The Choice

my mother has intuited the need for me to appear my age or older, for
me to look old enough to get through the ĕrst selection line alive. Her
hair is gray but her face is as smooth as mine. She could pass for my
sister. But I don’t think about which word will protect her: “mother”
or “sister.” I don’t think at all. I only feel every single cell in me that
loves her, that needs her. She is my mother, my mama, my only
mama. And so I say the word that I have spent the rest of my life
trying to banish from my consciousness, the word that I have not let
myself remember, until today.
“Mother,” I say.
As soon as the word is out of my mouth, I want to pull it back into
my throat. I have realized too late the signiĕcance of the question. Is
she your mother or your sister? “Sister, sister, sister!” I want to scream.
Mengele points my mother to the le. She follows behind the young
children and the elderly, the mothers who are pregnant or holding
babies in their arms. I will follow her. I won’t let her out of my sight. I
begin to run toward my mother, but Mengele grabs my shoulder.
“You’ll see your mother very soon,” he says. He pushes me to the
right. Toward Magda. To the other side. To life.
“Mama!” I call. We are separated again, in memory as we were in
life, but I will not let memory be another dead end. “Mama!” I say. I
will not be satisĕed with the back of her head. I must see the full sun
of her face.
She turns to look at me. She is a point of stillness in the marching
river of the other condemned. I feel her radiance, the beauty that was
more than beauty, that she oen hid under her sadness and
disapproval. She sees me watching her. She smiles. It’s a small smile. A
sad smile.
“I should have said ‘sister’! Why didn’t I say ‘sister’?” I call to her
across the years, to ask her forgiveness. at is what I have returned to
Auschwitz to receive, I think. To hear her tell me I did the best with