‘I AM A SURVIVOR, NOT A VICTIM’
Holocaust survivor Dr Edith Eger shares her life story and some sage advice for all of us
It’s difficult to imagine that Auschwitz, where nearly 1m Jews were murdered by the Nazis during the Second World War, could be described as anything other than horrifying. Yet survivor Dr Edith Eger says, although the death camp was ‘hell on earth’, it was also her ‘best classroom’. ‘It helped me find a way to look for the gift in everything,’ she explains. ‘It gave me an opportunity to discover strength from within.’
This remarkable optimism and wisdom goes some way to explaining why 93-year-old Dr Eger (known as Edie) has become an icon for resilience. Aged 90, she published her memoir, The Choice, chronicling her journey from unthinkable tragedy to healing herself and others, through her work as a clinical psychologist. The book sold more than 350,000 copies worldwide, and Desmond Tutu, Bill Gates and Oprah Winfrey count themselves as fans. Her new book, The Gift, is a more practical guide to the ideas she outlined in her memoir: ‘to help us identify our mental prisons and develop the tools we need to become free.’
A CHILDHOOD DESTROYED
When she was growing up in Košice (then in Hungary, now Slovakia), Edie dreamed of becoming a ballerina or a gymnast. Her father Lajos, a dress designer, and her mother Ilona, raised Edie and her two older sisters, Magda and Klara, to believe they could achieve anything. She even danced for the president. ‘We had no idea what was to come,’ she says.
In 1944, when Edie was 16, the Nazis occupied Hungary. Officers stormed into their apartment and forced them (minus
Klara, a violin prodigy who was studying in Budapest) on to cramped cattle cars. Her family, like the other Jews they travelled with, didn’t know where they were going. When they finally arrived at Auschwitz in Poland, men were moved into a separate line, and this was the last time Edie would see her father. Then, as Edie, Magda and their mother walked into the camp, Josef Mengele, who became known as the ‘Angel of Death’, pointed at Ilona and asked, ‘Sister or mother?’ Without thinking, Edie replied ‘mother’, and Ilona was herded into a separate line. As Edie tried to follow her, Mengele pushed her back and said: ‘You’ll see your mother soon, she’s just going for a shower.’ That shower, she’d soon realise, was actually a gas chamber. To this day, Edie has lived with the guilt that if she had said ‘sister’, perhaps her mother would have lived.
HELPING ONE ANOTHER
Edie channelled her energy into surviving. She was beaten, starved and lived in cramped conditions, watching people die all around her, and never knowing whether, when taking a shower, it would be water or gas coming out of the taps. ‘I told myself, if I can survive today, then tomorrow I will be free,’ she says. Her love for her sister Magda kept her going: ‘It was very important for us to look
I try to think young and live in the present
beyond the me, me, me, and find ways to commit to each other,’ she says. ‘Magda will tell you she took care of me, and I will tell you I took care of her.’
One night, Mengele demanded that Edie dance for him. ‘I closed my eyes, and imagined I was dancing to Romeo And Juliet at the Opera House in Budapest,’ she recalls. ‘My ballet master taught me that life comes from inside, and I was able to discover my inner resources.’ She was rewarded with a loaf of bread, which she shared with other girls at the camp – an act that would save her life. A few months later, on a so-called ‘death march’ with her back broken from brutal treatment, Edie nearly fell, and those who fell were shot dead. But those girls remembered her sharing bread with them. ‘They created a chair with their arms, and carried me so I wouldn’t die,’ she says. ‘We all tried to keep each other alive.’
After being moved between camps, Edie and Magda ended up at Gunskirchen Lager in 1945. They were liberated by American soldiers, pulled from a pile of bodies, barely alive. But freedom did not mean Edie’s pain and suffering were over. ‘Even though I was free physically, I didn’t know how to take responsibility for my freedom,’ she says. After they were reunited with their sister Klara, who had been hidden by her teacher, Edie was still waiting for her parents to come home. ‘When the reality hit me, I became suicidal,’ she recalls.
A NEW LIFE BEGINS
When she was in hospital being treated for her broken back, she met Béla, a charming Jewish Slovakian man who had also lost his parents, and the two married when Edie was just 19. ‘I wanted to be normal, and normal meant getting married,’ she says. But she didn’t love Béla – not yet, anyway. ‘Love? I was lonely, I was hungry, and he brought me salami!’ she says. When Edie fell pregnant with her daughter Marianne, she was determined to break free from the past: ‘I said to myself that she is the future, she is the one I survived for.’
With Europe still reeling from the war, the family emigrated to America in 1949. They arrived in Baltimore with nothing, and struggled with the alienation of immigrant life. ‘Marianne had to teach me how to speak English,’ she says. As Béla gained accountancy qualifications, Edie focused on having more children: Audrey and John. Although she tried to shield her children from her past, she suffered from post-traumatic stress, and something as simple as getting on a bus could trigger a panic attack. She still struggles with certain triggers to this day. ‘If I hear sirens or loud bangs, I automatically start shaking,’ she reveals.
‘However, these days, it actually helps me to realise that I’m here. I’m here, now.’
Edie’s journey towards healing didn’t truly begin until the 1960s, when her family moved to El Paso, Texas. ‘I wanted to be “for” something, rather than “against” something,’ she explains. She obtained a degree in psychology, but despite her academic success, she suffered ‘tremendous shame and guilt’.
During this time, Edie admits, she blamed Béla for her ‘chronic resentment and disappointment,’ and she chased achievement ‘as though it could make up for all I’d lost’. In 1969, the pair divorced. But, just two years later, she realised that her sadness and anger had little to do with Béla – ‘it had everything to do with me, with my own unresolved grief,’ she says. Béla wooed Edie all over again, and they remarried in 1971. ‘This time, I was a woman to a man, not a lonely little girl,’ she says. ‘There’s no going back; there is only new beginning.’
HEALING AND LIVING
Edie continued to experience ‘survivor’s guilt’ while working with paraplegic veterans from the Vietnam War. ‘I was wearing a white coat that said “Dr Eger, Department of Psychiatry”, and I felt like the biggest impostor,’ she remembers. ‘Partly because I could not take them further than I had gone myself.’ She realised she needed to confront her past. With Béla by her side, she visited Auschwitz in the 1980s. The trip was painful: she remembers being frightened by a museum guard who, in her mind, became a Nazi soldier. ‘I breathe, I wait for the moment to pass,’ she recalls, in The Choice. ‘I feel for the passport in my pocket. I can leave. I am free!’
This soon became a key feature of her therapy style: taking her patients’ ‘precious hands’ and leading them, physically or metaphorically, to the source of the pain so they could move forward. ‘If you don’t feel, you don’t heal,’ she says. Over time, she created her own therapy style, Choice Therapy, solidifying her as an established voice in the field. ‘Freedom is fundamentally about choice,’ she says. ‘While suffering is inevitable and universal, we can always choose how we respond.’
It’s clear that Edie chooses love and gratitude above all else. ‘I don’t have time to complain!’ she says. As we speak over Zoom, she sits holding hands with her daughter Marianne, also a psychologist, and beams with pride when she talks about her grandchildren and great-grandchildren. ‘They are the future to me,’ she says. ‘They are the ambassadors.’
Instead of looking back, Edie says,
‘I try to think young and live in the present.’ She finds so much joy in all life has to offer, like going to the theatre, eating great food and dancing. Béla died in 1993, and now Edie goes dancing with her boyfriend, Gene. She has some sage advice for anyone who is suffering, whether that’s losing loved ones, jobs or struggling with their mental health. ‘We cannot change the external environment, but we can change how we look within ourselves,’ she says. ‘Instead of saying “why me?”, we can say “what now?”.’
The Gift: 12 Lessons To Save Your Life (Rider) by Edith Eger is out 3 September