The Choice

more valuable to her than physical comfort.
I remember that even when we were starving, we would feast. We
cooked all the time at Auschwitz. In our heads, we were having
celebrations at every hour, ĕghting over how much paprika you put in
Hungarian chicken paprikash, or how to make the best seven-layer
chocolate cake. We’d wake at 4:00 A.M. for the Appell, the roll call,
stand in the freezing dark to be counted, and recounted, and we’d
smell the rich, full aroma of cooking meat. Marching to our daily labor
—to a warehouse called Canada, where we were ordered to sort the
belongings of the newly arrived inmates; to the barracks that we had to
clean and clean and clean; or to the crematoriums, where the
unluckiest were forced to harvest gold teeth and hair and skin from
the corpses waiting to be burned—we talked as though we were
heading to market, planning our weekly menu, how we would test
each fruit and vegetable for ripeness. We’d give one another cooking
lessons. Here’s how to make palacsinta, Hungarian crepes. How thin
the pancake must be. How much sugar to use. How many nuts. Do
you put caraway in your székely gulyás? Do you use two onions? No,
three. No, just one and a half. We’d salivate over our imaginary dishes,
and as we ate our one actual meal of the day—watery soup, a stale
piece of bread—I would talk about the goose my mother kept in the
attic and fed with corn each day, its liver bulging, more and more,
until it was time to slaughter the goose and blend its liver into pâté.
And when we fell onto our bunks at night and ĕnally slept, we dreamt
of food then too. e village clock chimes 10:00 A.M., and my father
slips into our apartment with a package from the butcher across the
street. Today, a cut of pork hidden in newspaper. “Dicuka, come
taste,” he beckons. “What a role model you are,” my mother gripes,
“feeding a Jewish girl pork.” But she is almost smiling. She’s making
strudel, stretching the phyllo dough over the dining room table,
working it with her hands and blowing underneath it till it’s paper