The Choice Read online

  It is already hard to tell who is living and who is dead. Disease passes into and between our bodies. Typhus. Dysentery. White lice. Open sores. Flesh upon flesh. Living and rotting. A horse’s carcass half gnawed. Eat it raw. Who needs a knife to cut the flesh? Just gnaw it away from the bone. You sleep three deep, in the crowded wooden structures or on the bare ground. If someone below you dies, keep sleeping. No strength to haul the dead away. There’s a girl doubled over in hunger. There’s a foot, black, rotted through. We have been herded into the dank, thick woods to be killed in a giant blaze, all of us lit on fire. The whole place is rigged with dynamite. We wait for the explosion that will consume us in its flame. Until the big blast there are the other hazards: starvation, fever, disease. There is only one twenty-hole latrine for the entire camp. If you can’t wait your turn to defecate, they shoot you right there, where your waste has pooled. Trash fires smolder. The earth is a mud pit, and if you can find the strength to walk, your feet spin in a pulp that is part mud, part shit. It is five or six months since we left Auschwitz.

  Magda flirts. That is her answer to death’s beckoning. She meets a Frenchman, a guy from Paris, who lived before the war on Rue de something, an address I tell myself I won’t ever forget. Even in the depths of this horror there is chemistry, person to person, that gallop in the throat, that brightening. I watch them talk as though they are seated at a summer café, little plates clinking between them. This is what the living do. We use our sacred pulse as a flint against fear. Don’t ruin your spirit. Send it up like a torch. Tell the Frenchman your name and tuck his address away, savor it, chew it slowly like bread.

  * * *

  In just a few days at Gunskirchen I become a person who cannot walk. Although I don’t know it yet, I have a broken back (even now I don’t know when the injury occurred, or how). I only sense that I have reached the end of my reserves. I lie out in the heavy air, my body entwined with strangers’ bodies, all of us in a heap, some already dead, some long dead, some, like me, barely alive. I see things I know aren’t real. I see them all mixed in with the things that are real but shouldn’t be. My mother reads to me. Scarlett cries, “I’ve loved something that doesn’t really exist.” My father throws me a petit four. Klara starts the Mendelssohn violin concerto. She plays by the window so that a passerby will notice her, lift a face toward her, so she can beckon for the attention she craves and can’t ask for outright. This is what the living do. We set strings vibrating with our needs.

  Here in hell, I watch a man eat human flesh. Could I do it? For the sake of my own life, could I put my mouth around the skin left hanging on a dead person’s bones and chew? I have seen flesh defiled in unforgivable cruelty. A boy tied to a tree while the SS officers shot his foot, his hand, his arms, an ear—an innocent child used as target practice. Or the pregnant woman who somehow made it to Auschwitz without being killed outright. When she went into labor, the SS tied her legs together. I’ve never seen agony like hers. But it’s watching a starving person eat a dead person’s flesh that makes the bile rise in me, that makes my vision black. I cannot do it. And yet I must eat. I must eat or I will die. Out of the trampled mud grows grass. I stare at the blades, I see their different lengths and shades. I will eat grass. I will choose this blade of grass over that one. I will occupy my mind with the choice. This is what it means to choose. To eat or not eat. To eat grass or to eat flesh. To eat this blade or that one. Mostly we sleep. There is nothing to drink. I lose all sense of time. I am often asleep. Even when I am awake I struggle to remain conscious.

  Once I see Magda crawling back to me with a can in her hand, a can that glints in the sun. A can of sardines. The Red Cross, in its neutrality, has been allowed to deliver aid to prisoners, and Magda has huddled in a line and been handed a can of sardines. But there’s no way to open it. It’s just a new flavor of cruelty. Even a good intention, a good deed, becomes futility. My sister is dying slowly of starvation; my sister holds food in her hand. She clutches the tin the way she clutched her hair once, trying to hold on to herself. An unopenable can of fish is the most human part of her now. We are the dead and the near dead. I can’t tell which I am.

  * * *

  I am aware at the corners of my consciousness of day trading places with night. When I open my eyes, I don’t know if I have slept or fainted, or for how long. I don’t have the capacity to ask, How long? Sometimes I can feel that I am breathing. Sometimes I try to move my head to look for Magda. Sometimes I can’t think of her name.

  Cries break me out of a sleep that resembles death. The cries must be death’s herald. I wait for the promised explosion, for the promised heat. I keep my eyes closed and wait to burn. But there’s no explosion. There’s no flame. I open my eyes, and I can see jeeps rolling slowly in through the pine forest that obscures the camp from the road and from the sky. “The Americans have arrived! The Americans are here!” This is what the feeble are shouting. The jeeps look wavy and blurry, as if I am watching them through water or in an intense heat. Could this be a collective hallucination? Someone is singing “When the Saints Go Marching In.” For more than seventy years these sensory impressions have stayed with me, indelible. But as they happen, I have no idea what they mean. I see men in fatigues. I see flags with stars and stripes—American flags, I realize. I see flags emblazoned with the number 71. I see an American handing cigarettes to inmates, who are so hungry they eat them, paper and all. I watch from a tangle of bodies. I can’t tell which legs are my legs. “Are there any living here?” the Americans call in German. “Raise your hand if you are alive.” I try to move my fingers to signal that I am alive. A soldier walks so near to me that I can see the streaks of mud on his pants. I can smell his sweat. Here I am, I want to call. I’m here. I have no voice. He scours the bodies. His eyes pass over me without recognition. He holds a piece of dirty cloth to his face. “Raise your hand if you can hear me,” he says. He barely moves the cloth away from his mouth when he speaks. I work to find my fingers. You’ll never get out of here alive, they’ve said: the kapo who ripped out my earrings, the SS officer with the tattoo gun who didn’t want to waste the ink, the forewoman in the thread factory, the SS who shot us down on the long, long march. This is how it feels for them to be right.

  The soldier shouts something in English. Someone outside my field of vision yells back. They’re leaving.

  And then a patch of light explodes on the ground. Here’s the fire. At last. I am surprised that it makes no noise. The soldiers turn. My numb body suddenly flushes hot—from flame, I think, or fever. But no. There is no fire. The gleam of light isn’t fire at all. It is the sun colliding with Magda’s sardine can! Whether on purpose or by accident, she has arrested the soldiers’ attention with a tin of fish. They are returning. We have one more chance. If I can dance in my mind, I can make my body seen. I close my eyes and concentrate, raising my hands above my head in an imaginary arabesque. I hear the soldiers yell again, one to the other. One is very close to me. I keep my eyes locked shut and continue my dance. I imagine that I am dancing with him. That he lifts me over his head like Romeo did in the barracks with Mengele. That there is love and it springs out of war. That there is death and always, always its opposite.

  And now I can feel my hand. I know it is my hand because the soldier is touching it. I open my eyes. I see that his wide, dark hand circles my fingers. He presses something into my hand. Beads. Colorful beads. Red, brown, green, yellow.

  “Food,” the soldier says. He looks into my eyes. His skin is the darkest I have ever seen, his lips thick, his eyes deep brown. He helps me lift my hand to my mouth. He helps me release the beads onto my dry tongue. Saliva gathers and I taste something sweet. I taste chocolate. I remember the name of this flavor. Always keep a little something sweet in your pocket, my father said. Here is the sweetness.

  But Magda? Has she been discovered too? I don’t have words yet, or a voice. I can’t stammer a thank you. I can’t form the syllables of my sister’s name. I can barely swallo
w the little candies that the soldier has given me. I can barely think of anything other than the desire for more food. Or a drink of water. His attention is occupied now in getting me out of the pile of bodies. He has to pull the dead away from me. They are slack in the face, slack in their limbs. As skeletal as they are, they are heavy, and he grimaces and strains as he lifts them. Sweat streaks his face. He coughs at the stench. He adjusts the cloth over his mouth. Who knows how long the dead have been dead? Maybe only a breath or two separates them from me. I don’t know how to speak my thankfulness. But I feel it prickling all across my skin.

  He lifts me now and deposits me on the ground, on my back, at a slight distance from the dead bodies. I can see the sky in pieces between the treetops. I feel the humid air on my face, the damp of the muddy grass beneath me. I let my mind rest in sensation. I picture my mother’s long coiled hair, my father’s top hat and mustache. Everything I feel and have ever felt stems from them, from the union that made me. They rocked me in their arms. They made me a child of the earth. I remember Magda’s story about my birth. “You helped me,” my mother cried to her mother. “You helped me.”

  And now Magda is beside me in the grass. She holds her can of sardines. We have survived the final selection. We are alive. We are together. We are free.

  PART II

  ESCAPE

  CHAPTER 7

  My Liberator, My Assailant

  When I permitted myself to imagine a moment like this—the end of my imprisonment, the end of the war—I imagined a joy blooming in my chest. I imagined yelling in my fullest voice, “I AM FREE! I AM FREE!” But now I have no voice. We are a silent river, a current of the freed that flows from the Gunskirchen graveyard toward the nearest town. I ride on a makeshift cart. The wheels squeak. I can barely stay conscious. There is no joy or relief in this freedom. It’s a slow walk out of a forest. It’s a dazed face. It’s being barely alive and returning to sleep. It’s the danger of gorging on sustenance. The danger of the wrong kind of sustenance. Freedom is sores and lice and typhus and carved-out bellies and listless eyes.

  I am aware of Magda walking beside me. Of pain throughout my body as the cart jolts. For more than a year I have not had the luxury of thinking about what hurts or doesn’t hurt. I have been able to think only about how to keep up with the others, how to stay one step ahead, to get a little food here, to walk fast enough, to never stop, to stay alive, to not be left behind. Now that the danger is gone, the pain within and the suffering around me turn awareness into hallucination. A silent movie. A march of skeletons. Most of us are too physically ruined to walk. We lie on carts, we lean on sticks. Our uniforms are filthy and worn, so ragged and tattered that they hardly cover our skin. Our skin hardly covers our bones. We are an anatomy lesson. Elbows, knees, ankles, cheeks, knuckles, ribs jut out like questions. What are we now? Our bones look obscene, our eyes are caverns, blank, dark, empty. Hollow faces. Blue-black fingernails. We are trauma in motion. We are a slow-moving parade of ghouls. We stagger as we walk, our carts roll over the cobblestones. Row on row, we fill the square in Wels, Austria. Townspeople stare at us from windows. We are frightening. No one speaks. We choke the square with our silence. Townspeople run into their homes. Children cover their eyes. We have lived through hell only to become someone else’s nightmare.

  The important thing is to eat and drink. But not too much, not too fast. It is possible to overdose on food. Some of us can’t help it. Restraint has dissolved along with our muscle mass, our flesh. We have starved for so long. Later I will learn that a girl from my hometown, the sister of my sister Klara’s friend, was liberated from Auschwitz only to die from eating too much. It’s deadly both to sustain and to end a hunger. A blessing, then, that the strength I need to chew returns to me only intermittently. A blessing that the GIs have little food to offer, mostly candy, those little beads of color, M&M’s, we learn.

  * * *

  No one wants to house us. Hitler has been dead for less than a week, Germany is still days away from official surrender. The violence is waning across Europe, but it is still wartime. Food and hope are scarce for everyone. And we survivors, we former captives, are still the enemy to some. Parasites. Vermin. The war does not end anti-Semitism. The GIs bring Magda and me to a house where a German family lives, a mother, father, grandmother, three children. This is where we will live until we are strong enough to travel. Be careful, the Americans warn us in broken German. There’s no peace yet. Anything could happen.

  The parents move all of the family’s possessions into a bedroom, and the father makes a show of locking the door. The children take turns staring at us and then run to hide their faces behind their mother’s skirt. We are containers for their fascination and their fear. I am used to the blank-eyed, automatic cruelty of the SS, or their incongruous cheer—their delight in power. I am used to the way they lift themselves up, to feel big, to heighten their sense of purpose and control. The way the children look at us is worse. We are an offense to innocence. That’s the way the children look at us—as though we are the transgressors. Their shock is more bitter than hate.

  The soldiers bring us to the room where we will sleep. It’s the nursery. We are the orphans of war. They lift me into a wooden crib. I am that small; I weigh seventy pounds. I can’t walk on my own. I am a baby. I barely think in language. I think in terms of pain, of need. I would cry to be held, but there’s no one to hold me. Magda curls into a ball on the little bed.

  * * *

  A noise outside our door splinters my sleep. Even rest is fragile. I am afraid all the time. I am afraid of what has already happened. And of what could happen. Sounds in the dark bring back the image of my mother tucking Klara’s caul into her coat, my father gazing back at our apartment on the early morning of our eviction. As the past replays, I lose my home and my parents all over again. I stare at the wooden slats of the crib and try to soothe myself back to sleep, or at least into calm. But the noises persist. Crashes and stomps. And then the door flies open. Two GIs careen into the room. They stumble over each other, over a little shelf. Lamplight strains into the dark room. One of the men points at me and laughs and grabs his crotch. Magda isn’t there. I don’t know where she is, if she is close enough to hear me if I scream, if she is cowering somewhere, as afraid as I am. I hear my mother’s voice. Don’t you dare lose your virginity before you’re married, she would lecture us, before I even knew what virginity was. I didn’t have to. I understood the threat. Don’t ruin yourself. Don’t disappoint. Now rough handling could do more than tarnish me, it could kill me. I am that brittle. But it’s not just dying or more pain that I fear. I’m afraid of losing my mother’s respect. The soldier shoves his friend back to the door to keep watch. He comes at me, cooing absurdly, his voice grainy, dislocated. His sweat and the alcohol on his breath smell sharp, like mold. I have to keep him away from me. There is nothing to throw. I can’t even sit. I try to scream, but my voice is just a warble. The soldier at the door is laughing. But then he isn’t. He speaks harshly. I can’t understand English, but I know he says something about a baby. The other soldier leans against the crib rail. His hand gropes toward his waist. He will use me. Crush me. He pulls out his gun. He waves it crazily like a torch. I wait for his hands to clamp down on me. But he moves away instead. He moves toward the door, toward his friend. The door clicks shut. I’m alone in the dark.

  I can’t sleep. I’m sure the soldier will return. And where is Magda? Has some other soldier taken her? She is emaciated, but her body is in much better shape than mine, and there is still a hint of her feminine figure. To settle my mind, I try to organize what I know of men, of the human palette: Eric, tender and optimistic; my father, disappointed in himself and circumstance, sometimes defeated, sometimes making the best of it, finding the little joys; Dr. Mengele, lascivious and controlled; the Wehrmacht who caught me with the carrots fresh from the ground, punitive but merciful, then kind; the GI who pulled me from the heap of bodies at Gunskirchen, determined and brav
e; and now this new flavor, this new shade. A liberator, but an assailant, his presence heavy but also void. A big dark blank, as though his humanity has vacated his body. I will never learn where Magda was that night. Even now, she doesn’t remember. But I will carry something vital away from that terrifying night, something I hope I never forget. The man who nearly raped me, who might have come back to do what he started to do, saw horror too. Like me, he probably spent the rest of his life trying to chase it away, to push it to the margins. That night, I believe he was so lost in the darkness that he almost became it. But he didn’t. He made a choice not to.

  He comes back in the morning. I know it is him because he still reeks of booze, because fear has made me memorize the map of his face even though I saw it in semidarkness. I hug my knees and whimper. I sound like an animal. I can’t stop. It’s a keening, droning noise, part insect. He kneels by the crib. He is weeping. He repeats two words. I don’t know what they mean, but I remember how they sound. Forgive me. Forgive me. He hands me a cloth sack. It’s too heavy for me to lift so he empties it for me, spilling the contents—small tins of army rations—onto the mattress. He shows me the pictures on the cans. He points and talks, a crazy maître d’ explaining the menu, inviting me to choose my next meal. I can’t understand a word he says. I study the pictures. He pries open a can and feeds me with a spoon. It’s ham with something sweet, raisins. If my father hadn’t shared his secret packages of pork, I might not know the taste of it—though Hungarians would never pair ham with anything sweet. I keep opening my mouth, receiving another bite. Of course I forgive him. I am starving, and he brings me food to eat.

  * * *

  He comes back every day. Magda is well enough to flirt again, and I believe at the time that he makes a point of visiting this house because he enjoys her attention. But day after day, he barely notices her. He comes for me. I am what he needs to resolve. Maybe he’s doing penance for his near assault. Or maybe he needs to prove to himself that hope and innocence can be resurrected, his, mine, the world’s—that a broken girl can walk again. The GI—in the six weeks he cares for me I am too weak and shattered to ever learn to say or spell his name—lifts me out of the crib and holds my hands and coaxes me a step at a time around the room. The pain in my upper back feels like a burning coal when I try to move. I concentrate on shifting my weight from one foot to the other, trying to feel the exact moment when the weight transfers. My hands reach overhead, holding on to his fingers. I pretend he is my father, my father who wished I’d been a boy and then loved me anyway. You’ll be the best-dressed girl in town, he told me over and over again. When I think of my father, the heat pulls out of my back and glows in my chest. There is pain and there is love. A baby knows these two shades of the world, and I am relearning them too.