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such stories are for remembering the past. Her goal is nothing less than to help each of us to escape the prisons of our own minds. Each of us is in some way mentally imprisoned, and it is Edie’s mission to help us realize that just as we can act as our own jailors, we can also be our own liberators.
Heroism is rather a mind-set or an accumulation of our personal and social habits. It is a way of being. And it is a special way of viewing ourselves. To be a hero requires taking effective action
To be a hero requires great moral courage.
“The worst brings out the best in us.”
Far from diminishing pain, whatever we deny ourselves the opportunity to accept becomes as inescapable as brick walls and steel bars. When we don’t allow ourselves to grieve our losses, wounds, and disappointments, we are doomed to keep reliving them.
Freedom lies in learning to embrace what happened. Freedom means we muster the courage to dismantle the prison, brick by brick. * * *
If you asked me for the most common diagnosis among the people I treat, I wouldn’t say depression or post-traumatic stress disorder, although these conditions are all too common among those I’ve known, loved, and guided to freedom. No, I would say hunger. We are hungry. We are hungry for approval, attention, affection. We are hungry for the freedom to embrace life and to really know and be ourselves.
Often, the little upsets in our lives are emblematic of the larger losses; the seemingly insignificant worries are representative of greater pain.
Our childhood memories are often fragments, brief moments or encounters, which together form the scrapbook of our life. They are all we have left to understand the story we have come to tell ourselves about who we are.
I haven’t yet learned that the problem isn’t that my sisters taunt me with a mean song; the problem is that I believe them.
She can’t stop being extraordinary, not for a second, or everything might be taken from her—the adoration she’s accustomed to, her very sense of self.
This is the way we misinterpret the facts of our lives, the way we assume and don’t check it out, the way we invent a story to tell ourselves, reinforcing the very thing in us we already believe.
Maybe every life is a study of the things we don’t have but wish we did, and the things we have but wish we didn’t. It took me many decades to discover that I could come at my life with a different question. Not: Why did I live? But: What is mine to do with the life I’ve been given?
We use denial as protection. If we don’t pay attention, then we can continue our lives unnoticed. We can make the world safe in our minds. We can make ourselves invisible to harm.
This isn’t a time of carefree dating, our bond isn’t a casual crush, a puppy love. This is love in the face of war.
The uncertainty makes the moments stretch.
We don’t know what’s going to happen. Just remember, no one can take away from you what you’ve put in your mind.”
“All your ecstasy in life is going to come from the inside,”
Just remember, no one can take away from you what you’ve put in your own mind.
As I dance, I discover a piece of wisdom that I have never forgotten. I will never know what miracle of grace allows me this insight. It will save my life many times, even after the horror is over. I can see that Dr. Mengele, the seasoned killer who just this morning murdered my mother, is more pitiful than me. I am free in my mind, which he can never be. He will always have to live with what he’s done. He is more a prisoner than I am.
To survive, we conjure an inner world, a haven, even when our eyes are open.
We can choose what the horror teaches us. To become bitter in our grief and fear. Hostile. Paralyzed. Or to hold on to the childlike part of us, the lively and curious part, the part that is innocent.
“What is it like?” I ask. “To belong to a man?”
More so, the idea of daily belonging.
I can’t remember how I used to think.
My head teems with questions and dread, but these thoughts are so enduring they don’t feel like thoughts anymore. It is always almost the end.
At Auschwitz, all the women with small children were gassed from the start. The fact that she is still alive can mean only one thing: her baby died. Which is worse, I wonder, to be a child who has lost her mother or a mother who has lost her child?
To exist is such an obligation.
I want to organize my mind. I don’t want my last thoughts to be cliché ones, or despondent ones.
I want to enjoy my body while I still have one.
I want to keep alive the part of me that feels wonder, that wonders, until the very end.
I ache so badly I can’t feel myself move. I am just a circuitry of pain, a signal that feeds back on itself.
There is always a worse hell. That is our reward for living.
This is what the living do. We use our sacred pulse as a flint against fear. Don’t ruin your spirit. Send it up like a torch.
For more than a year I have not had the luxury of thinking about what hurts or doesn’t hurt.
The war does not end anti-Semitism.
We’re free from the death camps, but we also must be free to—free to create, to make a life, to choose. And until we find our freedom to, we’re just spinning around in the same endless darkness.
And yet it is impossible to feel the joy of our homecoming uncoupled from the devastation of loss.
Soon we will understand that out of more than fifteen thousand deportees from our hometown, we are among the only seventy who have survived the war.
When you can’t go in through a door, go in through a window,
With the piano gone, something in her is missing too. A piece of her identity. An outlet for her self-expression. In its absence, she finds anger. Vibrant, full voiced, willful. I admire her for it. My anger turns inward and congeals in my lungs.
Is there something inside me that can verify my identity, that can restore myself to myself? If such a thing existed, who would I seek out to lift the lid, read the code?
on. So much of our energy is used just to restore things—our health, our belongings, what we can of life before loss and imprisonment.
The irony of freedom is that it is harder to find hope and purpose.
It isn’t just my own loss that hurts. It’s the way it ripples out into the future.
inside. I can’t ignore the grief, but I can’t seem to expel it either.
I feel like an elegant parrot, nothing but an echo dolled up in nice clothes that my father did not make for me.
Ava and Marta tell me that they are pregnant too.
I don’t immediately recognize this feeling. Then I remember. This is what it feels like to be happy.
I don’t yet understand that my sister’s pain has less to do with loneliness and more to do with the belief that she is undeserving of love.
