The Choice

“Yes,” I told my sister. “I do.”
I went back to Auschwitz and released the past, forgave myself. I
went home and thought, “I’m done!” But closure is temporary. It’s not
over till it’s over.
Despite—no, because of—our past, Magda and I have found
meaning and purpose in different ways in the more than seventy years
since liberation. I have discovered the healing arts. Magda has
remained a devoted pianist and piano teacher, and she has discovered
new passions: bridge and gospel music. Gospel, because it sounds like
crying—it is the strength of all the emotion let out. And bridge,
because there’s strategy and control—a way to win. She is a reigning
bridge champion; she hangs her framed awards on the wall in her
house opposite our grandmother’s portrait.
Both of my sisters have protected and inspired me, have taught me
to survive. Klara became a violinist in the Sydney Symphony
Orchestra. Until the day she died—in her early eighties, of Alzheimer’s
—she called me “little one.” More so than Magda or I did, Klara
remained immersed in Jewish Hungarian immigrant culture. Béla and
I loved to visit her and Csicsi, to enjoy the food, the language, the
culture of our youth. We weren’t able to be together, all of us
survivors, very oen, but we did our best to gather up for major events
—more celebrations our parents would not be present to witness. In
the early 1980s, we met in Sydney for Klara’s daughter’s wedding. e
three of us sisters had awaited this reunion with happy anticipation,
and when we were ĕnally together again, we went into a frenzy of
embraces as emotional as the ones we shared in Košice when we
found one another alive after the war.
No matter that we were now middle-aged women, no matter how
far we had come in our lives, once in one another’s company it was
funny how quickly we fell into the old patterns of our youth. Klara was
in the spotlight, bossing us around, smothering us with attention;