The Choice

seek revenge. I tell of my fellow survivors, the courageous men and
women I met in Israel, who looked pained when I mentioned
forgiveness, who insisted that to forgive is to condone or to forget.
Why forgive? Doesn’t that let Hitler off the hook for what he did?
I tell of my dear friend Laci Gladstein—Larry Gladstone—and the
single time in the decades since the war when he spoke to me explicitly
about the past. It was during my divorce, when he knew money was a
struggle for me. He called to say that he knew of a lawyer representing
survivors in reparations cases, he encouraged me to step forward as a
survivor, to claim my due. at was the right choice for many, but not
for me. It felt like blood money. As if one could put a price on my
parents’ heads. A way to stay chained to those who had tried to
destroy us.
It is too easy to make a prison out of our pain, out of the past. At
best, revenge is useless. It can’t alter what was done to us, it can’t erase
the wrongs we’ve suffered, it can’t bring back the dead. At worst,
revenge perpetuates the cycle of hate. It keeps the hate circling on and
on. When we seek revenge, even nonviolent revenge, we are revolving,
not evolving.
I even thought when I arrived yesterday that my presence here is a
healthy kind of revenge, a comeuppance, a settling of the scores. And
then I stood overlooking the cliff at the Berghof, and it came to me
that revenge doesn’t make you free. So I stood on the site of Hitler’s
former home and forgave him. is had nothing to do with Hitler. It
was something I did for me. I was letting go, releasing the part of
myself that had spent most of my life exerting the mental and spiritual
energy to keep Hitler in chains. As long as I was holding on to that
rage, I was in chains with him, locked in the damaging past, locked in
my grief. To forgive is to grieve—for what happened, for what didn’t
happen—and to give up the need for a different past. To accept life as
it was and as it is. I do not of course mean that it was acceptable for