Gift : 12 Lessons to Save Your Life

by Edith Eger

  A few years later, he asked his father’s other brother for permission to go through old family documents and memorabilia stored in the back of his house. Instinct told him that he might find in his grandfather’s past something that could explain the trench of unrest that linked the generations of his family—his father’s and uncles’ struggles with alcohol, their shrouded, closed-off manner that Andreas sensed had something to do with shame.

  He read and sorted for days, and little by little, more pieces emerged. His grandfather’s old passport, stamped by immigration in Chile, showing his arrival in 1930 and departure in 1931. A telegram sent to his grandfather in 1942 at his job in Frankfurt where he worked as an office clerk for one of the big industrial conglomerates. Have you removed all the bicycles and belongings from the house in Frankfurt? the telegram read, signed by his grandfather’s brother. A peculiar message.

  Then Andreas read the return address. His great-uncle had sent the message to his grandfather from the Gestapo headquarters in Marseille. How had his great-uncle been allowed to access a Nazi Telex machine? Why had his grandfather received a personal message from a Gestapo office? How deep did his family’s Nazi connection go?

  He kept digging through documents and found a letter from a family friend, notifying them that his great-uncle had died during the war on a withdrawal mission in France when his car went over a mine. No personal effects or ID tags had been recovered from the explosion. He also discovered letters from his grandfather to his grandmother, written from a prisoner-of-war camp in southern Germany after the war. What alleged or actual offenses had put his grandfather in prison?

  He searched for years for more information, but hit only dead ends. Despite his grandfather’s imprisonment, there didn’t appear to be any evidence of a trial or an investigation into his grandfather’s criminal acts. In a last-ditch effort to fill in the blanks in his family’s past, Andreas contacted archives of the home state where his grandparents had lived after the war. At last, he was handed a slim file. There were only a few sheets of paper inside, including a typed chronology that filled just half the page.

  In 1927, when he was twenty years old, his grandfather had joined the SA—the Sturmabteilung, the first Nazi Party paramilitary group established to persecute Jews by throwing stones through windows and setting fire to city blocks, creating a climate of fear and violence and contributing to Hitler’s rise to power. He left the SA in 1930—the year he’d gone to Chile—only to return to Germany a few months later, rejoin the SA, and rise in the ranks to become a squad leader and a member of the Nazi Party. These decisions in 1933 facilitated his job at the finance administration office in Frankfurt, and his mayorship in the village where Andreas’s father had pointed to his name—Hermann Neumann—the four syllables that denoted the dark legacy he’d inherited.

  “I share his name,” Andreas said. “My cells stem from his cells. In a foundational way, I’m a result—a product—of what happened.”

  His very identity felt contaminated.

  And history seemed to be repeating. At the same time that he learned the truth about his grandfather, the right-wing movement was gaining energy in an economically devastated eastern Germany.

  “I saw pictures of people running after immigrants in Chemnitz,” he said, “and I knew my grandfather had done the same.”

  He officially changed his middle name from Hermann to Phileas, after the character Phileas Fogg in Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days, a book that sparked Andreas’s curiosity about the world during his childhood days. The name change was an act to distance himself from his grandfather, to sever the personal connection to his grandfather’s wrongs, to say, “Yes, I am Hermann’s grandson, and I don’t need to carry his first name.”

  Andreas said he is still trying to release the burden of the past—the relentless shame that he carries the blood of a perpetrator, that his very life came into being as a result of the benefits his grandfather garnered from hurting others, from injustice. It’s a collective guilt that many German people unfortunately carry. If you are German, or Hutu, or a descendant of those who enforced apartheid or genocide or another instance of systemic violence and injustice, I am telling you: it wasn’t you. Assign the blame to the perpetrators, and then decide.

  “How long are you going to keep picking this up and carrying it around?” I asked Andreas. “What’s the legacy you want to pass on?”

  Do you want to stay beholden to the past? Or can you find a way to release your loved ones—and yourself?

  Until our trip to Europe, I had no idea how much my own daughter was struggling with this question.

  Neither Audrey nor I remember ever speaking of my past during her childhood. She learned about the Holocaust at Sunday school and asked Béla about it. He told her I’d been in Auschwitz. Something clicked into place. She’d sensed the presence of things we weren’t talking about; she knew there was pain. Yet because she didn’t know to ask—or at some level didn’t want to know—the truth had remained hidden.

  Now it was in full view. When I began to talk more openly and publicly about my past, Audrey didn’t know what to do with the feelings my history elicited in her. She wondered how my suffering, and Béla’s, too, might have transferred to her DNA, and worried she would pass the burden of trauma on to her own children. For years, she avoided books, films, museums, and events that dealt with the Holocaust.

  When we carry a difficult legacy, we often react in one of two ways: we resist it or detach from it; we fight it or run away. Though from opposite sides of the same tragedy, Andreas and Audrey were walking the same path: reckoning with a brutal truth, and figuring out how to hold it and carry it forward.

  Other than staying silent in an effort to protect my children from my pain, I hadn’t considered the broader impact of legacy until the early 1980s, when a fourteen-year-old boy came to his court-appointed therapy session wearing a brown shirt and brown boots, leaned his elbow on the table, and started ranting about how to make America white again, about how to kill all the Jews, niggers, Mexicans, and chinks. Fury swept through me. I wanted so badly to shake him, to say, “How dare you talk like that? Do you know who I am? My mother died in a gas chamber!” Just when I thought I might reach out my hands and throttle him, I heard a voice within say, “Find the bigot in you.”

  Impossible, I thought. I’m not a bigot. I’m a Holocaust survivor and an immigrant. I lost my parents to hate. I used the “colored” bathroom at the factory in Baltimore in solidarity with my African American coworkers. I marched for civil rights with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. I’m not a bigot!

  But to stop bigotry means you start with yourself. You let go of judgment and choose compassion.

  I took a deep breath, leaned in, gazed at him with as much kindness as I could muster, and said, “Tell me more.”

  It was a tiny gesture of acceptance—not of his ideology, but of his personhood. And it was enough for him to speak a little of his lonely childhood, absentee parents, and severe neglect. Hearing his story reminded me that he hadn’t joined an extremist group because he was born with hate. He was seeking what we all want: acceptance, attention, affection. It’s not an excuse. But attacking him would only nourish the seeds of worthlessness his upbringing had sown. I had the choice to alienate him further, or give him another version of refuge and belonging.

  I never saw him again. I don’t know if he continued on the path of prejudice, crime, and violence, or if he was able to heal and turn his life around. I do know that he walked in ready to kill someone like me, and he left in a softer mood.

  Even a Nazi can be a messenger of God. This boy was my teacher, guiding me to the choice I always have to replace judgment with compassion—to recognize our shared humanity and practice love.

  All over the world, a resurgence of fascism looms. My great-grandsons stand to inherit a world still gripped by prejudice and hate, where children yell racial epithets on the playground and carry guns to school, where nations build
walls to deny asylum to fellow humans. In this state of fear and vulnerability, it’s tempting to hate the haters. But I feel sorry for people who are taught to hate.

  And I identify with them. What if I’d been born a German gentile instead of a Hungarian Jew? What if I’d heard Hitler proclaim, “Today, Germany, tomorrow, the world”? I, too, could have been a Hitler Youth, a guard at Ravensbrück.

  We’re not all descendants of Nazis. But we each have a Nazi within.

  Freedom means choosing, every moment, whether we reach for our inner Nazi or our inner Gandhi. For the love we were born with or the hate we learned.

  The inner Nazi is the part of you that has the capacity to judge and withhold compassion, that denies you the permission to be free and victimizes others when things don’t go your way.

  I’m still learning to let go of my inner Nazi.

  I had lunch the other day at a fancy country club with women looking like a million dollars, every one of them. Why am I spending an afternoon with people who look like Barbie dolls? I thought. Then I caught myself in the act of judging others, engaging in the same us-versus-them mentality that killed my parents. When I put my prejudice aside, I discovered that the women were deep thinkers, that they’d experienced difficulty and pain. I’d been ready to write them off out of hand.

  Another evening I spoke at a Chabad where a fellow survivor was in attendance. During the question-and-answer period following my talk, he asked, “Why did you fall into line so easily in Auschwitz? Why didn’t you rebel?” His voice rose as he spoke. I started to explain that if I’d tried to fight a guard, I would have been shot right away. Rebellion wouldn’t have freed me. I’d have missed out on the rest of my life. But then I realized I was reacting to his agitation by trying to defend my choices in the past. What about the present moment? Perhaps this was the one opportunity I’d have in my life to offer this man compassion. “Thank you so much for being here,” I said. “Thank you for sharing your experience.”

  When we live in the prison of judgment, we don’t just victimize others. We victimize ourselves.

  Alex was on a journey toward self-compassion when we met. She showed me the tattoo on her arm. RAGE, it said. And then below, LOVE.

  “That’s how I grew up,” she said. “My dad was rage. My mom was love.”

  Her father was a police officer who raised her and her brother in a climate of wipe that look off your face; don’t be a burden; show no emotion; act like you’re fine; mistakes aren’t allowed. He often came home charged up about work, and Alex learned early to retreat to her room when his anger started to boil.

  “I always thought it was my fault,” she told me. “I didn’t know what he was so upset about. No one ever told me, ‘This isn’t about you. You didn’t do anything wrong.’ I grew up thinking I was the one who made him angry, that there was something wrong with me.”

  This sense of blame and judgment became so internalized that as an adult she was afraid to ask a store clerk to retrieve an item from a high shelf.

  “I was sure they’d think, ‘What an idiot.’ ”

  Alcohol provided temporary relief from her inhibitions, worry, and fear. Until she ended up in rehab.

  When I spoke to Alex, she’d been sober for thirteen years and had recently left the strenuous emergency dispatcher job she’d worked at for more than twenty years, which was difficult to balance with the needs of her disabled daughter. This is a new theme in her life: to respond to herself with kindness.

  And it’s a goal she feels is thwarted every time she is with her family. While her mom embodies warmth, safety, kindness, and love, serving as the family peacekeeper, able to go with the flow, dropping everything to be there for her kids and grandkids, making even a routine family dinner feel as special as a holiday, Alex’s dad is still angry and brooding. She monitors him with a watchful eye, reading his behavior so she can protect herself.

  On a recent camping trip with her parents, she noticed all the negative comments her dad made about other people.

  “The people next door were packing up their campsite and my dad said, ‘This is my favorite part—when I watch the idiots try to figure out what they’re doing.’ That’s how I grew up. My father watching and laughing when people make mistakes. No wonder I used to assume people were thinking terrible things about me! No wonder I used to watch him for any sign of a twitch or grimace—a clue to do whatever I could to keep him from getting angry. He scared me my whole life.”

  “The most obnoxious person is your best teacher,” I told her. “He teaches you what you don’t like in him, to examine in yourself. So how much time do you spend judging yourself? Scaring yourself?”

  We looked at the ways she shut herself down. The Spanish class she wanted to take but didn’t dare sign up for, the gym she was afraid to join.

  We’re all victims of victims. How far back do you want to go, searching for the source? It’s better to start with yourself.

  A few months later, Alex shared that she’d worked up the courage and self-acceptance to register for the Spanish class and join the gym. “I’ve been welcomed with open arms,” she said. “They’ve even recruited me to compete with the women’s powerlifting team.”

  When we relinquish our inner Nazi, we disarm the internal and external forces that have been holding us back.

  “Half of you is your father,” I told Alex. “Throw white light his way. Wrap him up in white light.”

  It’s what I learned in Auschwitz. If I tried to fight the guards, I’d be shot. If I tried to flee, I’d run into the barbed wire and be electrocuted. So I turned my hatred into pity. I chose to feel sorry for the guards. They’d been brainwashed. They’d had their innocence stolen. They came to Auschwitz to throw children into a gas chamber, thinking they were ridding the world from a cancer. They’d lost their freedom. I still had mine.

  A few months after our visit to Lausanne, Audrey returned to the International Institute of Management Development to give a workshop with Andreas at the High Performance Leadership program.

  “We grew up on opposite sides of the transmission line of secrets and horror,” Andreas said. Now they’re collaborating to help today’s business leaders focus on inner healing—to face the past and chart the course toward a better reality.

  Among their students are Europeans, primarily from Germany and neighboring countries, who are in their thirties, forties, and fifties—a generation or two removed from WWII, curious about what happened in their families during the war. Other students are from places in Africa and southeastern Europe that have been ravaged by violence, who are figuring out how to face and release the tragedies their families have experienced—or inflicted. This workshop on inner healing, led by the daughter of a survivor and the grandson of a Nazi, is such a beautiful example of not only how to heal but why. For ourselves, and also for what our healing gives the world. For the new legacy we pass on.

  “I used to participate in the silence about the past,” Audrey said. “I was afraid of the pain.” But she realized that in avoiding learning more she was holding on to grief. “Now I’d rather be curious,” she said. “And I want to help.”

  Andreas agreed.

  “It finally became clear to me why I invested so much time in the past,” he said. “I think my ancestors would want corrective action to happen, insofar as it’s possible. Realizing this, I’m much more at peace with them. I can stop questioning why they did what they did. I can focus on what I do now to contribute to peace.”

  We’re born to love; we learn to hate. It’s up to us what we reach for.

  KEYS TO FREE YOURSELF FROM JUDGMENT

  Our best teachers. The most toxic, obnoxious people in our lives can be our best teachers. The next time you’re in the presence of someone who irks or offends you, soften your eyes and tell yourself, “Human, no more, no less. Human, like me.” Then ask, “What are you here to teach me?”

  We’re born to love; we learn to hate. Make a list of the messages you heard gro
wing up that divided people into categories: us/them; good/bad; right/wrong. Circle any of these messages that describe how you see the world today. Notice where you may be holding on to judgment. How is this judgment affecting your relationships? Is it limiting your choices or ability to take risks?

  What’s the legacy you want to pass on? We can’t choose what our ancestors did, or what was done to them. But we get to create the recipe that’s handed down. Write a recipe for a life well-lived. Take the good things from your family’s past and add your own ingredients. Give the next generation something delicious and nourishing to build on.

  Chapter 11 IF I SURVIVE TODAY, TOMORROW I WILL BE FREE

  The Prison of Hopelessness

  In Auschwitz, I was haunted by a persistent thought: does anyone know Magda and I are here?

  Any answer pointed to hopelessness. If people knew and didn’t intervene, then what was the value of my life? And if no one knew, how would we ever get out?

  When hopelessness overwhelmed me, I’d think of what my mother had told me in the dark, crowded cattle car on our way to prison: “We don’t know where we’re going. We don’t know what’s going to happen. Just remember, no one can take away what you’ve put in your mind.”

  During the long, terrible days and nights in prison, I’d choose what to hold in my mind. I’d think of my boyfriend, Eric, how our romance kindled at a time of war, how we’d go picnicking by the river, eating my mother’s delicious fried chicken and potato salad, planning our future. I’d think of dancing with him in the dress my father had made just before we were forced out of our home—how I tested the dress to make sure I could dance in it, to make sure the skirt twirled, how Eric’s hands rested against the thin suede belt at my waist. I’d think of the last words he said to me as he watched my transport leave the brick factory: “I’ll never forget your eyes. I’ll never forget your hands.” And I’d picture our reunion, how we would melt into each other’s arms with joy and relief. These thoughts were like a candle I held through the very darkest hours and months. It’s not that daydreaming about Eric erased the horror. It didn’t bring back my parents or ease the pain of their deaths—or the looming threat of my own. But thinking of him helped me see past where I was, to envision a tomorrow that included my beloved, to keep starvation and torture in perspective. I was living through hell on earth—and it was temporary. If it was temporary, it could be survived.