In the summer of 2010, I was invited to Fort Carson, Colorado, to address an Army unit returning from combat in Afghanistan, a unit with a high suicide rate. I was there to talk about my own trauma—how I survived it, how I survived the return to everyday life, how I chose to be free—so the soldiers might also adjust more easefully to life after war. As I climbed up to the podium, I experienced a few brief internal skirmishes of discomfort, the old habits of being hard on myself, of wondering what a little Hungarian ballet student has to offer men and women of war. I reminded myself that I was there to share the most important truth I know, that the biggest prison is in your own mind, and in your pocket you already hold the key: the willingness to take absolute responsibility for your life; the willingness to risk; the willingness to release yourself from judgment and reclaim your innocence, accepting and loving yourself for who you really are—human, imperfect, and whole.
I called on my parents for strength, and my children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren too. Everything they’ve taught me, everything they’ve compelled me to discover. “My mama told me something I will never forget,” I began. “She said, ‘We don’t know where we’re going, we don’t know what’s going to happen, but no one can take away from you what you put in your own mind.’ ”
I have said these words countless times, to Navy SEALs and crisis first responders, to POWs and their advocates at the Department of Veterans Affairs, to oncologists and people living with cancer, to Righteous Gentiles, to parents and children, to Christians and Muslims and Buddhists and Jews, to law students and at-risk youth, to people grieving the loss of a loved one, to people preparing to die, and sometimes I spin when I say them, with gratitude, with sorrow. This time as I said the words, I almost fell from the stage. I was overcome by sensations, by sense memories I’ve stored deep inside: the smell of muddy grass, the fierce sweet taste of M&M’s. It took me a long moment to understand what was triggering the flashback. But then I realized: flanking the room were flags and insignias, and everywhere I saw an emblem I hadn’t thought about consciously for many, many years, but one that is as significant to me as the letters that spell my own name: the insignia the GI who liberated me on May 4, 1945, wore on his sleeve: a red circle with a jagged blue 71 in the center. I had been brought to Fort Carson to address the Seventy-first Infantry, the unit that sixty-five years ago had liberated me. I was bringing my story of freedom to the survivors of war who once brought freedom to me.
I used to ask, Why me? Why did I survive? I have learned to ask a different question: Why not me? Standing on a stage surrounded by the next generation of freedom fighters, I could see in my conscious awareness something that is often elusive, often invisible: that to run away from the past or to fight against our present pain is to imprison ourselves. Freedom is in accepting what is and forgiving ourselves, in opening our hearts to discover the miracles that exist now.
I laughed and wept on the stage. I was so full of joyful adrenaline that I could barely get out the words: “Thank you,” I told the soldiers. “Your sacrifice, your suffering, have meaning—and when you can discover that truth within, you will be free.” I ended my speech the way I always do, the way I always will, as long as my body will let me: with a high kick. Here I am! my kick says. I made it!
And here you are. Here you are! In the sacred present. I can’t heal you—or anyone—but I can celebrate your choice to dismantle the prison in your mind, brick by brick. You can’t change what happened, you can’t change what you did or what was done to you. But you can choose how you live now.
My precious, you can choose to be free.