The Choice

Later I would receive a beautiful letter from Margaret’s son. I don’t
know what you said to my mother, he would write, but she’s a different
person, she is more peaceful, more joyful.
It was a whim, a lucky experiment. My goal was to help her reframe
her experience—to reframe her problem as an opportunity, to put her
in the position of helping her mother—and in helping her mother to
be free, to help herself. Now that I am back in Germany, it occurs to
me that maybe the same principle can work for me. Bare-skinned
connection with the site of my loss. Contact and release. Hungarian
exorcism.
Lying awake in Goebbels’s bed, I realize that I need to do what
Margaret did, to perform the rite of grief that has eluded me all my
life.
I decide to return to Auschwitz.