The Choice

does their story have to do with me? Something about the colonel’s
guilt, about his prison of self-blame, is calling for my attention. Is my
memory pointing to work I have already done, or work that I have yet
to do? I have come so far since the end of my literal imprisonment,
since the American GI rescued me in 1945. I have taken off my mask.
I have learned to feel and express, to stop bottling my fears and my
grief. I have worked to express and release my rage. And I have
traveled back here, to my oppressor’s old home. I have even forgiven
Hitler, released him to the universe, if only for today. But there’s a
knot, a darkness, that extends from my gut to my heart, there’s a
tightness in my spine—it’s an unrelenting sense of guilt. I was
victimized, I wasn’t the victimizer. Whom is it that I think I have
wronged?
Another patient Ęashes into my mind. She was seventy-one years
old and a chronic source of concern to her family. She exhibited all the
symptoms of clinical depression. She slept too much and ate too much
and isolated herself from her children and grandchildren. And when
she did interact with her family, she was so full of anger that her
grandchildren were afraid of her. Her son approached me aer my
lecture in their city to ask if I could spare an hour to meet with his
mother. I wasn’t sure in what way I could be useful to her in a single,
short visit until the man revealed that, like me, his mother had lost her
own mother when she was only sixteen. I felt a surge of compassion
for his mother, this stranger. It struck me that she was the person I
could easily have become, that I almost became—so steeped in loss
that I hid from the people who loved me the most.
e woman, Margaret, came to see me in my hotel room that
aernoon. She was meticulously dressed, but there was a hostility that
bristled out of her like quills. She unleashed a litany of complaints
about her health, her family members, her housekeeper, her postman,
her neighbors, the headmistress of the girls’ school up the street. She