The Choice

the sky. e bodies are everywhere, in heaps. Bodies crooked and
splayed like pieces of broken fence. Bodies so skeletal and disĕgured
and tangled that they barely have a human shape. We stand in a line
on the white stairs. e Stairs of Death, they are called. We are
waiting on the stairs for another selection, we presume, that will point
us to death or more work. Rumors shudder down the line. e
inmates at Mauthausen, we learn, have to carry 110-pound blocks of
stone from the quarry below up the 186 stairs, running in line. I
picture my ancestors, the pharaoh’s slaves in Egypt, bent under the
weight of stones. Here on the Stairs of Death, we’re told, when you’re
carrying a stone, running up the stairs, and someone in front of you
trips or collapses, you are the next to fall, and on, and on, until the
whole line buckles into a heap. If you survive, it’s worse, we hear. You
have to stand along a wall at the edge of a cliff.
Fallschirmspringerwand, it’s called—the Parachutist’s Wall. At
gunpoint, you choose: Will you be shot to death, or will you push the
inmate beside you off the cliff?
“Just push me,” Magda says. “If it comes to that.”
“Me too,” I say. I would rather fall a thousand times than see my
sister shot. We are too weak and starved to say this out of politeness.
We say this out of love, but also out of self-preservation. Don’t give me
another heavy thing to carry. Let me fall among the stones.
I weigh less, much less, than the rocks the inmates li up the Stairs
of Death. I am so light I could dri like a leaf or a feather. Down,
down. I could fall now. I could just fall backward instead of taking the
next step up. I think I am empty now. ere is no heaviness to hold
me to the earth. I am about to indulge this fantasy of weightlessness,
of releasing the burden of being alive, when someone ahead of me in
line breaks the spell.
“There’s the crematorium,” she says.
I look up. We have been away from the death camps for so many