The Choice

Danube, Klara tells us, blunt, matter-of-fact, but when the last
remaining Jews in Hungary were rounded up, she escaped detection.
She lived in her professor’s house, disguised as a gentile. “One day my
professor said, ‘You have to learn the Bible tomorrow, you are going to
start teaching it, you are going to live in a nunnery.’ It seemed like the
best way to keep me hidden. e convent was nearly two hundred
miles from Budapest. I wore a habit. But one day a girl from the
academy recognized me, and I snuck away on a train back to
Budapest.”
Sometime in the summer, she got a letter from our parents. It was
the letter they had written while we were in the brick factory, telling
Klara where we were imprisoned, that we were together, safe, that we
thought we would be transferred to a work camp called Kenyérmező. I
remember seeing my mother drop the letter onto the street during our
evacuation from the brick factory, since there was no way to mail it. At
the time I thought she had dropped it in resignation. But listening to
Klara tell her story of survival, I see things differently. In releasing the
letter, my mother wasn’t relinquishing hope—she was kindling it.
Either way, whether she dropped the letter in defeat or in hope, she
took a risk. e letter pointed a ĕnger at my sister, a blond-haired Jew
hiding in Budapest. It gave her address. While we trundled in the dark
toward Auschwitz, someone, a stranger, held that letter in his hand.
He could have opened it, he could have turned Klara in to the nyilas.
He could have thrown the letter away in the trash, or le it in the
street. But this stranger put a stamp on it and mailed it to Klara in
Budapest. is is as unbelievable to me as my sister’s reappearance, it’s
a magic trick, evidence of a lifeline that runs between us, evidence,
too, that kindness still existed in the world even then. rough the
dirt kicked up by three thousand pairs of feet, many of them headed
straight for a chimney in Poland, our mother’s letter Ęew. A blond-
haired girl set her violin down to rip open the seal.