The Choice Read online

  I can smell manure and apple blossoms and German tobacco. The grass is damp and cool. On the other side of a stucco fence I see a garden: small lettuce heads, vines of beans, the feathery green plumes of carrot tops. I can taste the carrots as if I’ve already picked them, crisp and earthy. Climbing the wall isn’t hard. 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’m giddy. I grab the carrot tops and pull, the sound like a seam ripping as the earth releases the roots. They’re heavy in my hands. Clumps of dirt dangle from the roots. Even the dirt smells like a feast—like seeds—every possible thing contained there. I scale the wall again, dirt raining onto my knees. I picture Magda’s face as she bites into the first fresh vegetable we’ve eaten in a year. I have done a daring thing and it has borne fruit. This is what I want Magda to see, more than a meal, more than nutrients dissolving into her blood: simply, hope. I jump to earth again.

  But I’m not alone. A man stares down at me. He clutches a gun. He’s a soldier—Wehrmacht, not SS. Worse than the gun are his eyes, punitive eyes. How dare you? his eyes say. I’ll teach you to obey. He pushes me down to my knees. He cocks the gun and points it at my chest. Please, please, please, please. I pray like I did with Mengele. Please help him to not kill me. I’m shivering. The carrots knock against my leg. He puts the gun down for a brief second, then raises it again. Click. 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 yanks me to my feet and turns me toward the building where Magda sleeps. He uses the butt of his gun to shove me inside.

  “Pissing,” he says to the guard inside, and they chuckle crassly. I hold the carrots folded in my dress.

  Magda won’t wake up at first. I have to put the carrot in her palm before she’ll open her eyes. She eats so quickly that she bites the inside of her cheek. When she thanks me, she cries.

  * * *

  The SS shout us awake in the morning. Time to march again. I am starving and hollow and I think I must have dreamt the carrots, but Magda shows me a handful of greens she has tucked in a pocket for later. They have wilted. They’re scraps that in a former life we would have thrown away or fed to the goose in the attic, but now they appear enchanted, like a pot in a fairy tale that magically fills with gold. The drooping, browning carrot tops are proof of a secret power. I shouldn’t have risked picking them, but I did. I shouldn’t have survived, but I did. The “shoulds” aren’t important. They aren’t the only kind of governance. There’s a different principle, a different authority at work. We are skeletal. We are so sick and undernourished that we can barely walk, much less march, much less work. And yet the carrots make me feel strong. If I survive today, tomorrow I will be free. I sing the chant in my head.

  We line up in rows for the count. I’m still singing to myself. Just as we’re about to head out into the chilly morning for another day of horrors, there’s a commotion at the door. The SS guard shouts in German, and another man shouts back, pushing his way into the room. My breath catches and I grab Magda’s elbow so that I don’t fall over. It’s the man from the garden. He’s looking sternly around the room.

  “Where is the girl who dared to break the rules?” he demands.

  I shake. I can’t calm my body. He’s back for revenge. He wants to mete out punishment publicly. Or he feels he must. Someone has learned of his inexplicable kindness to me, and now he must pay for his risk. He must pay for his risk by making me pay for mine. I quake, almost unable to breathe I’m so afraid. I am trapped. I know how close I am to death.

  “Where is the little criminal?” he asks again.

  He will spot me any second. Or he will spy the carrot tops poking out of Magda’s coat. I can’t bear the suspense of waiting for him to recognize me. I drop to the ground and crawl toward him. Magda hisses at me, but it’s too late. I crouch at his feet. I see the mud on his boots, the grain of the wood on the floor.

  “You,” he says. He sounds disgusted. I close my eyes. I wait for him to kick me. I wait for him to shoot.

  Something heavy drops near my feet. A stone? Will he stone me to death, the slow way?

  No. It’s bread. A small loaf of dark rye bread.

  “You must have been very hungry to do what you did,” he says. I wish I could meet that man now. He’s proof that twelve years of Hitler’s Reich isn’t enough hate to take the good out of people. His eyes are my father’s eyes. Green. And full of relief.

  CHAPTER 5

  The Stairs of Death

  We march for days or weeks again. Since Auschwitz, we have been kept in Germany, but one day we come to the Austrian border, where we wait to cross. The guards gossip as we stand in the interminable lines that have become for me the illusion of order, the illusion that one thing naturally follows another. It is a relief to stand still. I listen to the conversation between the guards. President Roosevelt has died, they are saying. Truman is left to carry out the rest of the war. How strange to hear that in the world outside our purgatory, things change. A new course is determined. These events occur so far from our daily existence that it is a shock to realize that now, even right now, someone is making a choice about me. Not about me specifically. I have no name. But someone with authority is making a decision that will determine what happens to me. North, south, east, or west? Germany or Austria? What should be done with the surviving Jews before the war is over?

  “When the war ends …” a guard says. He doesn’t finish the thought. This is the kind of future talk that Eric and I once entertained. After the war … If I concentrate in just the right way, can I figure out if he still lives? I pretend that I’m waiting outside a train station where I will buy a ticket, but I have only one chance to figure out the city where I am to meet him. Prague? Vienna? Düsseldorf? Prešov? Paris? I reach into my pocket, feeling reflexively for my passport. Eric, my sweet love, I am on my way. A female border guard shouts at me and Magda in German and points us to a different line. I start to move. Magda stays still. The guard shouts again. Magda won’t move, won’t respond. Is she delirious? Why won’t she follow me? The guard yells in Magda’s face and Magda shakes her head.

  “I don’t understand,” Magda says to the guard in Hungarian. Of course she understands. We’re both fluent in German.

  “Yes, you do!” the guard shouts.

  “I don’t understand,” Magda repeats. Her voice is completely neutral. Her shoulders are straight and tall. Am I missing something? Why is she pretending not to understand? There is nothing to be gained from defiance. Has she lost her mind? The two continue to argue. Except Magda isn’t arguing. She is only repeating, flatly, calmly, that she doesn’t understand, she doesn’t understand. The guard loses control. She smacks Magda’s face with the butt of her gun. She beats her again across the shoulders. She hits and hits until Magda topples over and the guard gestures to me and another girl to drag her away with us.

  Magda is bruised and coughing, but her eyes shine. “I said, ‘No!’ ” she says. “I said, ‘No.’ ” For her, it is a marvelous beating. It is proof of her power. She held her ground while the guard lost control. Magda’s civil disobedience makes her feel like the author of choice, not the victim of fate.

  But the power Magda feels is short-lived. Soon we are marching again, toward a place worse than any we have yet seen.

  * * *

  We arrive at Mauthausen. It’s an all-male concentration camp at a quarry where prisoners are made to hack and carry granite that will be used to build Hitler’s fantasy city, a new capital for Germany, a new Berlin. I see nothing but stairs and bodies. The stairs are white stone and stretch up and up ahead of us, as though we could walk them to the sky. The bodies are everywhere, in heaps. Bodies crooked and splayed like pieces of broken fence. Bodies so skeletal and disfigured and tangled that they barely have a human shape. We stand in a line on the white stairs. The Stairs of Death, they are called. We are waiting
on the stairs for another selection, we presume, that will point us to death or more work. Rumors shudder down the line. The inmates at Mauthausen, we learn, have to carry 110-pound blocks of stone from the quarry below up the 186 stairs, running in line. I picture my ancestors, the pharaoh’s slaves in Egypt, bent under the weight of stones. Here on the Stairs of Death, we’re told, when you’re carrying a stone, running up the stairs, and someone in front of you trips or collapses, you are the next to fall, and on, and on, until the whole line buckles into a heap. If you survive, it’s worse, we hear. You have to stand along a wall at the edge of a cliff. Fallschirmspringerwand, it’s called—the Parachutist’s Wall. At gunpoint, you choose: Will you be shot to death, or will you push the inmate beside you off the cliff?

  “Just push me,” Magda says. “If it comes to that.”

  “Me too,” I say. I would rather fall a thousand times than see my sister shot. We are too weak and starved to say this out of politeness. We say this out of love, but also out of self-preservation. Don’t give me another heavy thing to carry. Let me fall among the stones.

  I weigh less, much less, than the rocks the inmates lift up the Stairs of Death. I am so light I could drift like a leaf or a feather. Down, down. I could fall now. I could just fall backward instead of taking the next step up. I think I am empty now. There is no heaviness to hold me to the earth. I am about to indulge this fantasy of weightlessness, of releasing the burden of being alive, when someone ahead of me in line breaks the spell.

  “There’s the crematorium,” she says.

  I look up. We have been away from the death camps for so many months that I have forgotten how matter-of-factly the chimneys rise. In a way, they are reassuring. To feel death’s proximity, death’s imminence, in the straight stack of brick—to see the chimney that is a bridge, that will house your passage from flesh to air—to consider yourself already dead—makes a certain kind of sense.

  And yet, as long as that chimney produces smoke, I have something to fight against. I have a purpose. “We die in the morning,” the rumors announce. I can feel resignation tugging at me like gravity, an inevitable and constant force.

  * * *

  Night falls and we sleep on the stairs. Why have they waited so long to begin the selection? My courage wavers. We die in the morning. In the morning we die. Did my mother know what was about to happen when she joined the line of children and the elderly? When she saw Magda and me pointed a different way? Did she fight death? Did she accept it? Did she remain oblivious until the end? Does it matter, when you go, if you are aware that you are dying? We die in the morning. In the morning we die. I hear the rumor, the certainty, repeat as though it is echoing off the quarry rock. Have we really been marched these many hundreds of miles only to vanish?

  I want to organize my mind. I don’t want my last thoughts to be cliché ones, or despondent ones. What’s the point? What has it all meant? I don’t want my last thoughts to be a replaying of the horrors we’ve seen. I want to feel alive. I want to savor what aliveness is. I think of Eric’s voice and his lips. I try to conjure thoughts that might still have the power to make me tingle. I’ll never forget your eyes. I’ll never forget your hands. That’s what I want to remember—warmth in my chest, a flush across my skin—though “remember” isn’t the right word. I want to enjoy my body while I still have one. An eternity ago, in Kassa, my mother forbade me to read Émile Zola’s Nana, but I snuck it into the bathroom and read it in secret. If I die tomorrow, I will die a virgin. Why have I had a body at all, never to know it completely? So much of my life has been a mystery. I remember the day I got my first period. I rode my bike home after school, and when I got there I saw blood streaks all over my white skirt. I was frightened. I ran to my mother, crying, asking her to help me locate the wound. She slapped me. I didn’t know it was a Hungarian tradition for a girl to be slapped upon her first period. I didn’t know about menstruation at all. No one, not my mother or sisters or teachers or coaches or friends, had ever explained anything about my anatomy. I knew there was something men had that women didn’t. I’d never seen my father naked, but I’d felt that part of Eric pressing against me when he held me. He had never asked me to touch it, had never acknowledged his body. I had liked the feeling that his body—and my own—were mysteries waiting to be uncovered, something that caused an energy to shoot between us when we touched.

  Now it was a mystery I would never solve. I had experienced little stars of desire but would now never feel their fulfillment, the whole promised galaxy of light. I cry about it now, on the Stairs of Death. It is terrible to lose, to have lost, all the known things: mother, father, sister, boyfriend, country, home. Why do I have to lose the things I don’t know too? Why do I have to lose the future? My potential? The children I’ll never mother? The wedding dress my father will never make? I’m going to die a virgin. I don’t want this to be my last thought. I should think about God.

  I try to picture an immovable power. Magda has lost her faith. She and many others. “I can’t believe in a God who would let this happen,” they say. I understand what they mean. And yet I’ve never found it difficult to see that it isn’t God who is killing us in gas chambers, in ditches, on cliff sides, on 186 white stairs. God doesn’t run the death camps. People do. But here is the horror again and I don’t want to indulge it. I picture God as being like a dancing child. Sprightly and innocent and curious. I must be also if I am to be close to God now. I want to keep alive the part of me that feels wonder, that wonders, until the very end. I wonder if anyone knows that I am here, knows what’s going on, that there is such a place as an Auschwitz, a Mauthausen? I wonder if my parents can see me now. I wonder if Eric can. I wonder what a man looks like naked. There are men all around me. Men no longer living. It wouldn’t hurt their pride anymore for me to look. The worse transgression would be to relinquish my curiosity, I convince myself.

  I leave Magda sleeping on the stairs and crawl to the muddy hillside where the corpses are piled. I won’t undress anyone still in clothes. I won’t tamper with the dead. But if a man has fallen, I will look.

  I see a man, his legs askew. They don’t seem to belong to the same body, but I can make out the place where the legs are joined. I see hair like mine, dark, coarse, and a little appendage. It’s like a little mushroom, a tender thing that pushes out of the dirt. How strange that women’s parts are all tucked away and men’s are exposed, so vulnerable. I feel satisfied. I won’t die ignorant of the biology that made me.

  * * *

  At daybreak, the line starts to move. We don’t talk much. Some wail. Some pray. Mostly we are private in our dread or regret or resignation or relief. I don’t tell Magda what I saw the night before. This line is moving quickly. There won’t be much time. I try to remember the constellations I used to recognize in the night sky. I try to remember the taste of my mother’s bread.

  “Dicuka,” Magda says, but it takes me a few hollow breaths to recognize my name. We’ve reached the top of the stairs. The selection officer is just ahead. Everyone is being sent in the same direction. This isn’t a selection line. It’s an ushering. It really is the end. They’ve waited until morning to send us all to death. Should we make a promise to each other? An apology? What is there that must be said? Five girls ahead of us now. What should I say to my sister? Two girls.

  And then the line stops. We’re led toward a crowd of SS guards by a gate.

  “If you try to run, you’ll be shot!” they shout at us. “If you fall behind, you’ll be shot.”

  We have been saved again. Inexplicably.

  We march.

  * * *

  This is the Death March, from Mauthausen to Gunskirchen. It is the shortest distance we have been forced to walk, but we are so weakened by then that only one hundred out of the two thousand of us will survive. Magda and I cling to each other, determined to stay together, to stay upright. Each hour, hundreds of girls fall into the ditches on either side of the road. Too weak or too ill to keep movin
g, they’re killed on the spot. We are like the head of a dandelion gone to seed and blown by the wind, only a few white tufts remaining. Hunger is my only name.

  Every part of me is in pain; every part of me is numb. I can’t walk another step. I ache so badly I can’t feel myself move. I am just a circuitry of pain, a signal that feeds back on itself. I don’t know that I have stumbled until I feel the arms of Magda and the other girls lifting me. They have laced their fingers together to form a human chair.

  “You shared your bread,” one of them says.

  The words don’t mean anything to me. When have I ever tasted bread? But then a memory rises up. Our first night at Auschwitz. Mengele ordering the music and Mengele ordering me to dance. This body danced. This mind dreamt of the opera house. This body ate that bread. I am the one who had the thought that night and who thinks it again now: Mengele killed my mother; Mengele let me live. Now a girl who shared a crust with me nearly a year ago has recognized me. She uses her last strength to interlace her fingers with Magda’s and those of the other girls and lift me up into the air. In a way, Mengele allowed this moment to happen. He didn’t kill any of us that night or any night after. He gave us bread.

  CHAPTER 6

  To Choose a Blade of Grass

  There is always a worse hell. That is our reward for living. When we stop marching, we are at Gunskirchen Lager. It’s a subcamp of Mauthausen, a few wooden buildings in a marshy forest near a village, a camp built to house a few hundred slave laborers, where eighteen thousand are crowded now. It is not a death camp. There are no gas chambers here, no crematoria. But there is no doubt that we have been sent here to die.