The Choice

through difficult times. I knew that laughter can heal. But to hear this
song now, in this place, it is too much. I am furious at Béla, less for his
absence of tact, more for his ability to move so quickly and successfully
out of anguish. I have to get away.
I head out alone for a walk. Just outside the hotel lobby is a path
that leads to the Berghof, the Eagle’s Nest, Hitler’s old residence. I will
not choose that path. I will not give Hitler the satisfaction of
acknowledging his home, his existence. I am not stranded in the past. I
follow a different trail instead, to a different peak, toward the open
sky.
And then I stop myself. Here I am, forever giving a dead person the
power to cut off my own discovery. Isn’t this why I have come to
Germany? To get closer to the discomfort? To see what the past still
has to teach me?
I slide along the gravel path toward the unassuming remains of
Hitler’s once grand estate, perched at the edge of a cliff. Now all that
exists of the house is an old retaining wall covered in moss, pieces of
rubble and pipes poking out of the ground. I look out over the valley
as Hitler must have done. Hitler’s house is gone—American GIs
burned it to the ground in the last days of the war, but not before
raiding Hitler’s stores of wine and cognac. ey sat on the terrace and
raised their glasses, behind them his house obscured by smoke and
Ęames. e house is gone, but what of Hitler? Can I still feel his
presence here? I test my gut for nausea, my spine for chills. I listen for
his voice. I listen for the echoing register of his hate, for the relentless
call of evil. But it’s quiet here today. I gaze up the mountain, I see
wildĘowers fed by the ĕrst cold trickles of melting snow from the
surrounding peaks. I am walking on the same steps that Hitler once
took, but he isn’t here now, I am. It is springtime, though not for
Hitler. For me. e thick crust of silent snow has melted; dead quiet
winter has yielded to the burst of new leaves and the jolting rush of