The Choice

by Edith Eger

  Last year I received a Christmas card from Renée and Greg. It shows them standing by the Christmas tree with their daughter, a beautiful girl in a red dress. Greg embraces his daughter in one arm, his wife in the other. Over Renée’s shoulder, a picture of Jeremy sits on the mantel. It’s his last school picture, he wears a blue shirt, his smile larger than life. He isn’t the void in the family. He isn’t the shrine. He is present, he is always with them.

  My mother’s mother’s portrait now lives in Magda’s house in Baltimore, above her piano, where she still gives lessons, where she guides her students with logic and heart. When Magda had surgery recently, she asked her daughter, Ilona, to bring our mother’s picture to the hospital so that Magda could do what our mother taught us: to call on the dead for strength, to let the dead live on in our hearts, to let our suffering and our fear lead us back to our love.

  “Do you still have nightmares?” I asked Magda the other day.

  “Yes. Always. Don’t you?”

  “Yes,” I told my sister. “I do.”

  I went back to Auschwitz and released the past, forgave myself. I went home and thought, “I’m done!” But closure is temporary. It’s not over till it’s over.

  Despite—no, because of—our past, Magda and I have found meaning and purpose in different ways in the more than seventy years since liberation. I have discovered the healing arts. Magda has remained a devoted pianist and piano teacher, and she has discovered new passions: bridge and gospel music. Gospel, because it sounds like crying—it is the strength of all the emotion let out. And bridge, because there’s strategy and control—a way to win. She is a reigning bridge champion; she hangs her framed awards on the wall in her house opposite our grandmother’s portrait.

  Both of my sisters have protected and inspired me, have taught me to survive. Klara became a violinist in the Sydney Symphony Orchestra. Until the day she died—in her early eighties, of Alzheimer’s—she called me “little one.” More so than Magda or I did, Klara remained immersed in Jewish Hungarian immigrant culture. Béla and I loved to visit her and Csicsi, to enjoy the food, the language, the culture of our youth. We weren’t able to be together, all of us survivors, very often, but we did our best to gather up for major events—more celebrations our parents would not be present to witness. In the early 1980s, we met in Sydney for Klara’s daughter’s wedding. The three of us sisters had awaited this reunion with happy anticipation, and when we were finally together again, we went into a frenzy of embraces as emotional as the ones we shared in Košice when we found one another alive after the war.

  No matter that we were now middle-aged women, no matter how far we had come in our lives, once in one another’s company it was funny how quickly we fell into the old patterns of our youth. Klara was in the spotlight, bossing us around, smothering us with attention; Magda was competitive and rebellious; I was the peacemaker, hustling between my sisters, soothing their conflicts, hiding my own thoughts. How easily we can make even the warmth and safety of family into a kind of prison. We rely on our old coping mechanisms. We become the person we think we need to be to please others. It takes willpower and choice not to step back into the confining roles we mistakenly believe will keep us safe and protected.

  The night before the wedding, Magda and I came upon Klara alone in her daughter’s childhood bedroom, playing with her daughter’s old dolls. What we witnessed was more than a mother’s nostalgia over her grown child. Klara was caught up in her make-believe game. She was playing as a child would. My sister had never had a childhood, I realized. She was always the violin prodigy. She never got to be a little girl. When she wasn’t performing onstage, she performed for me and Magda, becoming our caretaker, our little mother. Now, as a middle-aged woman, she was trying to give herself the childhood she had never been allowed. Embarrassed to have been discovered with the dolls, Klara lashed out at us. “It’s too bad I wasn’t at Auschwitz,” she said. “If I’d been there, our mother would have lived.”

  It was terrible to hear her say it. I felt all my old survivor’s guilt rushing back, the horror of the word I spoke that first day of Auschwitz, the horror of remembering it, of confronting that old, long-buried belief, however erroneous, that I had sent our mother to her death.

  But I wasn’t a prisoner anymore. I could see my sister’s prison at work, hear her guilt and grief clawing through the blame she threw at me and Magda. And I could choose my own freedom. I could name my own feelings, of rage, worthlessness, sorrow, regret, I could let them swirl, let them rise and fall, let them pass. And I could risk letting go of the need to punish myself for having lived. I could release my guilt and reclaim my whole pure self.

  There is the wound. And there is what comes out of it. I went back to Auschwitz searching for the feel of death so that I could finally exorcise it. What I found was my inner truth, the self I wanted to reclaim, my strength and my innocence.

  CHAPTER 23

  Liberation Day

  IN THE SUMMER of 2010, I was invited to Fort Carson, Colorado, to address an Army unit returning from combat in Afghanistan, a unit with a high suicide rate. I was there to talk about my own trauma—how I survived it, how I survived the return to everyday life, how I chose to be free—so the soldiers might also adjust more easefully to life after war. As I climbed up to the podium, I experienced a few brief internal skirmishes of discomfort, the old habits of being hard on myself, of wondering what a little Hungarian ballet student has to offer men and women of war. I reminded myself that I was there to share the most important truth I know, that the biggest prison is in your own mind, and in your pocket you already hold the key: the willingness to take absolute responsibility for your life; the willingness to risk; the willingness to release yourself from judgment and reclaim your innocence, accepting and loving yourself for who you really are—human, imperfect, and whole.

  I called on my parents for strength, and my children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren too. Everything they’ve taught me, everything they’ve compelled me to discover. “My mama told me something I will never forget,” I began. “She said, ‘We don’t know where we’re going, we don’t know what’s going to happen, but no one can take away from you what you put in your own mind.’”

  I have said these words countless times, to Navy SEALs and crisis first responders, to POWs and their advocates at the Department of Veterans Affairs, to oncologists and people living with cancer, to Righteous Gentiles, to parents and children, to Christians and Muslims and Buddhists and Jews, to law students and at-risk youth, to people grieving the loss of a loved one, to people preparing to die, and sometimes I spin when I say them, with gratitude, with sorrow. This time as I said the words, I almost fell from the stage. I was overcome by sensations, by sense memories I’ve stored deep inside: the smell of muddy grass, the fierce sweet taste of M&M’s. It took me a long moment to understand what was triggering the flashback. But then I realized: flanking the room were flags and insignias, and everywhere I saw an emblem I hadn’t thought about consciously for many, many years, but one that is as significant to me as the letters that spell my own name—the insignia the GI who liberated me on May 4, 1945, wore on his sleeve—a red circle with a jagged blue 71 in the center. I had been brought to Fort Carson to address the Seventy-first Infantry, the unit that sixty-five years ago had liberated me. I was bringing my story of freedom to the survivors of war who once brought freedom to me.

  I used to ask, Why me? Why did I survive? I have learned to ask a different question: Why not me? Standing on a stage surrounded by the next generation of freedom fighters, I could see in my conscious awareness something that is often elusive, often invisible: that to run away from the past or to fight against our present pain is to imprison ourselves. Freedom is in accepting what is and forgiving ourselves, in opening our hearts to discover the miracles that exist now.

  I laughed and wept on the stage. I was so full of joyful adrenaline that I could barely get out the words: “Thank you,” I told the
soldiers. “Your sacrifice, your suffering, have meaning—and when you can discover that truth within, you will be free.” I ended my speech the way I always do, the way I always will, as long as my body will let me: with a high kick. Here I am! my kick says. I made it!

  And here you are. Here you are! In the sacred present. I can’t heal you—or anyone—but I can celebrate your choice to dismantle the prison in your mind, brick by brick. You can’t change what happened, you can’t change what you did or what was done to you. But you can choose how you live now.

  My precious, you can choose to be free.

  Acknowledgments

  I BELIEVE THAT people don’t come to me—they are sent to me. I offer my eternal gratitude to the many extraordinary people who have been sent to me, without whom my life wouldn’t be what it is, and without whom this book wouldn’t exist:

  First and foremost, my precious sister Magda Gilbert—who is ninety-five years old and still blossoming, who kept me alive in Auschwitz—and her devoted daughter Ilona Shillman, who fights for the family like no other.

  Klara Korda—who was larger than life, who truly became my second mom, who made every visit to Sydney a honeymoon, who created Friday night dinners like our mother’s, everything artfully done by hand—and Jeanie and Charlotte, the women following in her line. (Remember the Hungarian song? No, no, we’re not going away until you kick us out!)

  My patients, the unique and one-of-a-kind humans who have taught me that healing isn’t about recovery; it’s about discovery. Discovering hope in hopelessness, discovering an answer where there doesn’t seem to be one, discovering that it’s not what happens that matters—it’s what you do with it.

  My wonderful teachers and mentors: Professor Whitworth; John Haddox, who introduced me to the existentialists and phenomenologists; Ed Leonard; Carl Rogers; Richard Farson; and especially Viktor Frankl, whose book gave me the verbal capacity to share my secret, whose letters showed me I didn’t have to run away anymore, and whose guidance helped me discover not only that I survived, but how I could help others to survive.

  My amazing colleagues and friends in the healing arts: Dr. Harold Kolmer, Dr. Sid Zisook, Dr. Saul Levine, Steven Smith, Michael Curd, David Woehr, Bob Kaufman (my “adopted son”), Charlie Hogue, Patty Heffernan, and especially Phil Zimbardo, my “baby brother,” who wouldn’t rest until he’d helped find this book a publishing home.

  The many people who have invited me to bring my story to audiences around the world, including: Howard and Henriette Peckett of YPO; Dr. Jim Henry; Dr. Sean Daneshmand and his wife, Marjan, of The Miracle Circle; Mike Hoge of Wingmen Ministries; and the International Conference of Logotherapy.

  My friends and healers: Gloria Lavis; Sylvia Wechter and Edy Schroder, my treasured fellow Musketeers; Lisa Kelty; Wendy Walker; Flora Sullivan; Katrine Gilcrest, mother of nine, who calls me Mom, whom I can count on day and night; Dory Bitry, Shirley Godwin, and Jeremy and Inette Forbs, with whom I can talk so openly about the ages and stages of our lives and how to make the best out of what we have as we age; my doctors, Sabina Wallach and Scott McCaul; my acupuncturist, Bambi Merryweather; Marcella Grell, my companion and friend who has taken exceptional care of me and my home for the last sixteen years and who always tells me what she thinks right out.

  Béla. Life mate. Soul mate. Father of my children. Loving, committed partner who risked it all to build a new life with me in America. You used to say, when I was consulting for the military and we traveled Europe together, “Edie works, and I eat.” Béla, it was our rich life together that was the true feast. I love you.

  All of my love and gratitude to my children: my son, John Eger, who has taught me how not to be a victim and who has never given up the fight for people living with disabilities; my daughters, Marianne Engle and Audrey Thompson, who have offered me unceasing moral support and loving comfort during the many months of writing, and who understood, perhaps before I did, that it would be more difficult for me to relive the past than it was to survive Auschwitz. In Auschwitz, I could think only about my survival needs; to write this book required that I feel all of the feelings. I couldn’t have taken the risk without your strength and love.

  And thank you to my children’s and grandchildren’s beautiful spouses and life partners, the people who keep adding branches to the family tree: Rob Engle, Dale Thompson, Lourdes, Justin Richland, John Williamson, and Illynger Engle.

  My nephew Richard Eger—my Dickie-boy—and his wife, Byrne, thank you for being true relatives, for watching over me and my health and celebrating holidays together.

  When our first grandchild was born Béla said, “Three generations—that’s the best revenge to Hitler.” Now we are four! Thank you to the next generation, to Silas, Graham, and Hale. Every time I hear you call me GG Dicu my heart goes pitter-patter.

  Eugene Cook, my dancing partner and soul mate, a gentle man and a gentleman. Thank you for reminding me that love isn’t what we feel—it’s what we do. You’re there for me always, every step and every word. Let’s keep dancing the boogie-woogie as long as we’re able.

  Finally, the people who word by word and page by page helped me bring this book into being, a collaboration that from the beginning has felt meant to be:

  The talented Nan Graham and Roz Lippel and their able staff at Scribner. How lucky I am to have been sent the most qualified editors with hearts as brilliant as their minds. Your editorial wisdom, persistence, and human compassion helped this book become what I always hoped it could be: an instrument of healing.

  Esmé Schwall Weigand, my co-writer—you didn’t just find the words. You became me. Thank you for being my ophthalmologist, for your ability to see my healing journey from so many different perspectives.

  Doug Abrams, world-class agent and world’s truest mensch, thank you for being a person with the backbone and character and soul to commit himself to make the world a better place. Your presence on the planet is an absolute gift.

  To all: In my ninety years of life I have never felt so blessed and grateful—or so young! Thank you.

  Index

  The page references in this index correspond to the printed edition from which this ebook was created. To find a specific word or phrase from the index, please use the search feature of your ebook reader.

  anorexia (eating disorder) treatment, 239–51

  anti-Semitism, 25, 96–7, 129

  Arab-Israeli War, 160

  Arpad (friend), 217–19, 229

  Auschwitz concentration camp, Germany, 45–64

  arrival at, 45–6

  barracks at, 50–1

  Béla’s mother’s death in, 129

  blood donations for wounded German soldiers in, 65

  “Blue Danube” dance performance for Mengele in, 51–3, 127, 211

  calling on memories of mother during, 53, 55–6, 57, 59

  connection between Edith and Magda during, 48–51, 53–4, 61–3, 64, 271

  Edith’s first pregnancy and memories of, 142

  Edith’s later return to, 291, 292–309, 331, 354, 357

  fantasies of Eric in, 58, 61, 76–7, 80–1

  first day with head shaving and waiting for uniforms at, 48–51

  flashbacks to, 174, 269, 313, 359

  food fantasies and desires during, 54–6

  Frankl’s experiences in, 211

  Horthy’s hold on deportation of Jews to, 61

  inner strength of prisoners and hope for survival in, 57–8, 174

  kapos (prisoner administrators) at, 46–7, 48, 50, 58, 89, 203

  keeping in line with Magda in, 63

  kindness of guard at, 63

  later memories of, 7

  liberation of, 64

  line for tattooing in, 62–3

  orchestra at, 51–2

  rules of survival at, 54–7

  separation from mother upon arrival at, 46, 48

  sharing of bread at, 53–4, 83–4

  total number of dead at, 302

  train trans
port with Magda to thread factory work, 63–4

  Australia, Klara’s move to, 139, 158, 162, 171

  ballet

  childhood training in, 20–1, 23, 27, 48, 179, 208, 246

  dancing for life and, 53

  Mengele’s viewing of routine from, 51–3

  message about “ecstasy in life” in, 21, 48, 208

  Baltimore

  Béla’s first job in, 177, 181

  Edith’s clothing factory work in, 171, 174

  Edith’s job moves in, 183–4

  Edith’s struggles in adjusting to life in, 172–3, 175, 176–7, 183–4

  first apartment in, 178

  lack of job prospects in, 186–7

  life with Béla’s brother in, 171–2, 177

  Magda’s move to, 184–5

  move to El Paso from, 188

  Bartók, Béla, 35

  Berchtesgaden, Germany, visit, 273–91

  arrival at hotel for, 276–7

  background on audience for training during, 273–4

  daughter’s advice on visit to, 268–9

  Edith’s keynote address during, 278–81

  Edith’s thoughts about her legacy from war experiences and, 271–2

  invitation to address military chaplains at, 266–7

  train trip to, 275–6

  visit to Hitler’s old residence during, 277–8, 280

  Bricha, 148, 150, 160, 161

  calamity theory of growth, 229

  catatonia, 3–6, 257

  Chamberlain, Neville, 273

  Choice Therapy, 227

  Communists, in Czechoslovakia

  Béla’s arrest by, 150–5

  Béla’s relationship with, 145, 146, 147

  immigration and need to escape from, 139, 147, 153, 155

  roster of permissible baby names kept by, 142

  concentration camps. See also Auschwitz concentration camp; Gunskirchen Lager concentration camp; Mauthausen concentration camp

  connection between Edith and Magda in, 48, 51, 53–54, 61–3, 64, 66–9, 88, 90–1, 140, 141–271