds a gun
...
at every
moment harbors a potential for violence
...
Doing what you’re told might not save you
...
Now
...
My
mother closes the suitcase and my father lis it
...
I’m next, then Magda
...
He
stands facing the door, suitcase in his hand, looking muddled, a
midnight traveler patting down his pockets for his keys
...

“Go ahead,” he says, “take a last look
...
”
My father gazes at the dark space
...
en the soldier kicks him in the knee and my
father hobbles toward us, toward the wagon where the other families
wait
...
Eric, I pray, wherever we are going,
help me find you Don’t forget our future
...
Magda
doesn’t say a word as we sit side by side on the bare board seats
...


* * *
Just as daylight breaks, the wagon pulls up alongside the Jakab brick
factory at the edge of town, and we are herded inside
...
Most of the
nearly twelve thousand Jews imprisoned here will sleep without a roof
over their heads
...
We will cover
ourselves with our coats and shiver through the spring chill
...
ere is no running water here
...
At rst
the rations, combined with the pancakes my mother makes from the
scraps she brought from home, are enough to feed us, but aer only a
few days the hunger pains become a constant cramping throb
...
“What will I do
when my milk is gone?” she moans to us
...
”
ere are two sides to the camp, on either side of a street
...
We learn that all of
Kassa’s Jews are being held here at the brick factory
...
But my
grandparents, whose home was a thirty-minute walk from our
apartment, are not on our side of the camp
...
We are not supposed to cross over
...
I walk
the wall-less barracks, quietly repeating their names
...
I tell myself
that it is only a matter of time and perseverance
...

I don’t find my grandparents
...

And then one aernoon when the water carts arrive and the

crowds rush to scoop a little pail of it, he spies me sitting alone,
guarding my family’s coats
...

I touch the suede belt of my silk dress, praising it for its good luck
...
Sometimes we speculate
about what will befall us
...
We don’t know that the rumor was
started by the Hungarian police and nyilas dishing out false hope
...
No such place exists
...
Aer the war
...
We will go to the university
...

We will continue the salons and book club we began at school
...

From inside the brick factory we can hear the streetcars trundle
past
...
How easy it could be to jump aboard
...
A
girl only a little older than me tries to run
...
My parents don’t say a word to me
or Magda about her death
...
“Get a block of sugar and hold on to it
...
” One day we hear that my
grandparents have been sent away in one of the rst transports to
leave the factory
...
I kiss Eric
good night and trust that his lips are the sweetness I can count on
...
I scramble to nd

someone who can pass a message to Eric
...
She and my father have written a goodbye letter to Klara, but
there is no way to send it
...
e silk of my dress brushes
against my legs as we surge and stop and surge and stop, three
thousand of us marched toward the factory gates, pressed into a long
row of waiting trucks
...
Just before the
truck pulls away, I hear my name
...
He’s calling through the
slats of the truck
...

“I’m here!” I call as the engine starts
...

“I’ll never forget your eyes,” he says
...
”
I repeat those sentences ceaselessly as we board a crowded car at
the train station
...
If I survive today, then I can
show him my eyes, I can show him my hands
...
If I survive today … If I survive today, tomorrow I’ll be
free
...
It’s not a passenger
train; it’s for transporting livestock or freight
...

ere are a hundred of us in one car
...
e
uncertainty makes the moments stretch
...
ere is one loaf of bread
for eight people to share
...
One bucket for our
bodily waste
...
People die on the way
...
I see a father give something to his daughter, a packet
of pills
...
Occasionally the
train stops and a few people from each car are ordered to get out to
fetch water
...
“We’re in Poland,” she tells

us when she returns
...
When she
went for water, a man out in his eld had yelled a greeting to her in
Polish and in German, telling her the name of the town and gesturing
frantically, drawing his nger across his neck
...

e train moves on and on
...

They don’t speak
...
My father’s beard is growing
in gray
...
I beg him
to shave
...
It’s just a gut feeling,
just a girl missing the father she knows, longing for him to be the bon
vivant again, the debonair irt, the ladies’ man
...
”
But when I kiss my father’s cheek and say, “Papa, please shave,” he
answers me with anger
...
“What for? What for?”
I’m ashamed that I’ve said the wrong thing and made him annoyed
with me
...
I lean against my mother for comfort
...

My mother doesn’t say much
...
She
doesn’t wish to be dead
...

“Dicuka,” she says into the dark one night, “listen
...
We don’t know what’s going to happen
...
”
I fall into another dream of Eric
...

* * *
ey open the cattle car doors and the bright May sun slashes in
...
We rush toward the air and the light
...
Aer several days of the ceaseless motion of the
train, it’s hard to stand upright on rm ground
...
I see the crowded dark of winter coats amassed on a
narrow stretch of dirt
...
I see the
sign: ARBEIT MACHT FREI
...
My father is suddenly cheerful
...
” He looks as though he
would dance if the platform weren’t so crowded
...
e rumors we heard at the brick
factory must be true
...
I search for the ripple
of nearby elds and imagine Eric’s lean body across from me, bending
to tend a crop
...
In the
distance, a few trees and chimneys break the at plane of this barren
place
...
Nobody explains anything
...
Go here
...
e Nazis point and
shove
...
I see my father wave
to us
...
I wonder where we’ll sleep tonight
...

My mother and Magda and I stand together in a long line of women
and children
...
We approach the man who with a
conductor’s wave of a nger will deliver us to our fates
...
Josef Mengele, the infamous Angel of
Death
...
When we’ve drawn nearer, I can see a boyish
ash of gapped teeth when he grins
...


“If you’re over fourteen and under forty, stay in this line,” another
officer says
...
” A long line of the elderly and
children and mothers holding babies branches off to the le
...
Magda and I squeeze our mother between us
...
Dr
...
He points my mother to
the le
...
He grabs my shoulder
...
“She’s just going to take a
shower
...

We don’t know the meaning of le versus right
...
“What will happen to us?” We’re
marched to a different part of the sparse campus
...
Some look bright, almost giddy, glad to be
breathing fresh air and enjoying the sun on their skin aer the
relentless stench and claustrophobic dark of the train
...
Fear circulates among us, but curiosity too
...
Women in striped
dresses stand around us
...
I’ve unbuttoned my coat in the steady sun and one of
the girls in a striped dress eyes my blue silk
...

“Well, look at you,” she says in Polish
...
Before I realize what’s happening, she reaches for the
tiny coral earrings set in gold that, in keeping with Hungarian custom,
have been in my ears since birth
...

She pockets the earrings
...
As
ever, I want to belong
...
“Why did you do that?” I say
...
”

“I was rotting here while you were free, going to school, going to
the theater,” she says
...
She’s thin, but sturdy
...
She could be a dancer
...
“When will I see my mother?”
I ask her
...
”
She gives me a cold, sharp stare
...

ere is nothing but rage
...
“Your mother is burning in there,”
she says
...
”

CHAPTER 3

Dancing in Hell

“All your ecstasy in life is going to come from the inside,” my ballet
master had told me
...
Until
Auschwitz
...
“e soul never dies,” she says
...
But I am in shock
...
I can’t think about the
incomprehensible things that are happening, that have already
happened
...
I can’t fully
grasp that she is gone
...
I can’t even grieve
...
It will take all of my attention to survive the next minute, the
next breath
...
I will survive by
attaching myself to her as though I am her shadow
...
We are
robbed of our hair
...
Taunts from the kapos and SS officers swarm us like
arrows grazing our bare, wet skin
...
I’m sure the disgust with which they glare at us could tear my
skin, split my ribs
...
Once I thought that Eric would be the rst man to see
me naked
...

Have they already made me something less than human? Will I ever
resemble the girl I was? I will never forget your eyes, your hands
...


I turn to my sister, who has fallen into her own shocked silence,
who has managed in each chaotic dash from place to place, in every
crowded line, not to leave my side
...
She
holds in her hands her shorn locks, thick strands of her ruined hair
...
She is
so near that we are almost touching, and yet I long for her
...

e con dent, sexy girl with all the jokes
...
She searches for herself in her ragged
clumps of hair
...
Murder, we’ve just
learned, is efficient here
...
But there seems to be no system
in place for distributing the uniforms for which we’ve been waiting
most of the day
...
e scrutiny they give our bodies doesn’t signal our
value, it signi es only the degree to which we have been forgotten by
the world
...
But this, too, the interminable
waiting, the complete absence of reason, must be part of the design
...
“How do I look?” she asks
...
”
The truth? She looks like a mangy dog
...
I can’t tell
her this, of course, but any lie would hurt too much and so I must nd
an impossible answer, a truth that doesn’t wound
...
ere aren’t mirrors
here
...
And so I tell
her the one true thing that’s mine to say
...
I never noticed
them when they were covered up by all that hair
...

“Thank you,” she whispers
...
Words can’t give shape to this new reality
...

To my papa’s face overgrown with shadow
...
To the transformation
of my parents into smoke
...
I must assume my
father is dead too
...

ey bring the uniforms—gray, ill- tting dresses made of scratchy
cotton and wool
...
ey herd us to the gloomy,
primitive barracks where we will sleep on tiered shelves, six to a board
...
e kapo, the young woman who stole my earrings,
assigns us bunks and explains the rules
...
ere is the bucket—our nighttime bathroom
...
We
discover there’s more room if we alternate heads and feet
...
We work out a system for rolling together, coordinating our
turns
...
“Don’t lose it,”
she warns
...
” In the darkening
barracks, we stand waiting for the next command
...
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
...
But the violinist she mentions is Viennese
...
e
kapo pulls herself straight as the door rattles open
...
I
know it’s him, the way he smiles with his lips parted, the gap between
his front teeth
...
Mengele, we learn
...
He trawls among the barracks in the evenings,
searching for talented inmates to entertain him
...
We
stand still, backs to the wooden bunks that edge the room
...
Magda ever so subtly grazes my hand with hers
...

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
...
I don’t know where to put my eyes
...
e orchestra is assembled just outside
...
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
...
Does
the dance give her power, or does the dance strip it away?
“Little dancer,” Dr
...
” He directs the
musicians to begin playing
...
Mengele’s eyes bulge
at me
...
I know a routine to “e Blue Danube” that I can
dance in my sleep
...
“Dance!” he commands again,
and I feel my body start to move
...
Then the pirouette and turn
...
And up
...
He never takes his eyes off me, but he attends to his duties as

he watches
...
He discusses with the
other officer which ones of the hundred girls present will be killed
next
...

I dance
...
I am dancing in hell
...
I close my eyes
...
She spins in excitement and anticipation
...
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
...
I can hear the
violins swell
...
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
...
Dr
...
“e Blue Danube” fades,
and now I can hear Tchaikovsky’s Romeo and Juliet
...
I dance for my fans in
the audience
...
I dance for my
lover, Romeo, as he lis me high above the stage
...
I
dance for life
...
I will never know what miracle of grace allows me this
insight
...
I
can see that Dr
...
I am free in my mind,
which he can never be
...
He is more a prisoner than I am
...
I pray for him
...

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
...
I am grateful to have bread
...

* * *
In my rst weeks at Auschwitz I learn the rules of survival
...
For me, that someone is
Magda, that something is the hope that I will see Eric again tomorrow,
when I am free
...
I remember a fellow inmate who managed to
save a picture of herself from before internment, a picture in which she
had long hair
...
is awareness became a refuge that preserved her
will to live
...
ey just tossed us the coats, willy-nilly, with no attention to
size
...

Magda was lucky
...
It was so warm, so coveted
...
e coat she chose in its place was a imsy
little thing, barely to the knees, showing off plenty of chest
...
Feeling attractive gave her something inside, a sense of dignity,

more valuable to her than physical comfort
...
We
cooked all the time at Auschwitz
...
We’d wake at 4:00 A
...
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
...
We’d give one another cooking
lessons
...
How thin
the pancake must be
...
How many nuts
...
No, just one and a half
...

And when we fell onto our bunks at night and nally slept, we dreamt
of food then too
...
M
...
Today, a cut of pork hidden in newspaper
...
“What a role model you are,” my mother gripes,
“feeding a Jewish girl pork
...
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
...
For my mother,
food was as much about the artistry of creating it as it was about
enjoying the nished meal
...

Just as athletes and musicians can become better at their cra through
mental practice, we were barracks artists, always in the thick of
creating
...

One night we enact a beauty pageant in the barracks before bed
...

ere’s a Hungarian saying that beauty is all in the shoulders
...
She wins the pageant
...

“Here’s a better competition,” Magda says
...
Mere months ago I was working out for more than ve hours a
day in the studio
...
I could even pick him up and carry him
...
I used to
envy my mother’s round, inviting bosom and feel embarrassed by my
tiny breasts
...
I strut around
in the dark like a model
...

We can choose what the horror teaches us
...
Hostile
...
Or to hold on to the childlike part of
us, the lively and curious part, the part that is innocent
...
I pump her for information
...
“To belong to a man?” I’m not asking about sex, not
entirely
...
More so, the idea of daily
belonging
...
For a few minutes, as she talks, I see marriage not
as my parents lived it but as something luminous
...
It sounds like
love, whole love
...
But at Auschwitz, my mother’s voice rang in my ears with a
different signi cance
...
I’m smart
...
e words I heard inside my head made a tremendous
difference in my ability to maintain hope
...
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 innocent
...

I knew a girl at Auschwitz who was very ill and wasting away
...
But she surprised
me
...
At night she would collapse onto her
bunk, breathing in rasps
...

“I heard we’re going to be liberated by Christmas,” she said
...


en Christmas came, but our liberators did not
...
I believe that her inner voice of hope kept her alive, but
when she lost hope she wasn’t able to keep living
...
is is temporary, I’d tell myself
...

We were sent to the showers every day at Auschwitz, and every
shower was fraught with uncertainty
...
One day when I feel the water
falling down on us, I let out my breath
...
I’m not skin and bones yet
...
My arms and thighs and stomach are still taut with
my dancer muscles
...
We are university
students now, living in Budapest
...

His eyes leave the page and travel over my face
...
Just as I imagine liing my face to receive his
kiss, I realize how quiet the shower room has become
...
e man I fear above all others stands at the door
...
I stare at the oor, waiting for the
others to begin breathing again so that I know he is gone
...

“You!” he calls
...
”
I try to hear Eric’s voice more loudly than Mengele’s
...
I’ll never forget your hands
...

I follow
...
Breathe, breathe , I tell

myself
...
Water runs from my body onto the cold oor
...
I am too
terri ed to think, but little currents of impulse move through my body
like re exes
...
A high kick to the face
...
I hope that whatever he plans to do to
me will be over quickly
...

I face him as I inch forward, but I don’t see him
...
I feel his body as I near him
...
e taste of tin can on my tongue
...
His ngers work over his buttons
...
I think of my mama and her long, long hair
...

I’m naked with her murderer, but he can’t ever take her away
...
He inches
...

“Don’t move,” he orders as he opens the door
...
I don’t make a decision
...
e 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
...
It never
goes away
...
But in the meantime I
can keep myself alive inside
...
I
survived today
...


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
...
He was too late
...
By October, Horthy’s government fell to
the Nazis
...
ey were forcemarched two hundred miles to Austria
...

One winter morning, we stand in yet another line
...

We are to be tattooed
...
I roll up my sleeve
...
I am responding automatically, making the motions required of
me, so cold and hungry, so cold and hungry that I am almost numb
...
I can’t remember how I used to think
...
I have to trick myself into memory, catch myself
unawares
...
I dart my eyes
around to con rm that she’s still behind me
...
I’ve begun saving

my bread at the evening meal so we can share it in the morning
...
He
grabs my wrist and starts to prick, but then shoves me aside
...
He pushes me into a different
line
...
“is is the end
...
Someone ahead of
us in the line is praying
...
I think suddenly about the
difference between deadly and deadening
...
e
chimneys smoke and smoke
...
So
why care? Why invest? And yet, if this moment, this very one, is my
last on Earth, do I have to waste it in resignation and defeat? Must I
spend it as if I’m already dead?
“We never know what the lines mean,” I tell the girl nearest me
...
She’s been selected for a different line
...
We are of the few, the lucky
inmates who have not yet been completely cut off from our families
...
It is no exaggeration
to say that my sister lives for me
...
I don’t
know what the lines mean
...
Even if what lies ahead is death
...
Guards ring us
...
Time is slow and time is fast
...
I see her blue eyes
...
I am doing
cartwheels, hands to earth, feet to sky, around, around
...
He’s right side up
...
I expect a bullet any
second
...
He doesn’t raise his gun
...
I swear I see him
wink
...

In the few seconds that I hold his complete attention, Magda runs
across the yard into my line to join me
...

* * *
We’re herded across the icy yard toward the train platform where we
arrived six months before, where we parted from our father, where we
walked with our mother between us in the nal moments of her life
...
If wind is silence
...
My head teems with
questions and dread, but these thoughts are so enduring they don’t
feel like thoughts anymore
...

We’re just going to a place to work until the end of the war , we have
been told
...
As we stand there
waiting to climb the narrow ramp into the cattle car, the Russians are
approaching Poland from one side, the Americans from the other
...
e inmates we are leaving
behind, those who can survive one more month at Auschwitz, will
soon be free
...
A
soldier—Wehrmacht, not SS—puts his head in the door and speaks to
us in Hungarian
...
“No matter what they do,
remember to eat, because you might get free, maybe soon
...
Who reminds a starving person to eat?
But even in the dark of the cattle car, his face backlit by miles of

fence, miles of snow, I can tell that his eyes are kind
...

I lose track of the time we are in motion
...
Once I wake to my sister’s voice
...
“My teacher,” she explains
...
At Auschwitz, all the women with small children were gassed
from the start
...
Which is worse, I wonder, to be a child who has lost
her mother or a mother who has lost her child? When the door opens,
we’re in Germany
...
We’re housed in what must
be a children’s summer camp, with bunk beds and a kitchen where,
with scant provisions, we prepare our own meals
...
We wear
leather gloves
...
Even with the gloves on, the wheels
slice our hands
...

She is crying loudly
...
But she is weeping for Magda
...
“You play piano
...

“You’re lucky to be working now,” she says
...
”
In the kitchen that night we prepare our evening meal supervised
by guards
...
” It’s funny because we are alive
...
I peel potatoes for
our supper
...
I hide the potato skins in my underwear
...
When we li
them eagerly to our mouths with our aching hands, the skins are still
too hot to eat
...
We laugh, as I did every week at Auschwitz when
we were forced to donate our blood for transfusions for wounded
German soldiers
...
Good luck winning a war with my pacifist dancer’s blood! I’d
think
...
I couldn’t
defy my oppressors with a gun or a st
...
And there’s power in our laughter now
...
Our talk is sustenance
...
We debate,
singing the praises of home
...
But this is an unwinnable competition
...
It’s a feeling, as universal as it is speci c
...

* * *
Aer a few weeks at the thread factory, the SS come for us one
morning with striped dresses to replace our gray ones
...
But this time we are forced on top of the cars in our
striped uniforms, human decoys to discourage the British from
bombing the train
...

“From thread to bullets,” someone says
...

e wind on top of the boxcar is punishing, obliterating
...
Would I rather die by cold
or by re? Gas or gun? It happens all of a sudden
...
Smoke
...
e train stops and I jump
...
I run straight up the snowy hillside that hugs the tracks
toward a stand of thin trees, where I stop to scan the snow for my
sister, catch my breath
...
I don’t see
her running from the train
...
I can
see a heap of bodies by the side of the train
...

I have to choose
...
Escape into the forest
...

Freedom is that close, a matter of footsteps
...
Click: forest
...
I run back down the
hill
...
It’s Hava
...
In a nearby train car, men are eating
...
ey’re dressed in civilian
clothes, not in uniforms
...
German political
prisoners, we guess
...

They’re eating
...
Magda, the beautiful one, is bleeding
...
“You’re too cut up to irt
...
Instead of rejoicing, giving thanks that we are both
alive, that we have survived another fatal moment, I am furious at my
sister
...

Magda doesn’t respond to my insult
...
e guards circle in, shouting at us, prodding bodies with their
guns to make sure that those who aren’t moving are really dead
...

“You could have run,” Magda says
...


Within an hour, the ammunition has been reloaded into new train
cars and we’re on top again in our striped uniforms, the blood dried
on Magda’s chin
...
We have long since lost track of the
date, of time
...
As long as she is near, I have
everything I need
...
e snow begins to melt,
giving way to dead grass
...
Bombs fall,
sometimes close by
...
We stop in small towns
throughout Germany, moving south sometimes, moving east, forced to
work in factories along the way
...
I don’t count how many
of us remain
...
It’s not a death camp
...
e roadside ditches run red with blood from those shot in the
back or the chest—those who tried to run, those who couldn’t keep
up
...
Exhaustion
...
Fever
...
If the guards don’t
pull a trigger, the body does
...
We come to the crest of a hill
and see a farm, outbuildings, a pen for livestock
...
She runs toward the farm, weaving
between trees, hoping not to be spotted by the SS who have stopped to
smoke
...
It’s too early for
spring vegetables, but I would eat cow feed, I would eat dried-up stalk
...
I try
not to call attention to Magda with my gaze
...
A gun res
...
Someone has

spotted my sister
...
A few
more shots crack
...
Help me, help me
...
I’m talking to her the way she
used to pray to her mother’s portrait over the piano
...
e night I was born, Magda heard our
mother screaming, “Mother, help me!” en Magda heard the baby
cry—me—and our mother said, “You helped me
...
Mother, help us , I pray
...
She’s alive
...
And somehow, now, she
escapes detection
...

“ere were potatoes,” she says
...
”
I imagine biting into one like an apple
...
I would eat the dirt along with the starch, the
skin
...
It is
March, we learn
...
I’m burning with fever, shaking and weak
...
“You can’t call in sick
...
Why would it be any different
now? ere’s no infrastructure for killing here, no pipes laid, bricks
mortared for the purpose
...

Still, I can’t get up
...
ey’ll let us skip school and take us to the bakery
...
Somewhere in my head I know I
am delirious, but I can’t regain my senses
...
“Don’t move even a nger,” she

says
...
I lie
under the coat, pretending not to exist, anticipating the moment when
I will be discovered missing and a guard will come into the shed to
shoot me
...

I swirl into delirious sleep
...
It’s a familiar dream—I
have dreamt for nearly a year of being warm
...
Is the shed on
re? I am afraid to go to the door, afraid I won’t make it on my weak
legs, afraid that if I do I’ll give myself away
...

e whistle and blast
...
Where is the safest place? Even if I
could run, where would I go? I hear shouts
...

I am aware again of the space between me and my sister: I have
become an expert at measuring the space
...
Water and
wood
...
I see it from the shed door where I nally stand and
lean against the frame
...
For anyone who has lived through the bombing,
the chaos is a respite
...
I picture Magda pushing
out a window and dashing for the trees
...
Ready to run even as far as that to be free
...
I can slide back down to
the oor and never get up
...
To exist is such an
obligation
...
I relax into the fall
...
Already dead
...
I’ll
catch up
...
Now I’ll join her
...
“I’m
coming!” I call
...
Somehow she makes me understand: She has
crossed the burning bridge to return to me
...
”
* * *
It’s April now
...
Light stretches each day
...
How
sad, I think, that these children have been brainwashed to hate me
...
“I’m going
to kill a German mother
...
”
I have a different wish
...
In my revenge fantasy, the boy who
yells at us now—“Dirty Jew! Vermin!”—holds out a bouquet of roses
...
No reason at
all
...
I don’t tell Magda my fantasy
...
There’s no food again
...

“Dicuka,” Magda moans as we sink onto the wooden boards that
will be our bed, “soon it’s going to be the end for me
...
She is scaring me
...
She doesn’t talk like this
...
Maybe I’ve been a burden to her
...
“You’re not going to die,” I
tell her
...
”
“Oh, Dicuka,” she says, and rolls toward the wall
...
I’ll show her there’s hope
...
I’ll

revive her
...
Sometimes they’ll throw a scrap of food at us
just for the pleasure of seeing us grovel
...

“Please, please,” I beg
...
One soldier holds a wedge of
canned meat toward me and I lunge for it, but he puts it in his mouth
and they all laugh harder
...
Magda is asleep
...
e SS break
up their picnic to relieve themselves or to smoke, and I slip out a side
door
...
e
grass is damp and cool
...
I can taste the carrots as if I’ve already picked them,
crisp and earthy
...
I skin my knees a little
as I shimmy over the top and the bright spots of blood feel like fresh
air on my skin, like a good thing deep down surfacing
...
I
grab the carrot tops and pull, the sound like a seam ripping as the
earth releases the roots
...
Clumps of dirt
dangle from the roots
...
I scale the wall again, dirt raining
onto my knees
...
I have done a daring thing and it has
borne fruit
...
I jump to earth
again
...
A man stares down at me
...

He’s a soldier—Wehrmacht, not SS
...
How dare you? his eyes say
...
He
pushes me down to my knees
...
Please, please, please, please
...

Please help him to not kill me
...
e carrots knock against

my leg
...

Click
...
Worse than the fear of death is the feeling of being locked
in and powerless, of not knowing what will happen in the next breath
...
He uses the butt of his gun to shove me inside
...
I
hold the carrots folded in my dress
...
I have to put the carrot in her palm
before she’ll open her eyes
...
When she thanks me, she cries
...
Time to march again
...
ey have wilted
...
e
drooping, browning carrot tops are proof of a secret power
...
I shouldn’t have survived, but I
did
...
ey aren’t the only kind of
governance
...

We are skeletal
...
And yet the carrots make me
feel strong
...
I sing the chant in
my head
...
I’m still singing to myself
...
e SS guard shouts in
German, and another man shouts back, pushing his way into the
room

---