The Choice

my host family back in college? ey returned to Auschwitz thinking it
would bring them peace. But it just stirred up all the trauma. It was
very stressful. ey both suffered heart attacks when they got home.
They died, Mom.”
Berchtesgaden isn’t Auschwitz, I remind her. I’d be more in the
geography of Hitler’s past than my own. Yet even my daily routines in
El Paso can trigger Ęashbacks. I hear sirens and I go cold, I see barbed
wire around a construction site and I am no longer in the present, I
am watching the blue bodies hanging from the fence, I am stuck in the
fear, I am struggling for my life. If mundane triggers can bring my
trauma back, what would it be like to be surrounded by people
speaking German, to wonder if I am walking among former Hitler
Youth, to be in the very rooms where Hitler and his advisers once
lived?
“If you think there’s something to be gained, then go. I support
you,” Marianne says. “But it’s got to be for you. You don’t have to
prove anything to anyone else. You’re not required to go.”
When she says it, the relief is immediate. “ank you, Marchuka,”
I say. I am safe now, I am happy. I have done my work. I have grown.
Now I can let go. I can be ĕnished. I can say that I am honored by the
invitation, but it is too painful for me to accept. Dave will understand.
But when I tell Béla that I have decided to decline the invitation,
he grabs my shoulder. “If you don’t go to Germany,” he says, “then
Hitler won the war.”
It’s not what I want to hear. I feel like I’ve been sucker-punched.
But I have to concede that he’s right about one thing: It’s easier to
hold someone or something else responsible for your pain than to take
responsibility for ending your own victimhood. Our marriage has
taught me that—all the times when my anger or frustration at Béla has
taken my attention away from my own work and growth, the times
when blaming him for my unhappiness was easier than taking