The Choice

Magda was competitive and rebellious; I was the peacemaker, hustling
between my sisters, soothing their conĘicts, hiding my own thoughts.
How easily we can make even the warmth and safety of family into a
kind of prison. We rely on our old coping mechanisms. We become
the person we think we need to be to please others. It takes willpower
and choice not to step back into the conĕning roles we mistakenly
believe will keep us safe and protected.
e night before the wedding, Magda and I came upon Klara alone
in her daughter’s childhood bedroom, playing with her daughter’s old
dolls. What we witnessed was more than a mother’s nostalgia over her
grown child. Klara was caught up in her make-believe game. She was
playing as a child would. My sister had never had a childhood, I
realized. She was always the violin prodigy. She never got to be a little
girl. When she wasn’t performing onstage, she performed for me and
Magda, becoming our caretaker, our little mother. Now, as a middle-
aged woman, she was trying to give herself the childhood she had
never been allowed. Embarrassed to have been discovered with the
dolls, Klara lashed out at us. “It’s too bad I wasn’t at Auschwitz,” she
said. “If I’d been there, our mother would have lived.”
It was terrible to hear her say it. I felt all my old survivor’s guilt
rushing back, the horror of the word I spoke that ĕrst day of
Auschwitz, the horror of remembering it, of confronting that old, long-
buried belief, however erroneous, that I had sent our mother to her
death.
But I wasn’t a prisoner anymore. I could see my sister’s prison at
work, hear her guilt and grief clawing through the blame she threw at
me and Magda. And I could choose my own freedom. I could name
my own feelings, of rage, worthlessness, sorrow, regret, I could let
them swirl, let them rise and fall, let them pass. And I could risk
letting go of the need to punish myself for having lived. I could release
my guilt and reclaim my whole pure self.