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Dr. Edith Eva Eger turned 97 last week. Happy birthday Edie. For those who don’t know Edie, she is a world-recognized psychologist and colleague of Viktor Frankl, who like Frankl, survived the Nazi death camps. She arrived at Auschwitz, with her sister and her parents, and then watched as her parents were ushered to the crematorium. Edie didn’t have a name for what enabled her to survive then, but it was a mindset—a mindset of hope, that she would survive, that this was only temporary. Improbably, Edie and her sister Marta were liberated—found by American G.I.s in a pile of dead bodies because Marta had a piece of metal to reflect the sun. Her bestselling book, The Choice: Embrace the Possible, tells this story—but more notably, it tells the story of what happened after, from learning how to walk and talk again, to surviving communists, to improbably again, being one of two Czech families granted a Visa to the United States, where she started over, doing piece work in a factory. Edie went back to school in her 40s, eventually earning her PhD, because she recognized she had to heal herself—that denial would destroy the life she fought so hard to save. The Choice: Embrace the Possible is an incredible book, and it’s now coming out in a YA version, called The Ballerina of Auschwitz, because before the camps, Edie was an Olympic hopeful gymnast and dancer—who Mengele used to make dance for him in the camps. In today’s conversation, Edie is joined by her grandson Jordan, who co-leads retreats with her to share some of the wisdom from her life. Let’s turn to the conversation now.
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EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:
ELISE:
Hi, an honor to be with you.
EDIE:
Where are you calling from?
ELISE:
Los Angeles.
EDIE:
Los Angeles.
ELISE:
Yeah,
EDIE:
Not too far,
ELISE:
But I was saying to Jordan, I'm not a native Angeleno. I'm from Montana and my parents met in Minnesota. My father's a South African Jew. My grandfather left Germany in the thirties and my grandmother and her family left Poland in the thirties and they met in South Africa.
JORDAN:
In Johannesburg?
ELISE:
Yeah, in Johannesburg. And then my dad moved to the US in the seventies, do his residency at the Mayo Clinic. So my family line and my father's an only child, so my family line, we managed to avoid the Holocaust, which is a blessing. And also just another part of the whole Jewish experience
JORDAN:
There is I think a strange, and I was thinking about this in terms of Clari. Do you think Clari felt like she missed out, not like she missed out on a good thing,
EDIE:
But
JORDAN:
That there was this thing that Jews experienced.
EDIE:
She did have guilt. Yeah, she did. She did help her and that didn't help her at all because she really had a big down and I dunno if she ever really recovered. Some people have overinvested conscience and some people don't have any, so we don't want psychopaths to run around. But I think you got to sometimes learn where to think and what to think and how to present yourself. Because I was in a class English as a second language and the teacher said, it's like an old preacher. You have to tell what you're going to say and then say it and then tell him what you said and then send us home. So I came back doing exactly what he told me to do. Tell him what you're going to say. Say it. And then I brought it to the class and I got an A plus. I graduated cu. Not sum,
JORDAN:
Not sum, not. That's very disappointing. Edie, I have a feeling you were disappointed. Didn't your show?
EDIE:
I love school. I do love school. I always send everybody either to school or go to work. I love our talk together. I think you do a great deal of good to humanity. Thank you.
ELISE:
Oh, pleasure. We'll see I try. You
EDIE:
Know what we say, I profession trying is lying. Mommy, I'm trying to get up. Either get up or Don. I think you're the kind of doer, you're a busy girl.
ELISE:
I am. I very busy and similar to you. I loved that moment where you went to your teacher after he said that he only gives Cs and you said, I don't get Cs, I only get A's. I could relate to that. And yeah, I agree with you. There is no try. I mean you are probably of all the people currently living on the planet, you're one of the only people with credibility around what it actually means to rely on a mindset to survive. And I think that we give a lot of lip service to those concepts, but I don't know that people really understand fully that in the way that you and Viktor Frankl put it, that the only way to survive at times is by insisting that you will,
EDIE:
The word understand is very academic. You go to a classroom to understand, I say what I lived and that is very real because I've been there, done that and the feelings are with me. You tell someone about what happened, but the feelings that goes with it is still with me in a lot of the times and a lot of the times. So I think it's good to relive the past and then revise your life. Go through it, but don't get stuck in it. I don't live in a past, I don't live in Auschwitz, but I tell you what I learned and what is still with me and how not to criticize each other.
ELISE:
There were so many beautiful parts of your story. Some were so stunning and important, particularly for this moment in time where you talked about the extreme interdependence that was required in order to survive. Obviously you had your sister, but you also had the other girls. And this idea that if you stole from another prisoner you would die if you stole from a guard to share with other prisoners, you would survive. But that there was this net of interdependence amongst you that got many of you through right that moment when you almost fell and that girl picked you up because you had shared your bread.
JORDAN:
The name I wanted to give to her book was Share the Bread.
ELISE:
Beautiful.
JORDAN:
Because to me that story is the root of humanity that Edie danced for Mangale the night after he pushed her parents into the gas chamber and she danced for this man and starving. He gave her bread and then instead of her eating it herself, she shared that bread. And in turn, those women saved her life. And it's the poetry that if you think only of yourself, you won't do as well, that you will actually live longer by thinking of others. It's actually more self-serving to think of others.
EDIE:
If you're selfish, it's just me, me, me and nobody else but many people. Everybody comes first. And then you. Many years ago, someone wanted an egg mag muffin I remember came telling me, but he let everybody in front of him, okay, go ahead, go ahead. They ran out by the time he got and he never got the egg McMuffin. So you got to be sure that you are working, loving and playing, that you have a good balance. Not childish, but childlike.
ELISE:
The other part for people who haven't read The Choice that I thought was so beautiful was this decision what seemed to happen sort of not concurrently but close in time, where you finally recognized that denial of the past, refusing to go back and acknowledge what was happening meant that you were creating patterns in your life of finding places to blame or shift all of the pain that you were feeling that was unrecognized, which I think is so common. One of the most beautiful themes of the book, which is so relevant today too, is your decision. And I don't know if it became before that or this was part of it, of I will not live my life as a victim. I am not participating in victimhood. This is no way to live. Did that start in the camp or was that as you came to heal after?
EDIE:
It's still going. I don't know. It's a beginning and an end. I climb that mountain and I keep on climbing and I keep on working as long as I live. It's not work for me. It's a way of life to be a giver. I have a lot to give and not just books, but the experiences that I been through. So that's the title of the book from Auschwitz to La Jolla.
JORDAN:
That's the book she wants to write next. And if that doesn't tell you about Edie, what does
ELISE:
From Auschwitz to La Jolla.
EDIE:
I'm still in a process of becoming not the way of being. I am a human being who likes to have something new, something to rest and something to be happy by. And I don't know where will I be tomorrow, but I live in a present and I think young but not young and foolish as I told you.
ELISE:
Yeah, that's beautiful. One of the things that I thought was beautiful about your story was that strangely, I mean the Holocaust is the first quarter of the book maybe, but mostly it's a book about what comes after, which I think is a really important lesson because so many of us get stuck right in the maze of whatever has happened to us.
EDIE:
Yeah, revolving rather than evolving. So I went to a restaurant many, many years ago and I was walking on cobble stones and that reminded me when we were walking from Auschwitz down to Austria to Moha and children were spitting at us and calling us very bad names like we are dogs. And so I'm taking care of a German family now in a hospital, in an army hospital. And so there I am and the German family comes in and a little girl jumps in my lap and calls me Oma. So you see that there and then the here and now children don't do what we say, they do what they see. So if you have a fight with your husband, do it in a bedroom, but don't raise your voice. The child is scared. And the biggest fear of a child is the fear of abandonment.
ELISE:
Yeah, it's a subtle theme in your book, but in terms of that level of modeling, one of the heartbreaking things in your story is the relationship between your parents and some of the emotional distance and your yearning for them to console each other, reach out to each other. And I thought that that was so beautifully expressed as well as your mom's unlived life and the way that in that Carl Young way that you live your parents unlive lives, the way that they continue to show up for you as you really negotiated your own relationships. I thought that was so beautifully told. And I can only imagine, I don't know what you feel about the afterlife. I know you call on your parents all the time, but I would imagine that there's some peace there for them and watching you navigate your life in a more complete way.
EDIE:
Many people ask me, how do I want to be remembered? And I say, I want to be remembered that there was the Edie who didn't have time to hate, that she did everything in her power to see to it that that will never happen again. And its prevention to do everything, to get to know each other as good people. And I hope that's contagious. I certainly do that.
JORDAN:
Edie mentioned her goal is to do everything within her power to make what happened to her, not happen again. And of course this is a powerful message right now. And if you look at what her experience of life is, it is every day she wakes up to continue her work and she continues doing it because she has that why so deeply rooted in her. And I think people that don't have a why deeply rooted, it's more challenging to know why we wake up every morning, what is the thing that we're trying to accomplish? And I can see for eating
EDIE:
Why is in the past, what is in the present and how is in the future, how is a solution oriented world?
ELISE:
Yeah,
EDIE:
Why you look for reasons and then you don't know what to do with the reasons either. So what is the problem? That is no problem, but there has to be something that bring people for trusting and trusting each other. So you don't have to tell your real life story to everybody. God for me. So you come as a victim or the victimizer, neither one. I think we are human beings and we'll make mistakes. I know I make a lot of mistakes myself and I'm learning. I'm hard on myself. I should have. I could have. And why didn't I say that? Well, if I knew then what I know now, I would've done things differently.
ELISE:
It's beautiful.
EDIE:
Be kind to yourself.
ELISE:
When you two think about the work that you're doing in the world and you think about this idea of hate and yes, this that we're in again where it feels like we're cycling through the same patterns and hate is present and antisemitism just doesn't die. When you lead people through these online workshops, how do you help people do what you do, which is look hate or evil in the face and love it anyway? How do you coach people to choose something different?
EDIE:
Don't say what you just said before. Don't ask. How can I help you? You're not there to help, but I think you say, how can I be useful to you? Because that way you assume that that person can change and do the same thing but do it differently. I think turn the other cheek. I do see things from a different angle and I sway, I don’t know what you think.
JORDAN:
One thing that you say is that you were there there to be, not to help somebody but to be a guide. And that idea, I really love it because you're not there to save anybody. You're just there to give a direction to go and to help lead them to the right direction that they have to walk for
EDIE:
Themselves from Germany to the Statue of Liberty. But then I noticed that the ship was turning around England and then I'm thinking, what's going on? But we didn't go to China, we went from Germany to the Statue of Liberty. And I think it's good to have an arrow for you and stay on that road, that main road that you chose the freedom with responsibility.
JORDAN:
Can I give context to the story of the boat? Because the boat is an amazing analogy for life. So when Edie and Bela and Marianne left Europe to come to America with their precious visas in their pocket, they got on the boat in BreenHoffen and they were taking the boat and the boat hit a huge storm in England and they had to go way out of the way. And the captain told everybody what was happening. And I can only imagine after everything everyone had been through the idea that we were still not going directly to America, which is what they all had in their hearts to do. And maybe the boat would sink, maybe they would end up in Canada, maybe they would end up somewhere not where they thought that they were going to go, which is what consistently had happened for all of these people for the last two to four years, depending on how long they had been displaced.
And they had to keep the hope alive that they would get to America despite the fact that it was going to go around this big storm. And they did and they made it to America. And all of the people on that boat began a new life including Edie, Bela and Marianne. And in life that is what happens is you have an idea of where you're going to go and then a storm erupts right in the middle of that journey and it can throw you off and you might get so thrown off, you don't make it back to where you started. But if you have that direction in mind and you have a goal in mind, which Edie had very powerfully, she's always had goals in mind. Right now she has a goal for her next book. It is how to get around the storm and not lose sight of where you were trying to accomplish and then to continue to get back to that space. And Ed, you've done that and continue to do that, which is one of the most powerful tools that I believe you share with us.
ELISE:
And in the beginning of the book, the goal was, I am going to survive. Right? This is temporary. I will survive.
EDIE:
Everything is temporary.
ELISE:
Yeah, yeah.
EDIE:
The
JORDAN:
Good and the bad.
ELISE:
Yeah, no, it really is. I think everything is temporary unless you, and this is a fine line in your work unless you choose to live in the past and stay engaged as you write about. That's an amazing story about going back to Germany.
EDIE:
Not all Germans were Nazis. Many of them were hiding Jews. And I think one want to be very fair and give credit where credit is due. I go to Germany, do a lot of lecturing all over the place, and I don't really try to look for the Nazis and I want to be sure I use my time. Good. Doing good. Yeah.
JORDAN:
You say that inside of each of us there is a Hitler and a Mother Teresa.
EDIE:
That's what I say.
JORDAN:
Yeah. And the question is, which one do you reach for?
EDIE:
I brainwash him
JORDAN:
In the best way. But it's all the same thing. Whether you get brainwashed for good or for evil is the truth. And I think it's what it comes down to. It's like what are you exposed to? I've been exposed to Edie very lucky. It's good for my children,
EDIE:
Which God said that,
JORDAN:
But I could just as likely have had a grandmother that espoused white supremacy or antisemitism or something along those lines. And then maybe instead of Jordan being this guy, I would be a very different guy, but I could be the exact same human with a very different philosophy because I would've been brainwashed by somebody else. And I think when you get down to it, that's what I take away from Edie's philosophy about current events and about life in general, is that it is very much dependent on who and what you are raised around who you become and what philosophies you carry and ultimately what actions you might take. And so Nazis weren't born Nazis. They became Nazis because they had people around them that they wanted to live up to. They wanted to be liked. They had a family or they had friends who said, this is the group you want to be a part of.
They decided they wanted to be a part of it. And next thing you know, they're out there very comfortable sending Jews to their death. But they weren't born that way. They became that way. And that is the case with any of us. We can become great, we can become terrible, but it's inside of us and we have to choose what do we listen to? How much do we take what somebody tells us to be true? And ultimately to say that if somebody does become go down that dark path, they of course are responsible for it because it's their own life. But there is some level to which that is part of a deeper responsibility of the culture that they were raised in and the culture that we have that leads people to become the kinds of people like what we see from the Nazis.
ELISE:
Yeah. Well, as Hannah Arendt said, “the banality of evil,” right? And it's that idea that we each have an inner Hitler and an inner Mother Teresa to quote you, Edie, that we have to attend to, right? We take responsibility for our own darkness instead of assuming that it's entirely over there. And we are on the side of good. We are wholly pure and unassailable. And unimpeachable. There's a level of personal responsibility that's required of all of us, even if we have been victimized by life.
EDIE:
That is evil in the world.
ELISE:
Can you talk a little bit about that idea? You've seen it in a way that many of us might not have seen it. What is it
EDIE:
To do everything in your power for control of your thinking, your feeling, and of course your behavior.
JORDAN:
Edie, why do people turn to evil?
EDIE:
Why?
JORDAN:
Yeah, why do you think
EDIE:
Do I think,
JORDAN:
What
EDIE:
Do you think? I think
JORDAN:
I've read about Nazis, but you saw it. You were there, you saw evil firsthand,
EDIE:
They were praying, watch children that I am bad. I know better inside me that I'm a good person. But here today to tell you, I don't know how much time I have. I'm going to have my 97th birthday, the 29th of September. So I am using every moment not to take, but hopefully to give the wisdom that I received and live by and not to say one thing and then do another because of course that's a hypocrite. And so I want to be sure that remember that someone who wanted to get up in the morning and look at each day as my whole life, this is beautiful. This is the evening part of my life. Yes. And I'm not afraid to die. I just want to know how I we.
JORDAN:
And hopefully you're not going to know that. Thank God none of us know that too. It would be too much.
EDIE:
I know if we are and you are doing good, you don't get up in the morning and just do nothing. You are putting every moment into where it belongs and you promote wonderful communication between two people because what you like in others, you need to look at that in you.
ELISE:
Thank you, I appreciate it. Thank you for the YA version for The Ballerina of Auschwitz. Because I think particularly with people wanting to believe that the Holocaust didn't happen, it's important to tell the story and it's important to tell the story of what can happen after.
EDIE:
Well, I don't know what the word belief means, but I have faith. I have faith that you and I will talk again and bring each other up to date.
ELISE:
I love it and I love faith. There's an amazing Alan Watts quote about choosing faith over belief. So I am with you. I choose faith too.
EDIE:
Thank you. Thank you.
JORDAN:
Elise. I want to mention something about The Ballerina of Auschwitz. You said that The Choice, one of the very powerful qualities of The Choice is that it spends most of its time after Edie's survival from Auschwitz. And conversely, the ballerina of Auschwitz really lives in the short period before and the short period after. And there's a reason that the young adult version, which is not ultimately for young adults alone, it's really for anybody to read. It's a powerful read. It's like saying knight is for young adults. Knight is read by young adults in school, but it's not like an adult wouldn't have a very powerful experience with that book. And it's the same thing with The Ballerina of Auschwitz. But the reason it focuses on just this section of time is that it's the moment where Edie experienced the largest transition in her life where she had a direction she thought her life was going to go in and then everything changed in a moment.
I mean it happened within six months. She thought she was going to the Olympics with the next team to go, and then she was kicked off of her team and she was in Auschwitz and she would never see her boyfriend again. And it's the story of what happens to all of us at some level when there is a life altering experience. And for Ed, it was a very powerful one. But for many young adults it's a divorce, it's change of high school, it's an injury. It's a moment where it's not the way that you thought it had been. Your expectations were shattered. And then what do you do when that happens?
EDIE:
Let me share something with you. After I survived, we ended up in a German home and my sister put me in a crib. So here comes two drunk GIs and one of 'em is getting me up from the crib and I'm yelling and that I'm a virgin, that not to touch me. And the other guy who was also drunk but not that drunk, I heard the word baby. So I knew that I was safe. And the following day, that guy came, brought me food, taught me how to go to the bathroom, and I didn't know how to. Anyway, if you are still alive, please, I hope I may still can hear from you because you were definitely older than I was then by then. 17, you were must have been in your twenties.
JORDAN:
But he went from leaning into the Hitler inside of him right at the night. And then the next day when he came back, he realized he would reach for the other
EDIE:
Apologizing, took care of me, showed me how to walk. Yeah, I needed totally everything. That's what happens, you see when you don't get food.
ELISE:
That was another powerful story, A complete regression and then rebuilding. And I think too, the fact that you had to completely restart your life, not once, but multiple times and build something from complete and total scratch. But beyond that because you arrived here in America and you didn't know any English and so on and so forth. And then to go to school and pursue your PhD after starting your life here, doing peace work in a factory, it's a stunning story of as to quote you from the beginning of evolving and not revolving.
EDIE:
Let me interrupt you because the time is so short. But what happened that I didn't want to go to the bathroom and I lose the time to come and go. So I had it as long as I could, but then I had to run and there was a sign of colored. And I didn't realize that America, there is no democracy, that I came to a country that people practice prejudice, which means to prejudge. So I always went to that bathroom and that little white lady came after me always showing me that that's for the colored people. So I went to the meeting with the colored people and I joined the N-A-A-C-P. You may able to check it somewhere. I dunno,
ELISE:
I believe you. I believe you.
EDIE:
I could see that what I here was my imagination because there was no democracy. Thank you very much.
ELISE:
Thank you both. And I can't wait to read what's next and yes, you'll have to come back.
EDIE:
Oh, absolutely. Hopefully I will.
ELISE:
All right. Have a wonderful day. Happy early birthday.
EDIE:
Thank You.
ELISE:
So it was the time of this episode's publication, Edie's 97th birthday, which is quite stunning because she certainly came very close to death multiple times. And at the end, this is, I just wanted to come back to this because we went down a different path. But she's invited after she has become a psychologist and become peers with Victor Frankl and created this career where she has spent a lot of time specifically with the American military. And she's invited back to Berkes Godden and to speak to 200, I think that they were actually ministers and she hasn't been back to Germany. And she's invited specifically to Hitler's place of refuge. And she decides that she has to go, which is a big decision for her, a terrifying decision as you can imagine. It fills her not only with anxiety, but just PTSD.
And her husband encourages her to go. He goes with her. And Dave, who invited her, says to her as he invites her, it's one thing to hear about hope and forgiveness from the pulpit or from a religious scholar, Dave explained, but you're one of the few people who can talk about holding on to hope even when you'd been stripped of everything, when you were starving and left for dead. I don't know anyone else with that kind of credibility. And so they go and she speaks, and I want to read this to you because it's so powerful. And as part of this, she's staying in this hotel, which is a retreat center, had been a retreat center for the ss. She's actually in Joseph Goebbels bed.
So she writes in human history, there is war. I say there's cruelty, there's violence, there's hate. But never in the history of humankind has there ever been a more scientific and systematic annihilation of people. I survived Hitler's horrific death camps. Last night I slept in Joseph Bels bed. People ask me, how did you learn to overcome the past? Overcome, I haven't overcome anything. Every beating, bombing and selection line, every death, every column of smoke, pushing skyward, every moment of terror, when I thought it was the end. These live on in me, in my memories and my nightmares. The past isn't gone. It isn't transcended or excised. It lives on in me, but so does the perspective. It has afforded me that I lived to see liberation because I kept hope alive in my heart, that I lived to see freedom, because I learned to forgive.
Forgiveness isn't easy. I tell them it is easier to hold grudges, to seek revenge. I tell of my fellow survivors, the courageous men and women I met in Israel who looked pained when I mentioned forgiveness, who insisted that to forgive is to condone or to forget. Why forgive doesn't that let Hitler off the hook for what he did. She goes on to say, it is too easy to make a prison out of our pain, out of the past at best, revenge is useless. It can't alter what was done to us. It can't erase the wrongs we've suffered. It can't bring back the dead. At worst, revenge perpetuates the cycle of hate. It keeps the hate circling on and on. When we seek revenge, even nonviolent revenge, we are revolving, not evolving. I even thought when I arrived yesterday that my presence here is a healthy kind of revenge, a comeuppance, a settling of the scores.
And then I stood overlooking the cliff at the Berghoff, and it came to me that revenge doesn't make you free. So I stood on the site of Hitler's former home and forgave him. This had nothing to do with Hitler. It was something I did for me. I was letting go, releasing the part of myself that had spent most of my life exerting the mental and spiritual energy to keep Hitler in chains. As long as I was holding onto that rage, I was in chains with him, locked in the damaging past, locked in my grief to forgive is to grieve for what happened, for what didn't happen, and to give up the need for a different past to accept life as it was. And as it is. I do not of course mean that it was acceptable for Hitler to murder 6 million people, just that it happened.
And I do not want that fact to destroy the life that I clung to and fought for against all odds.