The Choice

chasing more and more pieces of paper in the hopes of affirming my
worth. And it meant learning to reframe my trauma, to see in my
painful past evidence of my strength and gis and opportunities for
growth, rather than confirmation of my weakness or damage.
In 1975, I traveled to Israel to conduct interviews with Holocaust
survivors for my dissertation. (Béla accompanied me; I thought that his
facility with languages, including Yiddish, which he had picked up
from his El Paso clients, would make him an invaluable translator.) I
wanted to explore my professor Richard Farson’s calamity theory of
growth, which says: Very oen it is the crisis situation ... that actually
improves us as human beings. Paradoxically, while these incidents can
sometimes ruin people, they are usually growth experiences. As a result
of such calamities the person oen makes a major reassessment of his
life situation and changes it in ways that reflect a deeper understanding
of his own capabilities, values, and goals. I planned to interview my
fellow concentration camp survivors to discover how a person survives
and even thrives in the wake of trauma. How do people create lives of
joy, purpose, and passion, no matter what wounds they have suffered,
no matter what sorrows they have experienced? And in what ways
does the trauma itself give people an opportunity for positive growth
and change? I wasn’t yet doing what my friend Arpad had advised me
to do—grapple deeply with my own past—but I was getting one step
closer in interviewing people with whom I shared a traumatic past,
laying a foundation for my own healing to come.
How did the experience of calamitous events contribute to my
subjects’ everyday functioning? I met survivors who had gone back to
school, who had opened businesses (as Béla and I had planned to do),
who had built tremendous close friendships, who faced daily life with
a sense of discovery. Israel wasn’t an easy place for survivors; it’s not
easy to live amid prejudice and not become an aggressor yourself. I
met people who faced the political and cultural conĘicts with courage