Over the phone, Rev. Dr. David Woehr briefed me for my visit. I would address six hundred Army chaplains gathered for a clinical pastoral retreat at an Armed Forces Recreation Center in the General Walker Hotel, high in the mountains of Bavaria, which had served as a guesthouse and meeting place for Hitler’s SS officers. Béla and I would be provided accommodations at the nearby Hotel zum Türken, which had once been reserved for Hitler’s cabinet and diplomatic visitors. This was where British prime minister Neville Chamberlain stayed in 1938 when he met with Hitler and returned home with the triumphant and tragically misguided news that he had secured “peace for our time,” and where Adolf Eichmann himself had likely briefed Hitler on the Final Solution. The Berghof, or the Eagle’s Nest, Hitler’s former residence, was a short walk away.
My audience would be made up of healing arts professionals. Army chaplains serve as behavioral health providers in addition to spiritual counselors, and for the first time, Dave told me, chaplains were required to receive a year of clinical pastoral education to complement their seminary studies. The chaplains needed training in psychology as well as in religious doctrine, and Dave was leading weeklong retreats on clinical psychology to the chaplains stationed in Europe. I would give the keynote address.
Dave told me more about the chaplains and the soldiers they served. These weren’t the soldiers of my youth, or the soldiers I was accustomed to treating at William Beaumont; these were peacetime soldiers, soldiers of the cold war, of war behind the scenes. They weren’t living through daily violence, but nevertheless were on high alert, keeping the peace but at the ready for war. Most cold war soldiers were stationed at the sites of prepositioned missiles. These missiles were mounted on mobile launchers, already hidden at strategic sites. It was a matter of routine for these military personnel to live with the perpetual threat of war, the middle-of-the-night sirens that could signal another alert drill or an actual attack. (Like the showers at Auschwitz. Water or gas? We never knew.) The chaplains I was to address had the responsibility of supporting the spiritual and psychological needs of soldiers doing their best to deter an all-out war, doing their best to be prepared for whatever happened.
“What do they need to hear?” I asked. “What would it be helpful for me to talk about?”
“Hope,” Dave said. “Forgiveness. If chaplains can’t talk about this stuff, if we don’t understand it, we can’t do our job.”
“Why me?”
“It’s one thing to hear about hope and forgiveness from the pulpit, or from a religious scholar,” Dave explained. “But you’re one of the few people who can talk about holding on to hope even when you’d been stripped of everything, when you were starving and left for dead. I don’t know anyone else with that kind of credibility.”
* * *
A month later, when Béla and I are on a train from Berlin to Berchtesgaden, I feel like the least credible person, the last person on Earth qualified to talk about hope and forgiveness. When I close my eyes, I hear the sound of my nightmares, the constant turning of wheel against track. I see my parents, my father who refuses to shave, my mother’s inward gaze. Béla holds my hand. He touches a finger to the gold bracelet he gave me when Marianne was born, that I tucked into Marianne’s diaper when we fled Prešov, the bracelet I wear every day. It’s a token of triumph. We made it. We survived. We stand for life. But not even Béla’s comfort, nor the kiss of the smooth metal on my skin, can mitigate the dread collecting in my gut.
We share the train compartment with a German couple about our age. They are pleasant, they offer us some of the pastries they’ve brought, the woman compliments me on my outfit. What would they say if they knew that when I was seventeen I sat on the top of a German train under a hail of bombs, a human shield in a thin striped dress, forced to protect Nazi ammunition with my life? And where were they when I shivered on the top of the train? Where were they during the war? Were they the children who spat at Magda and me when we marched through German towns? Were they Hitler Youth? Do they think about the past now, or are they in denial, as I was for so many years?
The dread in me turns to something else, a fiery and jagged feeling, fury. I remember Magda’s rage: After the war, I’m going to kill a German mother. She couldn’t erase our loss, but she could flip it on its head, she could retaliate. At times I shared her desire for confrontation, but not her desire for revenge. My devastation manifested as a suicidal urge, not a homicidal one. But now anger collects in me, a gale-force fury, it gathers strength and speed. I am sitting inches away from people who might be my former oppressors. I am afraid of what I might do.
“Béla,” I whisper, “I think I’ve come far enough. I want to go home.”
“You’ve been afraid before,” he says. “Welcome it, welcome it.” Béla is reminding me of what I believe too: This is the work of healing. You deny what hurts, what you fear. You avoid it at all costs. Then you find a way to welcome and embrace what you’re most afraid of. And then you can finally let it go.
* * *
We arrive in Berchtesgaden and take a shuttle van to the Hotel zum Türken, which is now a museum as well as a hotel. I try to ignore the ominous history of this place and lift my face to the physical grandeur, to the mountain peaks rising around us. The rocky, snowy range reminds me of the Tatra Mountains where Béla and I first met when he reluctantly chaperoned me to the TB hospital.
Inside the hotel, Béla and I have a good laugh when the concierge addresses us as Dr. and Mrs. Eger.
“It’s Dr. and Mr. Eger,” Béla says.
The hotel is like a time machine, an anachronism. The rooms are still appointed as they were in the 1930s and 1940s, with thick Persian rugs and no telephones. Béla and I are assigned to the room that Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s minister of propaganda, slept in, with the same bed, the same mirror and dresser and nightstand that once were his. I stand in the doorway of the room, I feel my inner peace shatter. What does it mean that I am standing here now? Béla runs his hand over the dresser top, the bedspread, he goes to the window. Is history grabbing his skull the way it is mine? I grab for the bedpost to keep from falling to my knees. Béla turns back to me. He winks, he bursts into song.
It’s … springtime for Hitler, and Germany! he sings. It’s from Mel Brooks’s The Producers Deutschland is happy and gay!
He does a tap-dance routine in front of the window, he holds a pretend cane in his hands. We saw The Producers together when it opened in 1968, the year before our divorce. I sat in a movie theater with a hundred laughing people, Béla laughing loudest of all. I couldn’t even crack a smile. Intellectually, I understood the purpose of the satire. I knew that laughter can lift, that it can carry us over and 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. They sat on the terrace and raised their glasses, behind them his house obscured by smoke and flames. The 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 wildflowers fed by the first 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. The thick crust of silent snow has melted; dead quiet winter has yielded to the burst of new leaves and the jolting rush of fast water. Within the layers of the terrible sorrow I carry in me always, another feeling shoots through. It is the first melting trickle of long-frozen snow. Pulsing down the mountainside, the water speaks, the chambers of my heart speak. I am alive, the bubbling stream says. I made it. A song of triumph is filling me, pushing its way out of my heart, out through my mouth to the sky up above and the valley below.
“I release you!” I shout to that old sorrow. “I release you!”
* * *
“Tempora mutantur, et nos mutamur in illis,” I say to the chaplains when I give my keynote address the next morning. “It’s a Latin phrase I learned as a girl. Times are changing and we are changing with them. We are always in the process of becoming.” I ask them to travel back with me forty years, to the same mountain village where we sit right now, maybe to this very room, when fifteen highly educated people contemplated how many of their fellow humans they could incinerate in an oven at one time. “In human history, there is war,” I say. “There is cruelty, there is violence, there is hate. But never in the history of humankind has there ever been a more scientific and systematic annihilation of people. I survived Hitler’s horrific death camps. Last night I slept in Joseph Goebbels’s bed. People ask me, how did you learn to overcome the past? Overcome? Overcome? I haven’t overcome anything. Every beating, bombing, and selection line, every death, every column of smoke pushing skyward, every moment of terror when I thought it was the end—these live on in me, in my memories and my nightmares. The past isn’t gone. It isn’t transcended or excised. It lives on in me. But so does the perspective it has afforded me: that I lived to see liberation because I kept hope alive in my heart. That I lived to see freedom because I learned to forgive.”
Forgiveness isn’t easy, I tell them. It is easier to hold grudges, to 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. That 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. This 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 Hitler to murder six million people. Just that it happened, and I do not want that fact to destroy the life that I clung to and fought for against all odds.
The chaplains rise to their feet. They shower me in warm applause. I stand in the light on the stage, thinking that I will never feel so elated, so free. I don’t know that forgiving Hitler isn’t the hardest thing I’ll ever do. The hardest person to forgive is someone I’ve still to confront: myself.
* * *
Our last night in Berchtesgaden, I can’t sleep. I lie awake in Goebbels’s bed. A crack of light breaks in from under the door and I can see the pattern of vines on the old wallpaper, the way they intertwine, the way they rise. Tempora mutantur, et nos mutamur in illis. If I am changing, what am I in the process of becoming?
I rest in the wakeful uncertainty. I try to open myself, to let my intuition speak. For some reason I think of a story I heard of a very talented Jewish boy, an artist. He was told to go to Vienna to art school, but he didn’t have any money for the journey. He walked from Czechoslovakia to Vienna, only to be denied a seat at the exams because he was Jewish. He begged. He had come so far, he had walked the whole way, could he at least take the test, could he be allowed that much? They let him sit for the exam, and he passed. He was so talented that he was offered a spot at the school despite his ancestry. Sitting beside him at the exam was a boy named Adolf Hitler, who was not accepted at the school. But the Jewish boy was. And all his life, this man, who had left Europe and lived in Los Angeles, had felt guilty, because if Hitler hadn’t suffered this loss, if he hadn’t lost to a Jew, he might not have felt the need to scapegoat Jews. The Holocaust might not have happened. Like children who have been abused, or whose parents divorce, we find a way to blame ourselves.
The self-blame hurts others, too, not just ourselves. I remember a former patient, a man and his family I treated briefly a year or so ago. They sat before me like abandoned pieces from different puzzles: the intimidating colonel in his decorated uniform; the silent blonde wife, her collarbones jutting out from her white blouse; their teenage daughter, her dyed black hair ratted and sprayed into a wild nest, her eyes ringed in black eyeliner; a quiet son, eight years old, studying a comic book in his lap.
The colonel pointed at his daughter. “Look at her. She’s promiscuous. She’s a drug addict. She won’t respect our rules. She mouths off to her mother. She doesn’t come home when she’s told. It’s becoming impossible to live with her.”
“We’ve heard your version,” I said. “Let’s hear from Leah.”
As if taunting him by reading from a script that would confirm every one of her father’s claims, Leah launched into a story about her weekend. She’d had sex with her boyfriend at a party, where there’d been underage drinking and where she’d also dropped acid. She’d stayed out all night. She seemed to take pleasure in listing the details.
Her mother blinked and picked at her manicured nails. Her father’s face flushed red. He rose from his seat next to hers. He towered over her, shaking his fist. “You see what I have to put up with?” he roared. His daughter saw his anger, but I saw a man on his way to a heart attack.
“You see what I have to put up with?” Leah said, rolling her eyes. “He doesn’t even try to understand me. He never listens to me. He just tells me what to do.”
Her brother stared harder at his comic book, as if force of will could take him out of the war zone his family life had become and put him in the fantasy world of his book, where the lines between good and evil were clearly drawn, where the good guys would win, eventually. He had said the least of anyone in the family, and yet I had a hunch that he was the one with the most important things to say.
I told the parents I would spend the next part of the session with them, without their children in the room, and I took Leah and her brother into my adjoining office, where I gave them drawing paper and markers. I gave them an assignment, something I thought might help them let off steam after the tense minutes with their parents. I asked them each to draw a portrait of their family but without using people.
I returned to the parents. The colonel was yelling at his wife. She appeared to be wasting away, disappearing, and I was concerned she might be in the early stages of an eating disorder. If I asked her a question directly, she deferred to her husband. Each family member was in his or her own stockade. I could see the evidence of their inner pain in the ways they accused one another and hid themselves. But in trying to get them closer to the sources of their pain, I only seemed to be inviting them to open fire or recede even further.
“We’ve talked about what you see going on with your children,” I said, interrupting the colonel. “What about what’s going on with you?”
Leah’s mother blinked at me. Her father gave me a cold stare.
“What do you wish to achieve, as parents?”
“To teach them how to be strong in the world,” the colonel said.
“And how are you doing with that?”
“My daughter’s a slut and my son’s a sissy. How do you think?”
“I can see that your daughter’s behaviors are scaring you. What about your son? How is he disappointing you?”
“He’s weak. He’s always backing down.”
“Can you give me an example?”
“When we play basketball together, he’s a sore loser. He doesn’t even try to win. He just walks away.”
“He’s a boy. He’s much smaller than you. What happens if you let him win?”
“What would that teach him? That the world bends over for you if you’re soft?”
“There are ways to teach kids to go farther, to stretch their capacities, with a gentle push, not a kick in the ass,” I said.
The colonel grunted.
“How do you want your children to see you?”
“Like I’m in charge.”
“A hero? A leader?”
He nodded.
“How do you think your children actually see you?”
“They think I’m a goddamn pussy.”
Later in the session I brought the family back together, and I asked the kids to share their family portraits. Leah had drawn only one object: an enormous bomb detonating in the middle of the page. Her brother had drawn a ferocious lion and three cowering mice.
The colonel’s face turned red again. His wife looked down at her lap. He stammered and stared at the ceiling.
“Tell me what’s going on for you right now.”
“I fucked up this family, didn’t I?”
I half expected that I would never see the colonel or his family again. But he called the following week to schedule a private session. I asked him to tell me more about how he felt when his children had showed us their pictures.
“If my kids are afraid of me, how are they supposed to handle themselves in the world?”
“What leads you to believe they can’t protect themselves?”
“Leah can’t say no to boys or drugs. Robbie can’t say no to bullies.”
“What about you? Can you protect yourself?”
He puffed out his chest so his medals glinted in the sunlight. “You’re looking at the proof.”
“I don’t mean on the battlefield. I mean in your home.”
“I don’t think you understand the pressure I’m under.”
“What would it take for you to feel safe?”
“Safety isn’t the issue. If I’m not in control, people die.”
“Is that what safety would feel like to you? Freedom from the fear that people are going to get hurt on your watch?”
“It’s not just a fear.”
“Take me where you are. What are you thinking of?”
“I don’t think you want to hear this.”
“You don’t have to worry about me.”
“You won’t understand.”
“You’re right, no one can ever understand someone else completely. But I can tell you that I was once a prisoner of war. Whatever it is you want to tell me, I’ve probably heard—and seen—worse.”
“In the military, it’s kill or be killed. So when I got the order, I didn’t question it.”
“Where are you when you get this order?”
“Vietnam.”
“Are you inside? Outside?”
“In my office at the air base.”
I watched his body language as he took me into the past. I watched his energy, his level of agitation, so that I could be attuned to any distress that signaled we were going too far too fast. He had closed his eyes. He seemed to be sinking into a trance.
“Are you sitting or standing?”
“I’m sitting when I get the call. But I stand up right away.”
“Who’s calling you?”
“My commanding officer.”
“What does he say?”
“That he’s putting my men on a rescue mission in the bush.”
“Why do you stand up when you hear the order?”
“I feel hot. My chest is tight.”
“What are you thinking?”
“That it isn’t safe. That we’re going to be attacked. That we need more air support if we’re heading to that part of the bush. And they’re not giving it to us.”
“Are you mad about that?”
His eyes snapped open. “Of course I’m mad. They send us in there, they feed us a bunch of bullshit about America being the strongest army in the world, that the gooks don’t stand a chance.”
“The war wasn’t what you expected.”
“They lied to us.”
“You feel betrayed.”
“Hell yes, I feel betrayed.”
“What happened the day you got the order to send your troops on the rescue mission?”
“It was night.”
“What happened that night?”
“I’ll tell you what happened. It was an ambush.”
“Your men got hurt?”
“Do I have to spell it out? They died. They all died that night. And I’m the one who sent them in there. They trusted me, and I sent them in there to die.”
“War means people die.”
“You know what I think? Dying is easy. I have to live every day thinking about all those parents burying their sons.”
“You were following an order.”
“But I knew it was the wrong decision. I knew those boys needed more air support. And I didn’t have the balls to demand it.”
“What did you give up to become a colonel?”
“What do you mean?”
“You made a choice to become a soldier and a military leader. What did you have to give up to get here?”
“I had to be away from my family a lot.”
“What else?”
“When you have six thousand men relying on you for their lives, you don’t have the luxury of being afraid.”
“You’ve had to give up your feelings. To give up letting others see them.”
He nodded.
“You said before that dying is easy. Do you ever wish you were dead?”
“All the fucking time.”
“What’s stopping you?”
“My kids.” His face contorted in anguish. “But they think I’m a monster. They’d be better off without me.”
“Do you want to know how I see it? I think your children would be very much better off with you. With you, the man I am coming to know and admire. The man who can risk talking about his fear. The man who has the guts to forgive and accept himself.”
He was silent. Perhaps this was the first moment he had encountered the possibility of freeing himself from the guilt he felt over the past.
“I can’t help you go back in time to save your troops. I can’t guarantee your children’s safety. But I can help you protect one person: yourself.”
He stared at me.
“But to save yourself, you are going to have to give up the image of who you think you’re supposed to be.”
“I hope this works,” he said.
Shortly after, the colonel was reassigned and his family left El Paso. I don’t know what happened to them. I hope something good, as I cared for them deeply. But why am I thinking of them now? What does their story have to do with me? Something about the colonel’s guilt, about his prison of self-blame, is calling for my attention. Is my memory pointing to work I have already done, or work that I have yet to do? I have come so far since the end of my literal imprisonment, since the American GI rescued me in 1945. I have taken off my mask. I have learned to feel and express, to stop bottling my fears and my grief. I have worked to express and release my rage. And I have traveled back here, to my oppressor’s old home. I have even forgiven Hitler, released him to the universe, if only for today. But there’s a knot, a darkness, that extends from my gut to my heart, there’s a tightness in my spine—it’s an unrelenting sense of guilt. I was victimized, I wasn’t the victimizer. Whom is it that I think I have wronged?
Another patient flashes into my mind. She was seventy-one years old and a chronic source of concern to her family. She exhibited all the symptoms of clinical depression. She slept too much and ate too much and isolated herself from her children and grandchildren. And when she did interact with her family, she was so full of anger that her grandchildren were afraid of her. Her son approached me after my lecture in their city to ask if I could spare an hour to meet with his mother. I wasn’t sure in what way I could be useful to her in a single, short visit until the man revealed that, like me, his mother had lost her own mother when she was only sixteen. I felt a surge of compassion for his mother, this stranger. It struck me that she was the person I could easily have become, that I almost became—so steeped in loss that I hid from the people who loved me the most.
The woman, Margaret, came to see me in my hotel room that afternoon. She was meticulously dressed, but there was a hostility that bristled out of her like quills. She unleashed a litany of complaints about her health, her family members, her housekeeper, her postman, her neighbors, the headmistress of the girls’ school up the street. She seemed to find injustice and inconvenience everywhere in her life. The hour was wasting away, and she was so caught up in the small disasters that we hadn’t touched on what I knew to be her larger grief.
“Where is your mother buried?” I asked suddenly.
Margaret pulled away as though I was a dragon breathing on her face with flame. “In the cemetery,” she finally said, recomposed.
“Where is the cemetery? Nearby?”
“In this very town,” she said.
“Your mother needs you right now.”
I didn’t give her a chance to object. We hailed a taxi. We sat and watched the wet, busy streets through the windows. She kept up a running criticism of other drivers, the speed of the traffic signals, the quality of the shops and businesses we passed, even the color of someone’s umbrella. We drove through the iron gates of the cemetery. The trees were mature and towering. A narrow cobblestone road led from the gate into the field of the dead. Rain fell.
“There,” Margaret said at last, pointing up the muddy hill to a crowd of headstones. “Now tell me what in God’s name we’re doing here.”
“Do you know,” I said, “mothers can’t rest in peace unless they know the people they have left behind are fully embracing life?” Take off your shoes, I told her. Take off your stockings. Stand barefoot on your mother’s grave. Make direct contact so she can finally rest in peace.
Margaret got out of the taxi. She stood on the rain-slick grass. I gave her privacy. I looked back only once, when I saw Margaret crouched on the ground, holding her mother’s headstone in her hands. I don’t know what she said to her mother, if she said anything at all. I only know she stood barefoot on her mother’s grave, that she connected her bare skin to this site of loss and grief. That when she got back in the taxi she was barefoot still. She cried a little, then fell silent.
Later I would receive a beautiful letter from Margaret’s son. I don’t know what you said to my mother, he would write, but she’s a different person, she is more peaceful, more joyful.
It was a whim, a lucky experiment. My goal was to help her reframe her experience—to reframe her problem as an opportunity, to put her in the position of helping her mother—and in helping her mother to be free, to help herself. Now that I am back in Germany, it occurs to me that maybe the same principle can work for me. Bare-skinned connection with the site of my loss. Contact and release. Hungarian exorcism.
Lying awake in Goebbels’s bed, I realize that I need to do what Margaret did, to perform the rite of grief that has eluded me all my life.
I decide to return to Auschwitz.