The Choice

Prešov with a diamond ring in my hand, to a medical examiner’s office
in Vienna with my brother-in-law posing as my husband. I have come
this far in my life and my healing. I can concede to no obstacle now.
“I’m a survivor,” I tell the embassy clerk. “I was a prisoner at
Auschwitz. My parents and grandparents died there. I fought so hard
to survive. Please don’t make me wait to go back.” I don’t know that
within a year Polish–American relations will have deteriorated, that
they will stay frozen for the rest of the decade, that this is in fact the
last chance for me and Béla to go to Auschwitz together. I only know
that I can’t let myself be turned back.
e clerk eyes me, expressionless. He steps away from the counter,
returns. “Passports,” he says. Into our blue American passports he has
inserted travel visas good for one week. “Enjoy Poland,” he says.
is is when I start to feel afraid. On the train to Kraków I feel that
I’m in a crucible, that I am reaching the point at which I will break or
burn, that fear alone could turn me into ash. is is here, this is now. I
try to reason with the part of me that feels that with every mile I travel
I lose a layer of skin. I will be a skeleton again by the time I get to
Poland. I want to be more than bones.
“Let’s get off at the next stop,” I tell Béla. “It’s not important to go
all the way to Auschwitz. Let’s go home.”
“Edie,” he says, “you’re going to be ĕne. It’s only a place. It can’t
hurt you.”
I stay on the train for another stop, and another, through Berlin,
through Poznań. I think of Dr. Hans Selye—a fellow Hungarian—who
said stress is the body’s response to any demand for change. Our
automatic responses are to ĕght or to Ęee—but in Auschwitz, where
we endured more than stress, where we lived in distress, the stakes life
and death, never knowing what would happen next, the options to
ĕght or Ęee didn’t exist. I would have been shot if I’d fought back,
electrocuted if I’d tried to run away. So I learned to Ęow, I learned to