Edith Eger

THE AWARDWINNING INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER 'Eger's remarkable spirit shines through in every word' Stylist In 1944, sixteen-year-old Edith Eger was sent to Auschwitz. There she endured unimaginable experiences, including being made to dance for the infamous Josef Mengele. Over the coming months, her bravery helped her sister to survive and led to her bunkmates rescuing her during a death march. When their camp was finally liberated, Edith was pulled from a pile of bodies, barely alive. In The Choice, Edith Eger shares her life, remarkable because her years in the concentration camp encouraged her to find a hope and resilience that most of us would never think was possible. It wasn't easy but, as she tried to find a future for herself after the Second World War, partly by helping many others through their own versions of trauma, she discovered an honesty, strength and empowerment within herself that makes for a memorable and inspiring read. Compelling, truly remarkable, and ultimately triumphant, The Choice is the unforgettable memoir of a woman who has seen the worst and lived the best.

The Choice

Omar

Survival is black and white, no "buts" can intrude when you are fighting for your life. Now the "buts" come rushing in. We have bread to eat. Yes, but we are penniless. You are gaining weight. Yes, but my heart is heavy. You are alive. Yes, but my mother is dead.

Good to remember. We all have different degrees of experiences in which we feel helpless. So when we try to tell someone to feel empowered, that they can do anything, that may simply not match their lived experiences. I see this a lot in the workplace. It takes a lot of changes and trials before this feeling of helplessness can be left behind, and it's very easy to reverse progress and fall back into helplessness and desperate when a single new experience takes agency out of someone's hands. 

Seligman's experiments-which were done with dogs and unfortu nately preceded current protections against cruelty to animals-taught him about the concept he called "learned helplessness." When dogs who were given painful shocks were able to stop the shocks by pressing a lever, they learned quickly to stop the pain. And they were able, in subsequent experiments, to figure out how to escape painful shocks administered in a kennel cage by leaping over a small barrier. Dogs who hadn't been given a means to stop the pain, however, had learned the lesson that they were helpless against it. When they were put in a kennel cage and administered shocks, they ignored the route to escape and just lay down in the kennel and whimpered. From this Seligman concluded that when we feel we have no control over our circumstances, when we believe that nothing we do can alleviate our suffering or improve our lives, we stop taking action on our own behalf because we believe there is no point. This is what happened at the camps, when former inmates left through the gates only to return to prison, to sit vacantly, unsure what to do with their freedom now that it had finally come.

Nothing is gained if we close our eyes to wrong, if we give someone a pass, if we dismiss accountability. But as my fellow survivors taught me, you can live to avenge the past, or you can live to enrich the present. You can live in the prison of the past, or you can let the past be the springboard that helps you reach the life you want now

Dr Eger goes on to say that we are all part Tom and part Chuck, the struggles are hard on us but they are also what can help us transform ourselves.

Today I have been assigned two new patients, both Vietnam veter- ans, both paraplegics. They have the same diagnosis (lower T-injury of the spinal cord), the same prognosis (compromised fertility and sexual function, unlikely to walk again, good control of hands and trunk). On my way to see them, I am unaware that one of them will have a life-changing effect on me. I meet Tom first. He is lying on his bed, curled up in a fetal position, cursing God and country. He seems imprisoned-by his injured body, by his misery, by his rage.

When I go to the other vet's room, I find Chuck out of bed and sitting in his wheelchair. "It's interesting," he says. "I've been given a second chance in life. Isn't it amazing?" He is brimming over with a sense of discovery and possibility. "I sit in this wheelchair, and I go out on the lawn, out on the grounds, and the flowers are much closer. I can see my children's eyes."

Expression is the opposite of depression.

But from this moment on, I understood that feelings, no matter how powerful, aren't fatal. And they are temporary. Suppressing the feelings only makes it harder to let them go. Expression is the opposite of depression.

Reading this stirred so much emotion in me. I just can't imagine what it must be like to feel the pressure of going back to a place that forces you to face trauma in your past like this. 

But when I tell Béla that I have decided to decline the invitation, he grabs my shoulder. "If you don't go to Germany," he says, "then Hitler won the war."

That's why I'm anxious. That's why I'm sad. That's why I can't risk going to Germany. It's not that I'm wrong to feel anxious and sad and afraid. It's not that there isn't real trauma at the core of my life. And it's not that Hitler and Mengele and every other perpetrator of violence or cruelty shouldn't be held accountable for the harm they cause. But if I stay on the seesaw, I am holding the past responsible for what I choose to do now.

Time doesn't heal. It's what you do with the time. Healing is possible when we choose to take responsibility, when we choose to take risks, and finally, when we choose to release the wound, to let go of the past or the grief.

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.

The Choice quotes

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