Dr Edith Eger was just a teen when she and her family were ripped from their home by Nazis and sent to concentration camps.
The girl who had once enjoyed a normal life – going to ballet class and spending time with her sisters in Hungary – survived a year in a camp with her two sisters, while her parents were murdered in the gas chambers.
For a long time, she avoided speaking about the horrors she witnessed, focusing on building a family in America. Eventually, she became a psychologist and realized that in order to heal, she needed to confront her trauma, forgive and stop thinking of herself as a victim.
And over a nearly 50-year career, she worked to do the same with her patients.
Dr Eger, 96, told DailyMail.com: ‘I cannot change my blood. I can change the way I look at things, and I think change can be synonymous with growth.’
Dr Edith Eger pictured left before she and her family were sent to the camps in 1944. She was liberated from the camps in 1945 and immigrated to America four years later, where she’d earn her doctorate in psychology
Dr Eger enjoyed doing ballet during her youth in Czechoslovakia and Hungary. While in Auschwitz, Dr Eger said she was forced to perform a ballet routine, earning her the title, ‘The Ballerina of Auschwitz’
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Dr Eger was born Edith Eva Elefant, the youngest daughter of three to Lajos and Illona Elefant, in Czechoslovakia in 1927. The family moved to Hungary where Dr Eger became interested in dance and gymnastics and joined the Hungarian gymnastics team in the early 1940s.
But the comforts of normal life were stripped from her when she and her family were sent to Auschwitz in 1944. Shortly after arriving, Josef Mengele, the notorious Nazi doctor, sent her mother to the gas chambers.
After, Mengele reportedly asked Dr Eger to perform a dance for him. The ballerina did, and said in her 2019 memoir ‘The Choice’: ‘The barracks floor becomes a stage at the Budapest opera house.’
This performance earned her the title ‘The ballerina of Auschwitz’ and a loaf of bread, which she split amongst the girls in her area.
From there, Dr Eger endured starvation, beatings and death marches, moving from camp to camp as the Nazis lost ground in the war.
In May 1945, after US military liberated the camp she was in, she met the man who would become her husband, Bela Eger.
The two had their first daughter, Marianne, and then fled to America amid threats from the communist government in Czechoslovakia in 1949.
When she came to America, just four years after leaving the concentration camp, Dr Eger didn’t want to think about the past. She was focused on establishing a ‘normal’ American life with her family.
Dr Eger told DailyMail.com: ‘I had kept lots of things inside me because I didn’t want to be or my children [to be] different. I just wanted to be a good Yankee Doodle.’
She went to college in 1969, earning her degree in Psychology from the University of Texas, El Paso. She then earned her doctorate from William Beaumont Army Medical Center at Fort Bliss, and opened up a therapy clinic in La Jolla, California.
Dr Edie as a child, with her family, the Elefants, before being sent to the camps, circa 1932. Parents Lajos and Ilona perished in Auschwitz. Dr Eger married her husband in
Dr Eger with her husband Bela and their firstborn, Marianne circa 1947
Then, in the 1980s, she visited Washington D.C. and went to the Holocaust museum. There, Dr Eger saw a picture of a girl she swore looked exactly like her.
This experience moved her, and she decided she needed to start talking about what had happened to her, not only so people wouldn’t forget the horrors of the Holocaust, but also so that she could heal.
She said: ‘I think it’s important for us to acknowledge that what comes out to our body doesn’t make us ill, it’s what stays in there.’
This became a cornerstone of her therapeutic practice. She encourages people to share what they have been through and accept it, so that they can stop thinking of themselves as victims.
It’s common for people who have been through traumatic situations to feel like a victim. But this mindset is cyclical, she said, and leads people to fall into toxic patterns.
Someone who thinks of themselves as the victim of life is likely to end up in two scenarios, Dr Eger said. First, they are likely to end up in the same scenario – surrounded by people who will hurt them.
Or second, they are likely to become a victimizer themselves, turning their bad feelings into other people’s problems.
Dr Eger giving a presentation to a classroom full of students in the 1980s
To get there, Dr Eger recommends thinking about the choices you have in front of you, and making decisions that will help you grow and forgive yourself and those who have done wrong to you.
Dr Eger said: ‘The more choices you have, the less you’re ever going to feel like a victim. It’s not who I am, it’s what was done to me.’
If you struggle to forgive those who have done ill to you, Dr Eger said you can reframe the idea of forgiveness all together.
She said forgiveness is an act of self-care that actually helps you, and you don’t have to think of it as something that serves the person who hurt you.
This will lead to radical growth, and change for the better, she said: ‘I think forgiveness is a gift that you give yourself to stretch rather thank shrink. So don’t call me a shrink, call me a stretch, I think it’s good to stretch your comfort zone.’
Other things you can do to get over your past include focusing on the person you want to be.
To do this, she recommends starting the day by visualizing your self satisfied by the end of the day. This will help you make decisions during the day that will help you feel better and more present by the end of the day.
Dr Eger said: ‘You’re going to be what you practice. Decide in the morning what you want to feel at night.’
This will help you focus on each day as its presented to you, and be grateful for the time you have, she explained.
Dr Eger added: ‘You’re going to look at yourself in a mirror and see yourself satisfied. Because life is maybe just one day, that morning sunshine may or may not come back. I don’t know. There is no guarantee.’
