RIP Edith Eger, Survivor of Auschwitz, Author of The Choice
I rated Eger’s book The Choice as one of My favorite books and movies of 2025 as well as my life, comparable to Victor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning. I listened to The Choice and I don’t remember another book that led me to tears so much. I was outright bawling. I can’t recommend it enough.
I found her through Philip Zimbardo’s work. They were friends and colleagues. She knew Frankl too.
She died on April 27. I recommend starting with The Choice, then watching videos of her, of which there are plenty. Her book became an international bestseller. Oprah featured her. She was covered globally.
Here are some articles, followed by some quotes from them.
- Forced to dance for Mengele at Auschwitz, she was called to help others heal: Psychologist Edith Eger, who has died at 98, treated veterans and abuse victims. She had to heal herself first, she said, to truly help her patients. (Washington Post)
- ‘They sent my mother to the gas chamber and I blamed myself’ (Irish Independent)
- Edith Eger: Part of me is still in Auschwitz. But not the bigger part. Not the better part (The Times of London)
- Mind power in Auschwitz – and healing decades later (The Guardian)
- A Holocaust Survivor’s Secret Sadness: My mother died in Auschwitz. I survived, but it took me decades to realize that this was part of my daughters’ inheritance, too. (The Atlantic)
The beguilingly simple idea, distilled from her experiences at Auschwitz, that provides the core of The Choice: “Suffering is universal. But victimhood is optional.”
The concentration camps were run by Nazi guards, Ukrainian mercenaries and Jewish prisoners, who did most of the manual labour. “They were worse than the Nazis in some cases,” Edith recalls. “They displayed displaced aggression. One time a kapo beat me up badly with a dog leash because I wanted to go to the bathroom. She was another prisoner. But of course she was suffering terribly as well. She took her anger out on me.”
“The Nazi guards were prisoners too. I prayed for them. I turned hatred into pity. I never told anyone that they were spending their days murdering people. What kind of life was that for them? They had been brainwashed. Their own youth had been taken away from them.”
“After the war I was suicidal. I woke up in the morning and realised my parents were not there and it really upset me. Eventually I realised that I had to live my life for something.”
“It’s painful to look back at the things I went through, but necessary too. Forgiveness isn’t something I give to the Nazis, it’s a gift I give to myself, to say I won’t be a hostage or a prisoner to the past. I am an old woman now – I am very selective about who gets my anger.
“Auschwitz was my classroom, a place where I was forced to adapt and improve myself. And that, in a strange way, was a gift.”
It was during this return to Auschwitz that Eger confronted a devastating truth, a memory she’d hidden even from herself. When she had arrived at Auschwitz and awaited selection, Mengele had looked at her mother’s unlined face, then turned to Eger and asked if this was her “mother” or her “sister”. Eger didn’t think about which word would protect her – she simply told him the truth. Her mother was moved to the other line – the line that led straight to the gas chamber.
“Until I returned, I was my own worst enemy,” she says. “I not only had survivor’s guilt, I had survivor’s shame. I didn’t need a Hitler out there, I had a Hitler in me telling me I was unworthy, that I didn’t deserve to survive. On that day, I allowed myself to be human – not superhuman and not subhuman. We do things the way human beings do and we make mistakes. If I had known better, I would have done better – I would have, believe me. But unless we acknowledge that we cannot change the past, we cannot really heal and live life.”
Every part of her experience has informed her work. “I studied it and I lived it,” she says. “There is a difference between all the knowledge you get from books and all the clinical experience – both of which I have – and the ‘life experience’. That’s what I use most. I help people realise that the biggest prison is in their mind – and to be free of the past means not to run from it or forget it, but to face it. I see my work as my calling. And I’m still not done.”
Eger once had a neo-Nazi patient. She discovered that his life had been wrecked by his parents’ involvement in David Koresh’s Waco cult. She feels empathy even for the Pittsburgh gunman. “I think we are all good people. We are not born with hate,” she says softly. If the gunman were her patient she would search for the inner pain that drove him to commit the crime, asking him: “What would you like to hold on to and what are you willing to let go?” The goal would be to “remove the obstacles that get in the way” of him finding joy in life.
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