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.