The trauma therapist who concealed her own past
By Mona Tadjalli-Mehr and Catrien Spijkerman
Holocaust survivor Edith Eva Eger becomes a world-renowned therapist who helps others overcome their traumas. Yet for a long time, she is unable to break the silence about her own experiences.
When concentration camp Gunskirchen is finally liberated in May 1945, there is no loud cheering. The liberation arrives quietly. Edith Eva Eger lies motionless among a pile of bodies, too weak to give any sign of life. It is her sister Magda who manages to attract the attention of the soldiers by holding up a sardine can and letting the sunlight reflect on it.
The sisters are saved just in time. But freedom does not immediately end hunger, disease or fear. The war might be over, but the world is not yet ready to welcome Eger and all the others back to it. And there is nothing even remotely close to a script for how to deal with what they lived through.
Romeo and Julia
As a young girl, Edith Eger is very talented at ballet and gymnastics. She is even considered for the national gymnastics team to represent her home country Hungary at the Olympics. Antisemitism puts an end to this dream though. Jews are not allowed to represent the country anymore.
At the age of sixteen she is arrested and deported, together with her parents and sister. Just before she gets off the cattle wagon to enter concentration camp Auschwitz, her mother says something that will become her lifeline: ‘No one can take away your thoughts.’
Her mother’s words are like protective armor to Eger. However starved, scared and powerless she might feel, she is always aware that the guards cannot touch her inner self; she alone is in charge of how she reacts. She refuses to be poisoned by the hatred around her. When the notorious Nazi doctor Josef Mengele – who conducts medical experiments on prisoners – asks her to dance for him, she does. She closes her eyes and imagines she is listening to Tchaikovsky. She dances Romeo and Julia as if she were performing in the Budapest Opera. In her mind she is somewhere else.
As the Allied troops advance in 1945, the prisoners are forced to leave Auschwitz. Together with all other captives, Eger and her sister Magda go on a death march to concentration camp Gunskirchen; a journey through collapsing Nazi Germany that lasts six months. During the long and grueling walk, some prisoners feel forced to go as far as to eat human flesh to survive. Determined never to cross such a moral boundary, Eger refuses to do so and only eats grass.
‘No, no, i wasn’t there’
Returning to their hometown after the war doesn’t take the pain away for Eger and her sister. For a long time Eger had kept hope that she would see her friend Eric again and that her parents would be there to hold her. But upon her return, she finds out that none of them survived.
Due to ongoing health issues, Eger ends up in a tuberculosis hospital in the mountains. After all she has been through, it is there she has to face her biggest ordeal: getting out of bed every day. What is the point? In Auschwitz there had been something to fight against, now the demons are inside her. Survival had always been her sole goal, but what now?
She goes on with her life as if nothing had happened. She gets married, has two daughters and emigrates to America. She focuses on the here and now. ‘When my daughter was ten, she found a book on concentration camps. When she asked me if I had been in one, I ran into the bathroom’, she shares in an interview later. ‘I wanted to yell: “No, no, no, I wasn’t there!” I was about to break the mirror, but I restrained myself.’
Eger doesn’t talk. Post-war reconstruction is about buildings, infrastructure and institutions. There is no room to process the atrocities or talk about emotions. The fact that major impactful events can also cause psychological wounds (trauma), is hardly known.
Eger feels unhappy. First, she blames her husband, she says in an interview. They get divorced. ‘But overtime I realised that it wasn’t him, it was me. I had cut off all contact with myself.’ At forty, she goes back to university and starts to study clinical psychology. ‘I think subconsciously I wanted to help myself.’ She tells her husband she misses him and that she is willing to work on herself. They remarry.
The wrong answer
Initially, Eger mainly helps others. She specialises in trauma therapy and teaches her patients they are not powerless victims. You can’t change your past, but you can change how you react to it, she tells her patients. ‘Don’t say: “Why did this happen to me?”, but rather: “How do I move on from here?”’
But she is struggling to meet her own standards. For decades she doesn’t speak about Auschwitz publicly, she struggles with flashbacks and she is consumed by an all-encompassing sense of guilt.
Until she visits Auschwitz again.
There she relives the moment when Josef Mengele asks her sixteen-year-old self if her mother was her mother or her sister. ‘I gave the answer I had refused to remember for years until I returned to Auschwitz’, she says in an interview. The moment I said she was my mother I knew I should have said she was my sister. Eger basically signed her mother’s death warrant: ‘older’ women were sent to the gas chambers directly.
‘The rest of my life I had to live with the idea that I could have saved her. Back in Auschwitz I realised that I could keep beating myself up over it, or I could choose to accept myself. I said the wrong thing, but I was only sixteen and hungry and terrified, surrounded by barking dogs and guns and uncertainty. It is ok for me to be human and imperfect.’
From that moment on, Eger wants to tell the truth about what had happened. That way her parents and millions of others would not have died in vain. In 2017, at ninety years old, Edith Eger writes her whole story down in a book. It becomes a bestseller. She calls it The Choice.
