Taming the Demons : Former Nazi Captive Teaches Others to Escape Their Own Prisons

Edith Eva Eger is forever having flashbacks. One moment she’s here with the living, the next she’s back in a Nazi concentration camp, walking with the dead.

Watching her grandson play with his toy train set, she suddenly finds herself in a crowded railroad cattle car, rumbling toward Auschwitz and the extermination ovens with countless thousands of other Jews.

Doomed.

She sees her granddaughter looking so young and radiant, heading off to a junior high school dance, and she begins to cry uncontrollably over her own stolen childhood.

At age 16, Eger saw her mother and father taken off to the gaping ovens of death. She recalls the solemn smokestacks that never stopped belching their horrible black soot.

Night and day, she breathed the fumes of “The Final Solution,” the Nazi annihilation of about 6 million Jews.

At Auschwitz, the young ballerina was forced to dance for the notorious Dr. Josef Mengele, the prison’s capricious arbiter of life and death. She was beaten by a Nazi soldier and even a fellow inmate--battered so badly that it ended her budding dance career.

Finally, huddled in the arms of an older sister, she watched tortured cellmates surrender to their basest instincts and begin cannibalizing their own dead.

Almost half a century later, Eger is still visited by these images. But they no longer hold her captive.

Instead, she uses them as mental stepping stones, not only to escape the cramped cell of her own past, but to liberate others from their private prisons.

Each day, the La Jolla therapist teaches people the skills for emotional survival. She draws on her still-raw experiences to help patients conquer such modern-day manacles as child and spousal abuse, severe sexual dysfunction and drug and alcohol addictions.

She counsels AIDS patients and their disbelieving spouses. She sees shellshocked survivors of Vietnam and the Persian Gulf War. She comforts abused wives and talks to their domineering, often-alcoholic husbands.

As she and her patients sit in twin leather chairs in her spacious Mt. Soledad home, she transmits the idea that, no matter what the decade, captor or circumstance, the experience of being a victim can be endured.

The 64-year-old therapist began her psychology studies in the 1950s as a way to explore not only her own past, but also to learn about a speech defect that plagues her husband and about the emotional stress connected with her son’s cerebral palsy.

Today, she finds that the demons stalking her patients are often worse than her own Holocaust.

“I look at such abused wives or children, people who have been wronged by their own families, and I see that they were much more imprisoned than I was at Auschwitz,” said Eger, a licensed clinical psychologist who volunteers at the UC San Diego psychiatry department.

“After all, I knew I would get out. I knew who my enemies were. But I just have more compassion for these women who kept their awful domestic secret for so long. And I tell them that they can confront their perpetrators. They can walk out of their own concentration camps, just like I did.”

Consider this the story of the doctor who healed herself. She was not always so strong, this gritty survivor who a few years ago ventured to Germany to address groups of offspring of former Nazis about their guilt--and who now counsels the children of fellow concentration camp prisoners here at home.

For 35 years, Edith Eva Eger had her secret. And her secret had her.

“For years and years, she never spoke publicly about that time in the camps,” said her husband, Albert Eger, a former Czechoslovak resistance fighter against the Nazis who himself was briefly imprisoned. “She never came out about her secret. Never.”

Until 1980. Edith Eger, then a therapist working with the U.S. military, received a chance invitation to speak to American soldiers at a camp near Berchtesgaden, Germany, the site of Adolf Hitler’s mountain retreat.

“Edie showed me the letter of invitation and said: ‘No way I’ll go. It brings back too many memories. No way,’ ” said her husband, now an accountant. “I told her that was fine but to remember that, if that was the case, Hitler won the war.

“She looked at me for a very long time and finally cried out: ‘OK! You’re right. I’m going. I’ve got to go.’ And from that day on, she opened up. The memories of her time in the camps no longer held her back. It became a driving force in her life, a positive force.”

It was then that Eger shone the first glaring light on the dark shadows of her past. She began addressing groups from New York to New Zealand about her experiences and the Holocaust, a practice she continues today.

She also launched her work with victims of post-traumatic stress syndrome--first in El Paso, Tex., then in San Diego County after moving here four years ago--sharing the effects of her own painful memories with her patients.

“My aim is survival, to help people rid themselves of any kind of tyranny in their lives, so they can be the people they were meant to be. I believe that often an exchange of experiences between doctor and patient is valuable,” Eger said.

“I’m not into this guru stuff, where one person knows it all. The way I see therapy, both the patient and I are on a journey together. I’m more of a guide. In the process, we learn about each other, tapping into what has helped them survive and building on that, helping the person being driven become the driver.”

Now Eger is collaborating on a work of fiction, written with the German daughter of a former Nazi, a treatment of the concentration camp experience from the perspective of both prisoner and perpetrator. Last year, she acted as consultant for a local play about the Holocaust.

The book and performance are part of Eger’s philosophy about confronting the past, the victimizer, the memory--advice she herself followed in 1985 when she returned to Auschwitz for the first time since her confinement there for six months in 1944.

“At the time, my sister said: ‘Why are you going back? Are you a masochist? Haven’t you had enough?’ And, as the train arrived in Auschwitz, I was so scared. I thought that maybe she was right.”

Her voice still lightly accented with her native Hungarian, the soft-spoken Eger said she still finds it difficult to talk about the experience of seeing the barbed wire and those black ovens once again.

During the visit, she saw a Polish soldier and, for a moment believing he was a Nazi, clutched her American passport tightly.

She hesitated, her eyes misting, and continued: “I lost almost my whole family to that camp, and yet I never went to any funeral. For one thing, I came (back) to honor my dead parents. And Auschwitz is the cemetery I came to.

“It came 40 years after the fact, this peace with my past,” she said.

The final liberation came when Eger found the barracks where she spent those months of fear, sleeping six cellmates to a bed under the spiteful, watchful eye of her captors.

“When she finally found the barracks, she asked me to leave,” Albert Eger recalled. “She came out two hours later, and she was absolutely calm, so calm I didn’t know her. She was a completely different woman.”

Eger’s ability to use her own experiences as a touchstone of compassion and understanding of the victim is invaluable, experts say.

“One of the most difficult aspects of being a survivor is being so alone, the sense of profound alienation, that no one else knows what I’m going through or can appreciate just how horrible it is,” said Dr. Joel Dimsdale, a UC San Diego professor of psychiatry and a researcher on stress, coping and the Holocaust.

“The ability to sit down with a fellow survivor is very comforting, an experience that reknits a sense of connectedness with fellow human beings who do understand.”

Eger understands because she’s been there, colleagues say.

“The typical Holocaust survivor is a depressed and pessimistic person whose entire life is dominated by their experience,” said Dr. Walter Farr, a psychiatry professor at the Texas Tech University School of Medicine, where Eger once worked as a volunteer.

“But Edie is different. I haven’t known anyone with a similarly horrible past who has overcome it and drawn from it like she has. Hers, it seems, has been almost a complete emotional victory. And it rubs off on people.”

Dr. David Briones, associate chairman of the Texas Tech psychiatry department, agreed.

“When you see Edie walk into a room, her personality radiates so much that you say, ‘This is a survivor.’ There are no chinks in her armor. She knows that life is hard and dirty and terrible and nasty. But she tells herself that she’s not giving in to it.”

A patient of Eger’s said the doctor’s experiences were right there under the surface during their sessions following a divorce. “They weren’t obvious in the beginning,” the patient said.

“But the result is a remarkable philosophy born out of a victim’s situation, this positive approach of having every single experience being an opportunity to learn and develop the skills to survive. She taught me that, even in the worst situations, we have a choice of how to respond.”

The foreshadowing to the events that changed Edith Eva Eger’s life, that terrible concentration camp experience, actually occurred years before, in 1938.

Back then, she was a 10-year-old Hungarian girl living with her parents and two sisters in the border city of Kassa, training in gymnastics and ballet every day for her shot at the Olympic team.

After the rise of the Nazi Party in Hungary, her trainer informed her one day that she would no longer be considered for the Olympics--that she would assist in training another, less talented girl approved by the party.

“I was angry that day,” Eger said. “I didn’t want to be Jewish. I thought the price was just too high.”

She could never have imagined the price she would eventually pay.

Six years later, in the cold, wet spring of 1944, soldiers came to lay claim to her and her parents, along with her then 21-year-old sister, Magdalena--taking them to a local brick factory with thousands of other Jews. Only sister Klara, 18, who was studying music in Budapest, was spared.

Months later, in May, her family was boarded on a train and taken to the Auschwitz concentration camp in southern Poland. When they arrived, Eger was quietly separated from her father, to whom she never said goodby and whom she never saw again.

That same day, she recalled, she stood in line with her mother and sister and other women, walking slowly, single-file, toward a handsome, intelligent-looking man standing at attention in his crisp Nazi uniform.

He was Dr. Josef Mengele, the camp’s chief medical officer and an engineer of Hitler’s genetic quest to produce a super Aryan race. And he was playing what Eger later came to know as “The Finger Game.”

With a flick of an index finger, Mengele motioned Eger’s mother to his left, the two daughters to the right.

“He told me that I would see my mother soon, that she was only going to take a shower,” she recalled. “He handed her a bar of soap and she was taken away.”

The soap was really a rock. Eger’s mother was gassed and cremated that day along with all the other females so cursed as to be older than 40 or younger than 15.

“It was all very well organized,” Eger said. “All we could see was the fire coming out of the chimney. Day and night. Day and night. And that terrible smell. When I went back to Auschwitz, I saw birds flying. But, when I was there that first time, I never saw any birds.”

Minutes after the separation, as a guard shaved her head and ripped the earrings from her lobes, a tearful Eger asked about her parents. The guard only pointed to the billowing smokestacks of the crematory.

“They’re burning,” he told the girl. “You better talk about them in the past tense.”

Later that day, a soldier asked the young women in her group what talents they possessed. One of the girls pushed Eger to the front, and a short time later she was standing before Mengele himself.

Then Eger danced for the man responsible for her parents’ deaths. Mengele sat alone with an aide in a large room, she recalled. Outside, a full orchestra played the “Blue Danube Waltz” by Johann Strauss. Later, the players themselves would be executed.

As she danced, Eger closed her eyes and, for a moment, was no longer in a dreary concentration camp in Poland wearing a coarse gray burlap dress issued by the guards. In her mind, she was performing at the Budapest Opera House, a Juliet starting a mournful dance over the body of her Romeo.

Watching closely, Eger said, Mengele continued to motion to his aide about what to do with the remaining prisoners. When the young girl was finished dancing, this stern doctor of death gave his captive a crust of bread, she said.

“The very man who annihilated (nearly) my whole family saved me. And I danced for him,” Eger said. “He wanted to be entertained. Talk about absurdity. But that is my life.”

After her dance, she was sent back to the barracks, where in ensuing months she routinely awoke amid starvation and death. Once, when she went in search of food for her sister, she was caught by a Nazi guard who beat her with his rifle, breaking her back. During her captivity, she also was beaten by a fellow inmate who grew tired of hearing her cries.

From the horrors of Auschwitz, Eger learned that one thing could never be taken from her: her freedom of choice. “Before I left there, cannibalism broke out--people eating each other’s flesh. It was the worst sight I have ever seen in my life.”

Eger was slowly dying of starvation. Her weight had fallen to 40 pounds on her single daily serving of soup and bread. “But I refused to take part” in the cannibalism, she said. “I chose to eat grass. And I sat on the ground, selecting one blade over the other, telling myself that, even under those conditions I still had a choice--which blade of grass I would eat.”

The experience steeled her for another realization. She was still alive.

Twice she had stood before the crematory, but was never forced to enter. Once, Mengele had approached her in the shower, motioning to her with his finger as he would call a little girl. Eger was sure she was going to be raped. But she wasn’t.

“For years, I could never understand why I had survived while others didn’t,” Eger said. “I had a lot of guilt. And it drove me, I think, to be a high achiever.”

Six months after she danced on the day of her parents’ death, she and her sister were sent to another camp. The following year, they were liberated by U.S. soldiers.

All these years later, Eger said, her World War II concentration camp experiences still hold value in the modern world.

Take recently released hostage Terry Anderson.

“Some hostages said the time they spent was totally wasted,” she said. “He not only survived, but used the experience to make himself a more compassionate person. He is someone I would like to meet.”

Eger still seeks out therapy. The healing process goes on.

“I walk around with a scar,” she said. “I have a hard time just being silly, a talent I’m now learning from my grandchildren. It’s something I tell my patients: I’m never going to be the same again. I will never overcome what happened to me. And yet I believe I will come to terms with it.”

Looking back, she has come to the same conclusion once made by Henry David Thoreau: that those who made her captive were finally the ones to feel sorry for. Because it was they who were really in prison.

“I have no time to hate,” Eger said, sitting next to a bronze statue of a ballerina in her living room, a reminder of a former innocence.

“If I still hated today, I would still be in prison. I would be giving Hitler and Mengele their posthumous victories. If I hated, they would still be in charge, not me.”