The Choice

best to keep separate collide. I’m sitting in a lecture hall, waiting for
my introductory political science class to begin, when a sandy-haired
man sits down behind me.
“You were there, weren’t you?” he says.
“There?” I feel the panic start to rise.
“Auschwitz. You’re a survivor, aren’t you?”
I am so rattled by his question that I don’t think to ask him one in
return. What makes him think I’m a survivor? How does he know?
How did he guess? I have never said a single word about my
experience to anyone in my present life, not even my kids. I don’t have
a number tattooed on my arm.
“Aren’t you a Holocaust survivor?” he asks again.
He is young, maybe twenty—roughly half my age. Something in his
youth, in his earnest nature, in the kind intensity of his voice, reminds
me of Eric, how we sat in a movie theater together aer curfew, how
he took a picture of me on the shore doing the splits, how he kissed
my lips for the ĕrst time, his hands resting on the thin belt at my waist.
Twenty-one years aer liberation, I feel pounded by loss. e loss of
Eric. e loss of our young love. e loss of the future—the vision we
shared of marriage and family and activism. For the entire year of my
imprisonment, for the year I somehow escaped a death that seemed
mandatory and inevitable, I held to Eric’s remembered verse: I’ll never
forget your eyes, I’ll never forget your hands. Memory was my lifeline.
And now? I have shut out the past. To remember is to concede to the
horror again and again. But in the past, too, is Eric’s voice. In the past
is the love that I felt and sang in my mind all those months that I
starved.
“I am a survivor,” I say, shaking.
“Have you read this?” He shows me a small paperback: Man’s
Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl. It sounds like a philosophy text.
e author’s name doesn’t ring a bell. I shake my head. “Frankl was at