Ęawed. I wish I had known that I wasn’t a damaged person, that I was
suffering the fallout of an interrupted life.
At Auschwitz, at Mauthausen, on the Death March, I survived by
drawing on my inner world. I found hope and faith in life within me,
even when I was surrounded by starvation and torture and death.
Aer my ĕrst Ęashback, I began to believe that my inner world was
where the demons lived. at there was blight deep inside me. My
inner world was no longer sustaining, it became the source of my pain:
unstoppable memories, loss, fear. I could be standing in line at the ĕsh
counter, and when the clerk called my name I would see Mengele’s
face transposed over his. Walking into the factory some mornings I
would see my mother beside me, as plain as day, I would see her turn
her back and walk away. I tried to banish my memories of the past. I
thought it was a matter of survival. Only aer many years did I come
to understand that running away doesn’t heal pain. It makes the pain
worse. In America I was farther geographically than I had ever been
from my former prison. But here I became more psychologically
imprisoned than I was before. In running from the past—from my fear
—I didn’t ĕnd freedom. I made a cell of my dread and sealed the lock
with silence.
* * *Marianne, however, was Ęourishing. I wanted her to feel normal,
normal, normal. And she did. Despite my fear that she would discover
that we were poor, that her mother was afraid all the time, that life in
America wasn’t what we had expected, she was a happy child. At her
day care, which she was allowed to attend for free because the woman
who ran it, Mrs. Bower, was sympathetic to immigrants, she learned
English quickly. She became a little assistant to Mrs. Bower, tending to
the other children when they cried or fussed. No one asked her to ĕll
that role. She had an innate sensitivity to others’ hurt, and an innate