The Choice

responsibility for myself.
Most of us want a dictator—albeit a benevolent one—so we can
pass the buck, so we can say, “You made me do that. It’s not my fault.”
But we can’t spend our lives hanging out under someone else’s
umbrella and then complain that we’re getting wet. A good deĕnition
of being a victim is when you keep the focus outside yourself, when
you look outside yourself for someone to blame for your present
circumstances, or to determine your purpose, fate, or worth.
And that is why Béla tells me that if I don’t go to Berchtesgaden,
then Hitler has won. He means that I am sitting on a seesaw with my
past. As long as I can put Hitler, or Mengele, or the gaping mouth of
my loss on the opposite seat, then I am somehow justiĕed, I always
have an excuse. That’s why I’m anxious. That’s why I’m sad. That’s
why I can’t risk going to Germany. It’s not that I’m wrong to feel
anxious and sad and afraid. It’s not that there isn’t real trauma at the
core of my life. And it’s not that Hitler and Mengele and every other
perpetrator of violence or cruelty shouldn’t be held accountable for the
harm they cause. But if I stay on the seesaw, I am holding the past
responsible for what I choose to do now.
Long ago, Mengele’s ĕnger did point me to my fate. He chose for
my mother to die, he chose for Magda and me to live. At every
selection line, the stakes were life and death, the choice was never
mine to make. But even then, in my prison, in hell, I could choose
how I responded, I could choose my actions and speech, I could
choose what I held in my mind. I could choose whether to walk into
the electriĕed barbed wire, to refuse to leave my bed, or I could
choose to struggle and live, to think of Eric’s voice and my mother’s
strudel, to think of Magda beside me, to recognize all I had to live for,
even amid the horror and the loss. It has been thirty-ĕve years since I
le hell. e panic attacks come at any time of day or night, they can
subsume me as easily in my own living room as in Hitler’s old bunker,