The Choice: Embrace the Possible

Eger utilizes memory—happy and traumatic—as a motif to explore people’s connection to the past and how living fully requires a person to accept every aspect of their life. Memory haunts Eger’s nightmares, interrupts her daily routines, and feeds her survivor’s guilt. Desperate to regulate the pain, she suppresses memories of the war and loss. Eger recalls playing the role of “Béla’s wife” among Prešov’s high society, where she must pretend to be someone very different from what Auschwitz made her: “The memories and loss occupy only a little sliver of me. I will push and push against them so they know their place. I watch my hand lift the silver cigarette holder up to my face and away. I pretend it’s a new dance. I can learn every gesture” (104). Previously, Eger could escape to her inner world. However, that world had roots in her former identity; in Prešov, she attempts to begin her life from scratch, or to adopt a pretend identity. She spends years storing her memories away and avoiding emotional triggers, but the unprocessed emotions only grow inside her. Naturally, painful memories evoke emotion because the memories themselves are unpleasant, but they often cause more damage than that. These memories involve not just a particular event that occurred, but also the expectations that are not met as a result. In Auschwitz, Eger loses her father, but she also never receives his tailored clothes again, and he never walks her down the aisle on her wedding day. Memories recall the younger self’s hopes and dreams. The disappointment of unfulfilled dreams is a loss, too.

Eger’s memories also store precious moments: joy shared with loved ones, proof that she can survive when all the odds stack against her. In reality, memory is neutral and immutable, a tool that ties together the pieces of a person. It doesn’t supply meaning; it records an experience. Young Eger listens hungrily as her mother recounts the day her own mother died. Ilona was her daughter’s age when she awoke and discovered her mother’s body in bed next to her, still as a stone. Ilona says, “That night, Father told me to make the family supper. So that’s what I did” (13), and Eger writes, “I wait for the rest of the story. I wait for the lesson at the end, or the reassurance” (13). Ilona doesn’t supply a happy ending, and she sends Eger to bed. The ending leaves Eger unsatisfied, but Ilona still ascribes her own meaning to the story. Her mother’s death created a vacant role that she needed to fulfill, marking a milestone—if not the end—of her childhood.

Ilona tells Eger, who is now the same age as young Ilona, the story for a few possible reasons: to signify that Eger can take more responsibility, to show her that life isn’t always fair and doesn’t always reveal happy endings, and/or to share a vulnerable moment with her daughter. Whatever Ilona’s intent, Eger walks away puzzled. Later, Eger believes that people must make sense of their own pasts and do the difficult inner work of understanding how it molds their identity and available choices in the present. The past can’t change, but memories help people learn about themselves so they can make better choices in the future. Eger declares that “the only antidote to brokenness is the whole self” (225). A broken person, or someone with a troubled past, doesn’t need to start over; they need to accept all the hurt pieces of themselves, integrated with the joyful pieces, sacredly stored in the memory. Eger’s memoir is an exercise in memory and an ultimate unification of her past and who she desires to be.