The Choice

We travel to Salzburg, where we tour the cathedral constructed on
the ruins of a Roman church. It has been rebuilt three times, we learn
—most recently aer a bomb damaged the central dome during the
war. ere is no evidence of the destruction. “Like us,” Béla says,
taking my hand.
From Salzburg, we go to Vienna, traveling over the same ground
Magda and I marched across before we were liberated. I see ditches
running alongside roads, and I imagine them as I once saw them,
spilling over with corpses, but I can also see them as they are now,
ĕlling up with summer grass. I can see that the past doesn’t taint the
present, the present doesn’t diminish the past. Time is the medium.
Time is the track, we travel it. e train goes through Linz. rough
Wels. I am a girl with a broken back who learns to write a capital G
again, who learns again to dance.
We spend the night in Vienna, not far from the Rothschild Hospital
where we ĕrst lived when we were waiting for our visas to America,
and where, I have since learned, my mentor Viktor Frankl was the
chief of neurology before the war. In the morning we board another
train north.
I think Béla assumes my desire to return to Auschwitz might wane,
but our second morning in Copenhagen I ask our friends for directions
to the Polish embassy. ey caution me, as Marianne already has,
about their survivor friends who visited the camp and then died.
“Don’t retraumatize yourself,” they plead. Béla, too, looks worried.
“Hitler didn’t win,” I remind him.
I thought that choosing to return would be the biggest hurdle. But
at the Polish embassy, Béla and I learn that labor riots have broken out
across Poland, that the Soviets might intervene to suppress the
demonstrations, that the embassy has been advised to stop issuing
travel visas to Westerners. Béla is ready to console me, but I brush him
away. I feel the force of will that led me once to the prison warden in