The Choice

committed to my love for Eric, to my hope that I will ĕnd him again,
to seek a man’s arms to hold me now. Even if I didn’t carry Eric’s voice
with me still, I think I would be too afraid to look for comfort, for
intimacy. I am skin and bones. I am covered in bugs and sores. Who
would want me? Better not to risk connection and be denied, better
not to have my damage conĕrmed. And besides, who would provide
the best shelter now? Someone who knows what I have endured, a
fellow survivor? Or someone who doesn’t, who can help me forget?
Someone who knew me before I went through hell, who can help me
back to my former self? Or someone who can look at me now without
always seeing what’s been destroyed? I’ll never forget your eyes, Eric
told me. I’ll never forget your hands. For more than a year I have held
on to these words like a map that could lead me to freedom. But what
if Eric can’t face what I have become? What if we ĕnd each other and
build a life, only to find that our children are the children of ghosts?
I huddle against Magda. She and Laci talk about the future.
“I’m going to be a doctor,” he says.
It’s noble, a young man who, like me, was little more than dead
only a month or two ago. He has lived, he will heal, he will heal
others. His ambition reassures me. And it startles. He has come out of
the death camps with dreams. It seems an unnecessary risk. Even now
that I have known starvation and atrocity, I remember the pain of
lesser hurts, of a dream ruined by prejudice, of the way my coach
spoke to me when she cut me from the Olympic training team. I
remember my grandfather, how he retired from the Singer Sewing
Machine Company and waited for his pension check. How he waited
and waited, how he talked of little else. Finally he received his ĕrst
check. A week later we were evacuated to the brick factory. A few
weeks later, he was dead. I don’t want to dream the wrong thing.
“I have an uncle in America,” Laci continues. “In Texas. I’ll go
there, work, save up for school.”