To the Right or to the Left?

Left to the gas.  Right to a living hell, with hope and fear enough to live another day.

Of course, I'm only recounting what I've been told.

I don't say "evil" lightly, but it's used so often with regard to Dr. Josef Mengele that I am not reluctant to join the ranks.  To the right or to the left, that was his call, at least in Auschwitz.  His choice.  Which was no choice at all.  Only the evil that is rooted in abject apathy for humanity.

Many choices were unknowable.  Impossible.  To be patient or to flee?  To negotiate or to fight back?  To hide and risk capture or to follow the orders into the ghetto and risk deportation to the East?  Would a day's regularly scheduled program be the last experience of it?  Would eating now mean starving later?  Was bearing a child sentencing him or her to death?  In one of the most powerful memoirs of Auschwitz, Fragments of Isabella, Isabella Leitner recalls how they were selected, apparently to go to the crematoria.  But the ruddy, "healthy"-looking Jews were killed instead.  How could one fight fiercely for life in this abyss, knowing that the same action that saved one day might destroy the next?  Sophie's Choice (book and movie) made traumatic no-choice choices famous.  She-lo neda.

Left to my own devices, this post (or its less dramatic cousin) would only appear several months from now.  It's way too serious too soon.  But on Yom HaShoah, when the taxi drivers of Jerusalem air Schindler's List music, and the country heeds the siren in silence and memory of six million, I can't blog on choices without blogging about the worst choices of all.  Truthfully, I choose to mourn, without philosophizing about the impossibility of a reality that never should have been.

But apparently, even in hell, beyond the thumb of Mengele, people chose. Schindler himself chose.  As did Dietrich Bonhoeffer.   Viktor Frankl teaches that man searches for meaning, consciously choosing to cope positively with suffering.  And Isabella Leitner and her 3 sisters honored their mother's passioned plea to "choose life."  Without succumbing to the inhumanity around them.  Three of the four lived; but all four chose life.  And fiercely.  (Read the memoir.  It's as least as powerful as Night.)


As long as we mourn them (won't we always?), may we blessed with no impossible choices.

יהי זכרם ברוך