What True Freedom Means According to a Holocaust Survivor

No one can take away from you what you put in your mind.

Edith returns to Auschwitz. More than one million people were murdered right where she’s standing. There are no words that can explain the inhumanity of that human-made death factory. As she looks around the world’s biggest cemetery, she recalls the festive sounds that played through the loudspeakers on her first day. She remembers her father waving goodbye as he joined a line of men, but she can’t recall if she waved back.

She is linking arms with her mother; her sister Magda stands on the other side. She’s slim and flat-chested. She looks small in her woolen coat. Her mother tells her “button your coat, stand tall…you’re a woman, not a child”. She understands now that there was a purpose to her nagging. Edith’s survival depended on looking every day of her sixteen years.

She holds on to her mother’s hand firmly. The guards point and shove as the women move forward in a line. Edith sees Mengele up ahead, orchestrating their arrival. “Is anyone sick?” he asks. “Over forty? Under fourteen? Go left, go left”. Their father had explained that they were just there to work. They wanted to believe this; to think that this was just temporary. But as the three women stood in that barren yard, holding hands, hungry in their woolen coats, they feel this is their last chance to embrace.

It’s their turn. Mengele lifts his finger and asks “Is this your mother or your sister?”. Her hair was grey but her face as smooth as Edith’s; she could pass for her sister. But Edith doesn’t know the meaning of the left or the right. All she feels in that moment is that every cell in her body loves her, and needs her. “Mother,” she says. As soon as the word is out of her mouth, she wishes she could take it back. The gravity of her response dawns on her. She realizes the significance of the question too late. Mengele points her mother to the left, to join the children, the elderly, and the pregnant women.

It’s a moment Edith would never forget. That’s why she returned to Auschwitz. To ask her mother for forgiveness. To hear her mother tell her that she did the best with what she knew. That she made the right choice.

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